Name
Lifeboat from Titanic
Lifeboat to Carpathia
Confidence Level
Collyer, Mrs Charlotte Annie 14 (9 votes)
14 (8 votes)
12 (1 vote)
4.78 (leaving in 14)
3.88 (staying in 14)
3.00 (transfer to 12)
Collyer, Miss Marjorie Charlotte 14 (9 votes)
14 (8 votes)
12 (1 vote)
4.78 (leaving in 14)
3.88 (staying in 14)
3.00 (transfer to 12)

 


From Washington Post Semi-Monthly Magazine, May 26, 1912, account by Mrs. Collyer: (quoted in On Board RMS Titanic by Behe, page 245):
    "The boat was practically full, and no more women were anywhere near it when Fifth Officer Lowe jumped in and ordered it lowered.   ....
   
For our part, we went in search of other lifeboats that had escaped. We found four or five, and Mr. Lowe took command of the little fleet. He ordered that the boats should be linked together with ropes so as to prevent any one of them from drifting away and losing itself in the darkness. This proved to be a very good plan and made our rescue all the more certain when the Carpathia came.
     He then, with great difficulty, distributed most of the women in our boat among the other craft. This took perhaps half-an-hour. It gave him an almost empty boat, and as soon as possible he cut loose and we went in search of survivors.
    
I have no idea of the passage of time during the balance of that awful night. Someone gave me a ship‘s blanket, which served to protect me from the bitter cold, and Marjorie had the cabin blanket that I had wrapped around her. But we were sitting with our feet in several inches of icy water. The salt spray had made us terribly thirsty, and there was no fresh water and certainly no food of any kind on board the boat. The sufferings of most of the women, from these various causes, was beyond belief. The worst thing that happened to me was when I fell over, half fainting, against one of the men at the oars. My loose hair was caught in the rowlock, and half of it was torn out by the roots.
     Not far from where the Titanic went down we found a lifeboat floating bottom up. Along its keel were lying about twenty men. They were packed closely together and were hanging on desperately, but even the strongest were so badly frozen that, in a few moments more, they must have slipped into the ocean. We took them on board, one by one, and found that of the number four were already corpses. The dead men were cast into the sea. The living groveled in the bottom of our boat, some of them babbling like maniacs.
     A little farther on we saw a floating door that must have been torn loose when the ship went down. Lying upon it, face downward, was a small Japanese. He had lashed himself with a rope to his frail raft, using the broken hinges to make the knots secure. As far as we could see, he was dead. The sea washed over him every time the door bobbed up and down, and he was frozen stiff. He did not answer when he was hailed, and the officer hesitated about trying to save him."

Leatherhead Advertiser, Epsom District Times and County Post, April 18, 1912, account by Miss Collyer:
   
"When we got a little way off another boat came near us, and an officer in our boat said he guessed he would go back to the wreck in it. I don't know who he was, but he put some of the people from the other boat in ours, and got in that. Then he went back with some sailors and pulled six men into the boat. "We rowed around for seven hours. All the time I was frightened a whole lot, and sometimes I cried. I cried hardest when I thought of my dollie back there in the water with nobody to mind it and keep it from getting wet.
    The women in the boat just sat up and didn't say anything. We were all very tired and cold, when we saw a big light. Somebody said it was a boat, but I thought it was just a star. But it kept getting bigger and bigger, and then we saw that it was a boat. Then all the sailors rowed hard."

Though most of us (not all) felt the Collyers left Titanic in lifeboat #14, we were not so sure they went back into the wreck field, in spite of Mrs. Collyer's very detailed account of going back.