Name
Lifeboat from Titanic
Lifeboat to Carpathia
Confidence Level
Tenglin, Mr Gunnar Isidor
15 (8 votes)
13 (2 votes)
15 (8 votes)
13 (2 votes)
2.94
3.00


Immediately following the sinking, Gunnar Tenglin claimed to have left Titanic in a lifeboat, from the deck.  For example, in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on April 19, 1912:
    “Bunar Tonglin (sic), a Swede, was saved in the next to the last boat which left the Titanic. Before getting into the boat he placed two hysterical women in another boat. Then he heard a cry, and looking up, he saw a woman standing on the upper deck. The woman, he said, dropped from her arms her baby, which Tonglin caught, and gave it to one of the women he had put in the boat. Then he got into his own boat, which was lowered, and shortly afterward came two explosions, and the plunge downward of the TItanic.”

Tenglin described a similar scene in the Toronto Star on April 19, 1912, saying that he left the ship in a lifeboat from the deck:
    "the boat I got into was lowered till I was about ten feet from the water, when the ropes stuck, and we had to wait till the Titanic had settled that much before we could free ourselves and row away."
 
In the New York Call on April 20, 1912, Tenglin describes having ushered four (not two) women to the next-to-last boat to leave the ship:
    "As he did so, he was about to start back when he heard a cry and looked up and saw a woman standing on the upper deck. As he did this, the woman dropped from her arms her baby. Tenglin caught it and turned it over to one of the women. By this time, the boat had been lowered and was being rowed away from the wreck. A few minutes later, two explosions occurred, and then the vessel sank."
     
The fact that Tenglin, as a male, was allowed to board a lifeboat, and that he described “looking up” could suggest that he boarded one of the aft starboard boats that loaded from A Deck. 

Despite this, within a short period of time, Tenglin had changed his claims about the way he survived, shifting to a version that involved him being in the water and surviving aboard Collapsible A. He detailed this in the Burlington Daily Gazette on April 25, 1912:
    "The lifeboats all gone, it looked to us as if we were doomed to perish with the ship, when a collapsible lifeboat was discovered. This boat would hold about fifty people and we had considerable trouble getting it loose from its fastenings. The boat was on the second deck and the ship settled the question of its launching as the water suddenly came up over the deck and the boat floated.
    There must have been fully 150 people swimming around or clinging to the boat and we feared it would capsize or sink. We had no oars, or anything else to handle the boat with and were at the mercy of the waves, but the sea was calm. There was no way to sit down in the boat and we stood up in knee deep in ice cold water, while those on the edges pushed the frantic people in the water back to their fates, it being feared they would doom us all.
    The shock of the cold water and the fright caused many to succumb. I do not know how many died on that lifeboat. One big Swede named Johnson was kept busy throwing the corpses overboard as we desired to make the boat as light as possible to increase its buoyancy. One woman was stark crazy, her mania taking the form of embracing the men. There were three men insane, but they made no attempt to jump overboard. It seemed to us as if we had been standing up in that boat for a week, when it was in reality only about six hours. I was numb with the cold. I had no feeling in my hands or feet, as you will remember I did not put on my shoes when I left my stateroom, although I had on my overcoat. It could not have been over twenty minutes after we launched our life raft from the deck of the Titanic that the big liner sank.
    When we were picked up by the Carpathia , there were only twelve of us left.”

A major problem with Tenglin’s claims to have been in the water, other than his previous claims to have simply boarded a lifeboat from the deck, are the statements of fellow Third Class passenger August Wennerström.  Tenglin and Wennerström shared a cabin on Titanic, and Wennerström, despite leaving very detailed accounts of the sinking, never described his roommate as having been rescued aboard Collapsible A with him. 

In the end, we concluded that Tenglin’s early version of escape, with him having boarded a lifeboat from the deck, was the accurate version.  Since Tenglin seems to describe a boat loading from A Deck, and also refers to his boat having been hung up, several of us voted for boat #15 as a possibility.  Others voted for boat #13, based on Tenglin’s statement that his lifeboat was the “next to last” to leave the ship.  In both cases, we were unanimous that his later claims to have been aboard Collapsible A were dishonest, and that he probably pulled those details from the account of his cabin mate Wennerström.