Hearses waiting for bodies from the Titanic !!!

Darren Bedford

PCS Member
I found this incredible historical photo of horse drawn hearses waiting for bodies on a port in Nova Scotia Canada. They were picking up drowned people who were on the Titanic which sunk out in the Atlantic Ocean on April 14-15th 1912.



Some facts about that day...

The sinking of the RMS Titanic occurred on the night of 14 April through to the morning of 15 April 1912 in the north Atlantic Ocean, four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. The largest passenger liner in service at the time, Titanic had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg at 23:40 (ship's time[a]) on Sunday, 14 April 1912. Her sinking two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 (05:18 GMT) on Monday, 15 April resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, which made it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.

Titanic received six warnings of sea ice on 14 April but was travelling near her maximum speed when her crew sighted the iceberg. Unable to turn quickly enough, the ship suffered a glancing blow that buckled her starboard (right) side and opened five of her sixteen compartments to the sea. Titanic had been designed to stay afloat with four flooded compartments but not more, and the crew soon realised that the ship would sink. They used rocket flares and radio (wireless) messages to attract help as the passengers were put into lifeboats. However, although not unlawfully, the ship was carrying far too few lifeboats for everyone, and many boats were not filled to their capacity due to a poorly managed evacuation.

The ship sank with over a thousand passengers and crew members still on board. Almost all those who jumped or fell into the water died from hypothermia within minutes. RMS Carpathia arrived on the scene about an hour and a half after the sinking and had rescued the last of the survivors in the lifeboats by 09:15 on 15 April, little more than 24 hours after Titanic's crew had received their first warnings of drifting ice. The disaster caused widespread public outrage over the lack of lifeboats, lax shipping regulations, and the unequal treatment of the different passenger classes aboard the ship. Inquiries set up in the wake of the disaster recommended sweeping changes to maritime regulations. This led to the establishment in 1914 of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which still governs maritime safety today.


Darren
 

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Looks like they are building shipping/transfer boxes on site as well.

Its not shipping boxes, they're building coffins. When the White Star Line chartered the Mackay-Bennett to steam to the site of the sinking for the purpose of recovering victims, no one expected her to find as many as she did. While the Titanic was lacking (in the moral sense though not in the legal sense) in her lifeboat capacity, she did indeed have enough lifejackets on board for everyone, and the lifejackets kept the dead bodies afloat just as well as the living ones.

The Mackay-Bennett sailed with a cargo hold of coffins, a team of undertakers, and necessary embalming supplies and equipment. It was originally intended that all recovered bodies would be placed in a coffin, but when they reached the disaster site and saw bodies floating as far as the eye could see, that quickly became impractical. Within just days of arriving, supplies were running short, resulting in the decision being made that first class passengers received coffins, second class passengers were embalmed and placed on deck under cover, third class and crew would be placed on ice in a cargo hold, and unidentifiable would be buried at sea.

Radioing in her overloaded and undersupplied status, the White Star Line chartered a second ship to take over the Mackay-Bennett's task, while Halifax undertakers prepared for the Mackay-Bennett's arrival including the constructing of coffins right on the dock.

All in all, the White Star Line would send four ships to pick up Titanic victims, with the Mackay-Bennett finding the majority of them by far. After the Mackey-Bennett's voyage, storms moved into the area and scattered the remaining victims far and wide. When the fourth of the chartered body recovery ships only found a single victim, the search was ended.

The last confirmed find of Titanic victims happened by accident on May 16 when the White Star Line's own Oceanic came across one of Titanic's lifeboats with three victims in it during the course of a normal transatlantic voyage. The Oceanic stopped, buried the bodies at sea, and sank the lifeboat. Passing ships would continue to report spotting an occasional body into the summer months, but no more were recovered.
 
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