Titanic lifeboat 4. The eighth boat to be lowered from the port side. The boat had been lowered from the boat deck to A deck and there was some trouble before passengers could start entering it. Some of the socially most well-known ladies were gathered around the boat; the Astors, the Carters, the Wideners and the Thayers. When John Jacob Astor asked whether he might join his wife in the boat, seeing as she was in a ''delicate condition,'' he was stopped from doing so. Women and children only. When John Ryerson, age 13, was about to enter it, an officer is said to have tried to stop him, as he was old enough to stay with the men. He was let in, in the end. Eventually, about 30 passengers, mainly ladies from first class, but also some from second class, including Mrs. Richards with two small sons and also her mother, were in it. Quartermaster Walter Perkis was put in charge and there were two other seamen with him. When lowered away, at least one more crewman came down the falls and while they were trying to get away from the sinking ship, rather close to the end, eight crewmembers were plucked from the sea; Alfred White, Thomas Dillon, Frederick Scott, Samuel Hemming, Frank Prentice, Andrew Cunningham, William Lyons and Sidney Siebert; the two last ones so overcome with cold that they died in the boat shortly after having been hauld aboard. With now some 40 or 42 people on board, they received another five or six from boat 14, to which they had been attached. When 14 left them, they went, together with boat 12, to rescue those on boat B and received another 6 or 8 people from that boat and reached the Carpathia late, with perhaps 55 living survivors on board.
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