The Mail Room

The Mail-Room was filled with over 7 million pieces of mail. All that mail filled the shelves and 3,423 sacks of mail. There was 5 post-masters named Oscar Scott Woody, John Star March, William Logan Gwinn, James Bertram Williamson, and John Richard Jago Smith. The Mail-room was located on G-Deck on the Port-Bow side. When the TITANIC struck an iceberg, the Mail-Room almost immediately filled with water. The Post-Masters almost immediately began to carry the bags to the upper decks. By the time they had almost met their fate, they had brought an estimated 200 bags to the upper decks. One eyewitness named Albert Theissinger said "I urged them to leave their work. They shook their heads and continued at their work. It might have been an inrush of water later that cut off their escape, or it may have been the explosion. I saw them no more." Those men were some of the first to die on the TITANIC. They have a memorial in the Smithsonian Institute with beautiful paintings of them. Their bodies were never found. The mail was thought to be lost for years but now, there may be parcels still in the bowels of the ship. First of all, there was a bag filled with not only jewelry and gold, but also bank-notes (English checks)that still had ink and was visible. Secondly, on the Empress of Ireland, there was a clearly visible newspaper from the day it sank. Hopefully, there will be a recovery expedition to find the mail and send the mail to the persons or family of those of whom the letters are sent.

TITANIC myths 2

Myths 1,2,and 3: At the store, have you seen this magazine that is in black and white called "World Weekly News? Well they say that they are the most reliable magazine but I say that's a big fat lie ! They say things like "TITANIC bodies found in ice" when the nearest ice was 2 miles away and the average person lasted 20 minutes. Another said "Baby found alive in life preserver wearing 1912 clothes" which is clearly a lie. They also say that the TITANIC was sunk by a giant fish but I say that's the biggest fish story I've ever heard !

Myth 4: Some people say that if the lookouts had binoculars, they would have seen the iceberg sooner and the TITANIC would have turned and missed the iceberg but through testing, binoculars would not have changed anything.

Myth 5: Gash in the hull- There was no 300 foot long gash; there were small holes where the steel plates had buckled.

Myth 6: Frank Tower- there is a legend of Frank Tower surviving the TITANIC, Lusitania, and Empress of Ireland but he appears in none of the lists of those aboard any of the ships when they sank. He is probably just an urban legend.

Another Shipwreck

1st class stairs

Storstad after collision

The Empress of Ireland was launched on January 26, 1906 and was 570 feet long and 66 feet wide. She was 9 hours into her voyage from Quebec, Canada to Liverpool, England carrying 1,477 passengers when a blanket of fog came down all of a sudden. It was May 14, 1914 and Captain Henry George Kendall was keeping a lookout for anything. Immediately, there were lights and they were coming closer at a great speed and then it hit the starboard side and scraped a huge hole. Then, the lights vanished. The impact was hardly felt and the water came in at 60,000 gallons a second. Those on the lower decks on the starboard side never even had the chance to wake up before water came over their heads! The only passengers that had the slightest chance of getting a life jacket on were on the top decks. The boats were being lowered quickly but all were full. In all, only 4 lifeboats were launched. Captain Kendall just stood there, watching all those people scream, panic, jump, and Kendall did nothing to regain order. instead, he ordered his Chief officer to help lower the boats. The
Chief Officer was never seen again. As the ship listed a little more, Kendall was thrown overboard from the bridge and landed next to a lifeboat where he was pulled in. The Empress then stopped when the water had consumed half the ship. There were about a hundred standing on the port side. Then, the ship gracefully slipped beneath the waves into the freezing St. Lawrence river. The captain then began rescue operations and picked up dozens of people from the water. They were later picked up by the Storstad which was the ship that sank her. 465 people survived including 4 children (out of 138) and 42 women (out of 279). 1,012 died. The owner of the Storstad was forced to sell her for $750,000 after a Law Suit was won by the owners of the Empress of Ireland for $2,000,000. Salvage efforts have gone slowly. There is a hole from where the U.S.A. had blasted their way to get a bullion of 6 billion dollars. Only the most experienced divers can go down there and they can see things like the Steward's Dormitory where sixty stewards never had a chance and now are in a
jumble of bones. The wreck is a graveyard and , like the TITANIC, we must think about that if anyone goes down there.