The story of his remarkable escape was told by Augustus H. Weikman, of Palmyra, Burlington County, when he alighted from the Carpathia last night. Weikman was the ship barber on the Titanic, but he assisted in the work of lowering the lifeboats from an upper deck. He was blown into the water when the boilers on the ship exploded.
The officers on the bridge, one of them Second Officer Murdock, [sic] promptly worked the electrical apparatus for closing the watertight compartments when the crash came, Weikman said. He believes the machinery was in some way so damaged by the crash that the front compartments failed to close tightly, although the rear ones were secure.
Whiteman [sic] was blown off the deck by the second of two explosions, presumably of the boilers, and was in the water for more than two hours, he says, before he was picked up by a raft.
“The explosions,” declared Weikman, “were caused by the rushing in of icy water on the boilers. A bundle of deck chairs, roped together, was blown off the deck with me, and I struck my back, injuring my spine, but it served as a temporary raft.
“The crew and passengers had faith in the bulkhead system to save the ship and we were lowering a collapsible boat, all confident the ship would get through, when she took a terrible dip forward and the water rushed up and swept over the deck and into the engine rooms.
“The bow went clean down, and I caught the pile of chairs as I was washed up against the rail. Then came the explosions, and blew me fifteen feet.
“After the water had filled the forward compartments the ones at the stern could not save her. They did delay the ship’s going down. If it wasn’t for the compartments hardly anyone would have escaped.
"The water was too cold for me to swim and I was hardly more than one hundred feet away when the ship went down. The suction was not what one would expect and only rocked the water around me. I was picked up after two hours. I have done with the sea.”
Comment and discuss