Monday, April 15, 1912
3:20am
About an hour after Titanic sank, and with nearly all the screams silenced, 5th Officer Lowe takes lifeboat 14 and returns to scene of the wreck to look for survivors. He was only able to rescue four people out of the hundreds that were floating on the surface. When he arrived, it was painfully clear that he waited too long.
"We were amongst hundreds of dead bodies floating in lifebelts. We could only see four alive. The first one we picked up was a male passenger. He died shortly after we got him in the boat. After a hard struggle we managed to get the other three. One of these we saw kneeling as in prayer on what appeared to be a part of a staircase. He was only about twenty yards away from us, but it took us half an hour to push our boat through the wreckage and bodies to get to him. Even then we could not get very close, so we put out an oar for him to get a hold of, and so pulled him to the boat. All the bodies we saw seemed as if they had perished with the cold, as their limbs were all cramped up. As we left that awful scene, we gave way to tears. It was enough to break the stoutest heart."
-Seaman Joseph Scarrott