Photographers were crammed into a flotilla of small boats trying to get photographs of the lifeboats, and survivors of the disaster lined up at the rail. The atmosphere around them was half funeral, half circus, as the relatives of survivors waited in agonized silence to see who would come off, and reporters and photographers shouted to each other and jockeyed for the best positions and best shots.

After depositing the lifeboats, the Carpathia moved slowly to her own dock at Pier 54, and longshoremen and Cunard employees tied her up quickly. And then the gangway was finally let down. In silence, and with heartrending deference, the Titanic survivors were let off first. Passengers from the Carpathia hugged some of them and squeezed their hands. There were many tears, and little said, as one by one, the survivors came off, most of them with tears streaming down their faces, some still in shock from what they’d seen, and lived through on that awful night. No one would soon forget the hideous screams and moans from the water, the shouts and calls for help in vain as people died. Those in the lifeboats had been too afraid of picking people up, for fear they would capsize from the effort, and drown even more people than those who were already doomed in the water. The sights around them had been hideous, of dead floating bodies, as they waited for help to come and to be picked up.

As they came off the Carpathia, there were women with young children, a few women still in evening gowns from their last night aboard the doomed ship, with blankets over them. Some of them had been too shaken to change their clothes for the past three days, and had huddled in the space provided in the Carpathia’s dining rooms and main salons. The regular passengers and the crew had done all they could to help, but no one could change the death toll and the shocking loss of life, in circumstances no one could have foreseen.