[The following is an excerpt of a firsthand account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, written by a second class passenger, Mr. Lawrence Beesley.]
What impressed me at the time that my eyes beheld the horrible scene was a thin light-gray smoky vapor that hung like a pall a few feet above the broad expanse of sea that was covered with a mass of tangled wreckage. That it was a tangible vapor, and not a product of imagination, I feel well assured. It may have been caused by smoke or steam rising to the surface around the area where the ship had sunk. At any rate it produced a super-natural effect and the pictures I had seen by Dante and the description I had read in my Virgil of the infernal regions, of Charon, and the river Lethe, were then uppermost in my thoughts. Add to this, within the area described, which was as far as my eyes could reach, there arose to the sky the most horrible sounds ever heard by mortal man except by those of us who survived this terrible tragedy. The agonizing cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning, none of us will ever forget to our dying day. "Help! Help! Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!" and "My God! My God!" were the heart-rending cries and shrieks of men, which floated to us over the surface of the dark waters continuously for the next hour, but as time went on, growing weaker and weaker until they died out entirely.
Source:
Stephens, John Richard. “Victims of History.” Weird History 101: Tales of Intrigue, Mayhem, and Outrageous Behavior. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. 183-84. Print.
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