Captain of the Carpathia

The seafaring life of Titanic Hero Sir Arthur Henry Rostron

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Titanic

Launched at Belfast, Ireland, on May 31, 1911, by the shipbuilder Harland and Wolff, Titanic was the second of three-ships intended to provide the White Star Line’s Southampton-New York service. At 46,328 tons, 882 feet long, and with a 92-foot beam, Titanic was the largest in the world when completed ten months later.

On April 10, 1912, she sailed from Southampton for New York, calling at Cherbourg, France, that evening and Queenstown, Ireland, early the following afternoon. Three and a half days after leaving Queenstown, Titanic struck an iceberg about 350 nautical miles southeast of Newfoundland, at 11:40 pm, Sunday, April 14. She sank two hours and forty minutes later with the loss of more than fifteen hundred of her passengers and crew. The Cunard liner Carpathia arrived on the scene at dawn and recovered all seven hundred survivors of what would become history’s most famous shipwreck.

Pathe’s Titanic Footage

This newsreel coverage of the Titanic disaster by Pathé uses footage of her sister ship Olympic, and shows Captain E. J. Smith dressed in his summer whites while commanding that ship the previous year. The images of Carpathia are stock footage as well. Rostron appears for eight seconds at the midpoint of the film wearing civilian clothing. The newsreel also accurately depicts some of Titanic’s surviving crew and the rush on White Star’s New York offices. Cunard’s 14th Street piers, wireless inventor Guglielmo Marconi, and MacKay Bennett, the cable ship sent to recover bodies from the disaster site, also make brief appearances.  

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About the Author

AuthorEric Clements is professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University. The Atlantic liners were his earliest historical interest, an interest that led him to serve an enlistment in the U.S. Coast Guard and to write Captain of the Carpathia. His unpublished research projects include writing a history of the Second World War-era, U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mohawk for his master's thesis and two vessel histories for the "Historic American Engineering Record."

 

He is also the author of After the Boom in Tombstone and Jerome, Arizona: Decline in Western Resource Towns (University of Nevada Press, 2003, reissued 2014), and of numerous articles and book reviews about the history and historic preservation of the American West.

Around the Web

From CNN: Titanic Survivor's letter: 'Disgraceful' treatment after rescue (2015)

From Smithsonian: Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us (2012)

From YouTube: Scenes from Capathia's arrival in New York, 18 April 1912 (2014)

From History Channel: 5 Things You May Not Know About Titanic's Rescue Ship (2012)

From NUMA: Wreck of the Carpathia, Titanic's Rescuer, Found (2000)

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