Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [38]
After running through a storm at sea, Carpathia arrived at New York, reaching Pier 54 at 8:00 p.m. A crowd of thirty thousand had gathered. The news of Titanic’s sinking was the focus of world attention. Wireless operators ashore had intercepted the distress calls, and Rostron had broadcast a brief message to the Associated Press, informing the world Titanic was gone, along with two-thirds of the people who had sailed in her.
At the Cunard Pier, a clutch of anxious families and eager reporters stood by. After Carpathia’s own passengers disembarked, Titanic’s survivors filed off, many of them wearing clothes donated by Carpathia’s passengers and crew, some of the children dressed in makeshift smocks sewn from steamer blankets.
The daring dash through the dark and ice-filled seas to rescue the survivors of Titanic earned world fame for Carpathia and her captain. Both received a number of awards—plaques, engraved silver cups and plate, and medals, many of them displayed in a special case aboard Carpathia. The ship returned to her regular run between New York and the Mediterranean, sailing again on April 20 to resume her interrupted voyage.
CELTIC SEA: JULY 17, 1918
The coming of war in 1914 disrupted Carpathia’s usual routes, and in 1915 she began running from Liverpool to New York and Boston. After leaving Liverpool with just fifty-seven passengers as part of a convoy on July 15, 1918, Carpathia’s luck finally ran out in the Celtic Sea as she left the British Isles. Just after midnight, in the early moments of July 17, the German submarine U-55 intercepted Carpathia with two torpedoes. The first ripped into the port side and the second went into the engine room. The blasts killed five of the ship’s firemen and injured two engineers. Dead in the water, Carpathia began to sink by the bow as the sea poured in. Captain William Prothero gave the order to “abandon ship” and fired distress rockets to warn the other ships in the convoy that a submarine was nearby.
Carpathia’s passengers and the 218 surviving crew members climbed into the lifeboats as the ship sank. The U-boat surfaced and fired another torpedo into the ship to hurry the end, and Carpathia finally went under. The submarine was approaching the lifeboats when the armed sloop HMS Snowdrop hove into view and fired her deck guns to drive away U-55, then came about to pick up Carpathia’s survivors.
At 12:40 a.m., Carpathia sank at a position that Snowdrop recorded as 49.25 N 10.25 W, off the southern coast of Ireland about 120 miles west of the famous Fastnet. The loss of the famous ship was one of many during the war and was overshadowed by the sinking of other liners, such as the well-known tragedy of Lusitania and the loss of Titanic’s sister ship Britannic in the Mediterranean. But the memory of the gallant liner never faded. Her former captain, Arthur Rostron, eulogized Carpathia in 1931: “It was a sorry end to a fine ship … She had done her bit both in peace and war, and she lies in her natural element, resting her long rest on a bed of sand.”
THE SEARCH FOR CARPATHIA
Exactly where Carpathia rested spurred the efforts of many shipwreck hunters, particularly Clive Cussler, the famous author whose bestseller Raise the Titanic had launched not only the fictional career of Dirk Pitt of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), but also fueled Clive’s real-life NUMA and its quest, funded largely by his book royalties, to search for famous shipwrecks. Carpathia was high on Clive’s list of ships to find, and in 1999, when John Davis of Eco-Nova Productions proposed a television series based on Clive’s book The Sea Hunters, they chose Carpathia as the first wreck to look for. When The Sea Hunters crew was assembled, I had the good fortune to be selected as Clive’s co-host for the show and as the team’s archeologist, joining veteran diver Mike Fletcher.
The search for Carpathia was more daunting than it sounds, because the general