On April 23, another steamship, the Minia, arrived on the scene and delivered more embalming fluid so bodies could once more be preserved for burial on land. The bodies selected were wrapped in canvas, weighed down with iron bars, and dropped over the side three at a time as an Anglican minister delivered the service. “The undertaker didn’t think these bodies would keep more than three days at sea, and as we expected to be out more than two weeks, we had to bury them,” Larnder told The Washington Times. Most of the bodies to be buried at sea could be identified by their clothing as the Titanic’s crew or third-class passengers. Larnder made the difficult decision to begin burying some of the victims at sea-regulations required that only embalmed persons could be brought ashore. After Snow ran out of embalming fluid and caskets, he began wrapping victims in canvas and placing them on ice in the hold, but they quickly filled the available space. Each one pulled from the water was given a number, and their personal effects were placed in a small canvas bag marked with the same number. Snow, Jr., of Nova Scotia’s largest undertakers, took care of the bodies to be transported back to Halifax. No two were clasped in each other’s arms.”Ĭhief embalmer John R. Captain Larnder said that “We found no two bodies together, all floating separately. The following day, April 21, fewer were recovered, but 119 were hauled aboard on April 22. The rescue mission had to pause at nightfall with the sea still dotted with bodies. Their heads and shoulders showed bruises from the chaotic sinking of the ship. On that first day, 51 victims were retrieved most were wearing life-jackets and floating upright.
Boats with five or six crew and room for eight bodies were lowered into the water to begin the recovery. “We saw them scattered over the surface, looking like a flock of seagulls,” he later told The Washington Times.
Captain Frederick Harold Larnder found far more victims in the icy waters than he expected. By the next morning, the crew was ready to start recovering bodies. The Mackay-Bennett arrived on the evening of April 19. But it wouldn't be enough to cope with the huge number of Titanic victims. The Mackay-Bennett carried all the embalming fluid available in Halifax, approximately 100 wooden coffins, 100 tons of ice, and 12 tons of iron bars to weigh down bodies to be buried at sea. A Halifax-based cable ship, the CS Mackay-Bennett, was quickly fitted out as a “morgue ship” and dispatched to where the Titanic had sunk two days earlier, more than 800 statute miles away. Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, was the closest major port to the site of the disaster. Now, the task became recovery of the dead.
By 8:30 a.m., all survivors-705 women, men, and children-were brought up from the lifeboats, and the Carpathia steamed for New York. After half an hour of searching in the dark, a crew member spotted a flare from one of the drifting lifeboats, and the rescue mission commenced. The first ship to reach the scene of the disaster, the RMS Carpathia arrived at about 3:30 a.m. All too soon, more than 2200 souls aboard the Titanic realized the odds of survival were stacked against them: The ship’s lifeboats, launched into the icy Atlantic, had space for only half the passengers and crew. The supposedly unsinkable ocean liner was four days into its journey from Southampton, England, to New York when the call to abandon ship rang out. on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg about 375 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
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