Name
Lifeboat from Titanic
Lifeboat to Carpathia
Confidence Level
Nye, Mrs Elizabeth 11 11 4.10

 


In a letter written April 16th 1912 on board the Carpathia (On Board RMS Titanic page 137 and Commutator Vol 21 No 3) she says:
    “I thought I should get back to get more clothes on and get a few other things, but we were put into the lifeboats, and pushed off at once. They put all ladies and children in first. I guess there were 30 or 40 in our boat. It seemed to be the last one lowered with women in it."
    ".... We sighted a bright light soon and we all watched it so anxiously it came along closer and closer till we saw more lights on her and knew that help was at hand. The suspence was terrible. We were afraid they did not know of the Wreck or that they would not see our lights for most of the boats had no light only a lighted rope end."

In 1952, she wrote an account of the sinking.
     "I went to the side where the last boat was being lowered. I stood there looking at a crowd of men huddled together, a silent crowd, while the ships orchestra of ten young men were standing knee deep in water playing a tune called Autumn. … Someone called out, “Here is another woman” and I was pushed into the boat. Blankets were thrown in after me, for we had four babies without their mothers, they were reunited on the rescue ship."

New York Evening World, April 19th 1912.
    "Was saved in boat No.11. She said: 'I was put into the boat, together with about thirty other women, and they took us away a mile and a half from the sinking ship.'

In a letter to her mother, printed in the Folkestone Herald, on May 4th 1912, Mrs Nye writes that a piece of rope was burned in her boat. She told Walter Lord that there were four babies in her boat without their mothers. She also told Lord that the band were playing on deck near to her boat. George Behe, in his book, Those Brave Fellows, published in July 2020, used evidence to suggest that, for a time, the band played on the starboard side of A deck, close to where lifeboat 11 was launched.

Lifeboat #11 was also a boat where a rope end was burned for torches.  Seaman Brice at the American Inquiry, page 652 said:
    Mr. BRICE. No, sir; no lantern, sir. I searched for the lantern. I cut the lashing from the oil bottle and cut rope and made torches.

  Her biography Elizabeth Nye: Titanic Survivor, by Dave Bryceson, says she was in #11, but gives no back up documentation.