Jack Thayer – Survivor of the Titanic

 "I have spent much time on the ocean, yet I have never seen the sea smoother than it was that night; it was like a mill-pond, and just as innocent looking, as the great ship quietly rippled through it." He had said goodnight to his parents at about 11.45pm when he felt the ship sway slightly, veering to port "as though she had been gently pushed", before the engines suddenly stopped. He and his father went upstairs to explore. The passengers remained calm, even when to their disbelief, one of the "unsinkable" ship's designers - with whom the Thayers had spent several evenings - told them he believed it would not survive an hour. They went back to fetch Mrs Thayer and her maid, then all returned to deck, wearing life preservers of thick cork vests. The ship's band, also in life preservers, played on as the vessel's officers remained at their posts. They fired distress rockets that illuminated the night sky, but they were ignored by at least one nearby vessel, the SS California, which passed close enough at 12.30am for its lights to be seen by many on the Titanic. Shortly after 12.45am, stewards passed the word "All women to the port side" as lifeboats were lowered into the water, with people scrambling for spaces. The Thayers were separated in the throng - and while Jack's mother eventually made it to safety, he never saw his father again. By 2.15am, the sinking liner was tilting sharply out of the water. "We were a mass of hopeless, dazed humanity, attempting, as the Almighty and Nature made us, to keep our final breath until the last possible moment," he noted of the mood. The vessel then reared up and, amid a rumbling roar and muffled explosions, he decided to jump. "I was pushed out and then sucked down. The cold was terrific. The shock of the water took the breath out of my lungs. "Down and down, I went, spinning in all directions. Swimming as hard as I could in the direction which I thought to be away from the ship, I finally came up with my lungs bursting, but not having taken any water." Falling debris dragged him under water again and when he fought back to the surface, he came up against an overturned lifeboat. Too exhausted to haul himself, the men already clinging to it pulled him up. To his shock, the other lifeboats, some of which had plenty of space, never returned to try and rescue those - very possibly including his father - calling for help in the water because of fears they too would be swamped. "The most heartrending part of the whole tragedy was the failure, right after the Titanic sank, of those boats which were only partially loaded, to pick up the poor souls in the water. There they were, only four or five hundred yards away, listening to the cries, and still they did not come back. If they had turned back several hundred more would have been saved." The Carpathia, a Cunard liner, had received wireless messages and was by now heading towards them. Thayer was on the last lifeboat to be rescued at about 7.30am, and at the top of the ladder, he saw his mother. Her joy was rapidly tempered. "Where's daddy?" she asked him "I don't know, mother," he replied. The journey of the next three days was one of crushing sorrow. "The trip back to New York was one big heartache and misery," he wrote. It seemed as if there were none but widows left, each one mourning the loss of her husband. It was a most pitiful sight." Mr Thayer later married the heiress to another railway fortune and pursued his own career in business. But in 1944, his beloved son, a US air force pilot, was killed over the Pacific and his mother also died.

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https://www.biography.com/news/titanics-100th-anniversary-6-survivor-stories-20799733


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