ster ship; the _Cincinnati,
Prince Adelbert, Amerika,_ the _Prinz Friederich Wilhelm_, and many
others, abandoned all else to fly to help those in danger. Nearest of
all was the _Carpathia_, bound from New York for Mediterranean ports,
only sixty miles away. And as they all, with forced draft and every
possible device for adding to speed, dashed through the misty night on
their errand of mercy, Phillips, of the _Titanic_, kept wafting from
his key the story of disaster. The thing he repeated oftenest was:
"Badly damaged. Rush aid." Now and then he gave the ship's position in
latitude and longitude as nearly as it could be estimated by her
officers as she was carried southward by the current that runs swiftly
in this northern sea, so that the rescuers could keep their prows
accurately pointed toward the wreck. Soon he began to announce, "We are
down by the head and sinking rapidly." About one o'clock in the morning
the last words from Phillips rippled through the heavy air, "We are
almost gone."

The crew were summoned to their stations; the lifeboats and liferafts
were swiftly provisioned and furnished with water as well as could be
done. Yet this provision could hardly have been very extensive, since
it has long been an accepted axiom of the sea that the modern giant
ships are indestructible, or at least unsinkable.

"Women and children first," the order long enforced among all decent
men who use the sea, was the word passed from man to man as the boats
were filled, the boatfalls rattled, and the frail little cockleshells
were lowered into the calm sea. What farewells there were on those dark
and reeking decks between husbands and wives and all other men and
women of the same family one can hardly dare think about. Steadily the
work of filling the boats and lowering away went on until the last
frail craft had been dropped upon the ocean from the sides of the liner
and the whole little fleet rose and fell on the sea beside the great
black hulk. And when the last crowded boat had come down and there was
no possibility of removing one more human being from the wreck, there
were still more than fifteen hundred men on her decks. So far had
belief in the invulnerability of the modern ship curtailed sane and
proper provision for taking care of her people in time of calamity.

One can imagine with what frantic but impotent hope, as the sinking
decks and menacing plash of waters within told of the imminent last
plunge, those