Cottam kept trying to raise Phillips, but Titanic’s faint signals showed that power was failing aboard the sinking liner. At 2:17 a.m., Cottam heard the beginning of a call from Titanic, then nothing but silence.
On Titanic, Phillips and assistant wireless operator Harold Bride stayed at their posts nearly to the very end, frantically working the radio to urge the ships racing to Titanic to hurry. As Titanic’s stern rose higher in the air, the engineers — all of whom had remained at their posts, knowing that they would die, but who nonetheless kept the dynamos running to keep the lights burning and to give “Sparks” every remaining bit of electricity to call for help — lost their battle as the machinery tore free of its mounts. The lights blinked out, surged on briefly, then went out forever. Once the power was gone, Phillips and Bride joined the crowd of people on the sloping decks. Titanic, straining in the water, half submerged, tore apart. The stern bobbed free for a minute, then joined the bow in a 2¼ mile fall to the ocean floor.
It was 2:20 a.m., and Carpathia was still nowhere in sight. Hundreds of people huddled in twenty lifeboats, while in the water more than fifteen hundred people thrashed, struggled and screamed for help until the icy water took their lives. “The cries, which were loud and numerous at first, died away gradually one by one… I think the last of them must have been heard nearly forty minutes after the Titanic sank,” reported survivor Lawrence Beesley, floating in the distance in the relative safety of a lifeboat.
Two of those struggling in the water were Phillips and Bride. They made their way to one of the ship’s collapsible boats that had been washed off the deck when Titanic sank. Floating half submerged on the overturned boat through the night, they suffered from the cold with a handful of passengers and crew. As the long night wore on into early morning, Phillips died. Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller, washed into the sea as the ship sank, had also struggled onto the overturned lifeboat and took command of the precarious perch. “We were painfully conscious of that icy water, slowly but surely creeping up our legs. Some quietly lost consciousness, subsided into the water, and slipped overboard… No one was in a condition to help, and the fact that a slight but distinct swell had started to roll up, rendered help from the still living an impossibility.”
Lightoller hoped that help would come soon. “We knew that ships were racing to our rescue, though the chances of our keeping up our efforts of balancing until one came along seemed very, very remote.”
Rostron kept a careful lookout as Carpathia rushed into the darkness. “Into that zone of danger we raced… every nerve strained watching for the ice. Once I saw one huge fellow towering into the sky quite near— saw it because a star was reflected on its surface — a tiny beam of warning which guided us safely past.” At 2:40 a.m., he spotted a green flare on the horizon, just as the first icebergs came into view, but he did not slacken speed. Firing rockets and flares to signal his arrival, Rostron dodged the ice and he pressed on. He knew that the Titanic was probably gone, but he also knew that every minute counted for the survivors on — or in — the frigid sea. “It was an anxious time,” he later recalled. “There were seven hundred souls on the Carpathia; these lives, as well as all the survivors of the Titanic herself, depended on a sudden turn of the wheel.”
At 3:50 a.m., Carpathia slowed, and at 4:00 stopped. She was at Titanic’s position, but the ship was gone. Then, ahead, just a few miles off, a green flare blazed up from the water, and the dim outline of first one, then several lifeboats, came into view. In the boats, the survivors, many of them sitting in stunned silence, watched as Carpathia slowly approached, picking her way through the ice. As the profile of the ship, portholes filled with light, came into sight of the survivors in the boats, Titanic passenger Lawrence Beesley recalled: “The way those lights came into view was one of the most wonderful things we shall ever see. It meant deliverance at once… everyone’s eyes filled with tears … and ‘Thank God’ was murmured in heartfelt tones round the boat.”
As Titanic’s lifeboats rowed towards Carpathia, the sun rose to reveal that rescuer and rescued were in the midst of a field of ice — it lay everywhere, from bergs 200 feet high to chunks “as big as a man’s fist” bobbing in the swell. Beesley said that when his boat rowed past a berg and alongside their rescuer, “We could read the Cunarder’s name— CARPATHIA — a name we are not likely ever to forget.” Another passenger, Colonel Archibald Gracie, reported that when he climbed up a ladder and into an open companionway hatch, he “felt like falling down on my knees and kissing the deck in gratitude for the preservation of my life.”
As No. 2 lifeboat came alongside, the first to reach Carpathia, Titanic’s fourth officer, Joseph G. Boxhall, went to the bridge to report to Captain Rostron. Rostron knew the answer, but he asked Boxhall a “heartrending inquiry.” Had Titanic sunk? “Yes,” answered Boxhall, “she went down around 2:30.” His composure broke when Rostron asked how many people had been left aboard. “Hundreds and hundreds! Perhaps a thousand! Perhaps more! My God, sir, they’ve gone down with her. They couldn’t live in this icy water.” Rostron thanked the distraught officer and sent him below to get some coffee and warm up.
By 8:00 a.m., Carpathia had taken aboard more than seven hundred of Titanic’s crew and passengers, many of them stunned by shock.
As Carpathia stood by, Titanic’s survivors waited at the rails, looking out at the water. Husbands, fathers, sons — as well as women and children — would never return. Rostron held a service of thanksgiving for the saved and a memorial service for the lost, then left the scene of the disaster at 9:00 a.m., just as the Leyland Line’s Californian arrived to offer assistance. Ironically, Californian had been closer than Carpathia to Titanic, and her deck officers had seen the sinking liner’s distress signals — but the wireless operator had gone to bed so they had not received Titanic’s frantic calls for help.
Carpathia headed for New York, her passengers divided by the gulf of the tragedy. Many of Titanic’s survivors kept to themselves. J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, sequestered himself in Carpathia’s doctor’s cabin, refusing contact. His actions on Carpathia— and his survival when so many others had died — only reinforced the criticisms leveled against him in the aftermath of Titanic’s loss. Sadder yet, and perhaps more typical, was the reaction of two women who sat wrapped in blankets on Carpathia’s deck chairs, staring at the sea as a steward approached to ask if they wanted coffee. “Go away,” they answered. “We’ve just seen our husbands drown.”
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.