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Commutator #211, from The News
(Portsmouth) 9/2/79:
“I climbed on the taffrail and
held onto a boat davit preparing to jump into the
water. It was icy cold, icy cold and black, and I
had to be really determined to swim away into the
darkness, away from the liner’s lights, but I knew
the suction would pull me down if I stayed close. ….
A darker shape proved to be the capsized Collapsible
B that Daniels had cut free. “I wish I could have
kept that knife! It was instrumental in saving 24
lives including my own!” He hauled himself up on her
keel and sat on the planking, just out of the water
where two dozen crew and passengers clung together.
“It was bitterly cold and by morning the man huddled
beside me died from exposure. ….. We were rescued by
one of our lifeboats which took us to the
Carpathia.”
An account for the Southampton City Heritage Oral
History, sometime prior to 1991, gives pretty
much the same account.
"Climbing onto 'the upturned
boat', the man next to him dying. He did say 'There
were twenty of us on the two different boats. And
they took us to the Carpathia.” (Lifeboats #4
and #12 that took the survivors off collapsible B)
From
the Western Daily Mercury, April 29th 1912:
"We filled the boats with women
and children, and got them away safely. I stayed on
deck, not thinking the ship was going down, but when
she gradually became submerged, and the water came
over the boat deck and the bows, I knew there was no
hope, so jumped overboard. I swam about for four or
five minutes, till I reached an upturned collapsible
boat, to which twenty-seven others were clinging,
including a saloon passenger and two third class
passengers (an Irishman and a Swede) and the second
officer. We clung to this boat for five hours until
picked up by the Carpathia. ..... As it
was, the second officer fell off the boat to which
we clung, and was not seen afterwards."
If Mr. Daniels
thought that Second Officer Lightoller had fallen off
Collapsible B, then it seems that he had to have
transferred to #4, and not #12. We know with a
certainty that Lightoller was the last man to transfer
to #12, and it would be very unlikely for Daniels to
miss seeing him as he moved between the boats, if he
was going into #12.
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