The Sinking of the SS Titanic

“To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”

On 14 April 1912, John B. ‘Jack’ Thayer III, the 17-year-old heir to a Pennsylvania railroad fortune, was traveling first class with his mother, father and their maid on the most spectacular ship of the era – the TITANIC.

Jack was one of only a handful of survivors who escaped by jumping into the freezing Atlantic as the TITANIC sank and spent the next five hours clinging onto collapsible lifeboat B, the last lifeboat swept off the ship’s boat deck. He barely survived the disaster, and his detailed and shocking account of that fateful night riveted those he recounted it to in the following decades.

Finally, in 1940, he wrote down what happened for his family, privately printing 500 copies.

Five years later, after the tragic loss of his son in the Second World War, Jack Thayer committed suicide, and his story was mostly forgotten.

This new edition, published in 2019, includes the historically important series of six drawings by Lewis Skidmore a young art teacher aboard the CARPATHIA, the liner that came to the aid of the TITANIC survivors.

Jack described to Lewis the stages of the TITANIC’S demise, which Skidmore faithfully drew.

Critically it shows the ship breaking in two as she sank. Many survivors refuted this assessment but seventy years later Jack was proved correct when the wreck was discovered resting on the seabed – in two halves.

This edition also includes further bonus material, Jack’s earlier, much shorter accounts of his amazing escape published in 1912 and 1913.