All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?
i very much want to do that.
I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.
But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.
There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.
This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.
So is the German submarine U-55.
She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.
The second torpedo hits the engine room.
Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.
The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.
She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.
The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.
Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.
There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.
This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.
And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.
There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.
U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.
HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.
She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.
U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.
Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.
But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.
The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.
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