Carpathia rescued survivors of the Titanic sinking only to be a victim of German U-boat torpedo in WWI

AS the ship Carpathia headed to America a century ago it was shadowed by a German U-boat that sent it to the bottom of the ocean

RMS Carpathia circa 1910, rushed to the rescue of the Titanic after it struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912.

CARPATHIA,the Cunard Line transatlantic passenger steamship, had waited at Huskisson dock in Liverpool for three weeks to join a convoy, escorted by warships, across the perilous waters of the Atlantic. She was heading back to the US after delivering more troops to the Western Front. Only 57 passengers were making the crossing, vastly outnumbered by the 166 crew, under the command of Capt William Prothero.

German U-boats lurked beneath the ocean, waiting for an opportunity to pick off a ship, desperate to do something about the dire situation in France and Belgium where Germany’s last ditch Spring Offensive had failed to break through the Allied lines.

On a bright summer’s day 100 years ago today, Carpathia came within the sights of German submarine U-55. After a crewman spotted a torpedo heading toward the ship, Prothero tried to take evasive action, but it was too late. She was struck on the port side.

It was an ignominious end for the ship that had played a heroic part in a more famous sinking, that of the Titanic in 1912. The Carpathia’s story has been retold by Australian author Jay Ludowyke in a new book, Carpathia (Hachette, $32.99).

Picture of Titanic survivors in a lifeboat taken from deck of rescue vessel Carpathia on April 15, 1912.

Carpathia was built in 1902 at the Swan & Hunter shipyard at Wallsend in northeast England. In 1903, while the ship was being fitted out, workers in Wallsend discovered the end of the Roman wall that once separated the Roman province of Britannia from Caledonia, literally the Wall’s End that gave the town its name. Consequently, a piece of that wall was placed aboard Carpathia in a glass display case.

The ship was one of three liners commissioned by Cunard at the beginning of the 20th century to update its fleet. Rather than competing with other companies to build the fastest or most luxurious ships, Carpathia and her sister ships, Ivernia and Saxonia, were built for fuel economy, to maximise profits transporting migrants across the Atlantic.

While Carpathia was not the most luxurious, it was renowned for being comfortable. Its cabins were heated in winter and cooled in summer, the ship was stable during storms because of its comparatively wide hull and it lacked the disturbing vibrations that often went with high-speed engines on other liners.

Harold Bride (with bandaged feet), a survivor of the Titanic is carried up the ramp of the Carpathia on April 15, 2012 Picture: AP/Library of Congress

Nicknamed the ’Thia by its crew, the ship started running passengers between Liverpool and Boston. She was later sent to the Mediterranean to carry Italians migrating to the US, some of whom were members of the notorious Black Hand criminal gang, who delivered ominous threats in the form of a black hand print in the corridors of the ship. American consul in Sicily, William Henry Bishop, fled the Black Hand aboard the Carpathia in 1909 after the gang threatened to kill him if he didn’t halt his investigations into their crime links with the US.

In January 1912, Arthur Rostron took command of the ship and in March of that year, as the ship left Palermo, Italy, headed for New York the Black Hand symbol was seen again. On April 11, Carpathia left New York for Italy, but four days later Rostron’s first officer Horace Dean burst unannounced into Rostron’s cabin to tell him that a message had been received from the Titanic saying the ship had struck an iceberg and was sinking.

Cunard commodore and HMS Carpathia captain Sir Arthur Henry Rostron

Rostron immediately ordered the Carpathia to head for the Titanic. He diverted extra power to the engines to pass the ship’s normal top speed of 14 knots, pushing past 17 knots, resulting in some near misses with icebergs along the way.

Four hours later when Carpathia arrived at the position given for Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship was nowhere to be seen; it had already disappeared below the waves.
Instead, Carpathia began taking aboard hundreds of survivors drifting in Titanic’s lifeboats.

By the time Carpathia arrived back in New York on April 18, news of the disaster had spread and the ship was greeted by a crowd of concerned relatives of Titanic passengers along with newspaper reporters.

Rostron became a celebrity and was later given a knighthood and a silver cup for his part in the rescue of the survivors. Crewmen received a special medallion, paid for by the survivors.

In January 1913, Prothero took command of the Carpathia. When war broke out in 1914, Carpathia had to flee Fiume, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Croatia), and seek shelter in Malta, before bringing American refugees home from Italy.

The ship spent the war travelling in convoys, transporting Canadian and American troops to Europe. On July 17, 1918, while carrying a small group of officers and civilians, the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat. Five crew were killed in the explosion but all remaining crew and passengers, a total of 218 people, survived and were rescued by a Royal Navy ship.

The wreck was discovered in 2000 by Clive Cussler’s National Underwater & Marine Agency.