1200 People Aboard the Steamship Titanic Drown in the Sea

Amongst the Missing of This Tragedy are Millionaires

New York, April 16—When the steamship Titanic of the White Star Line went down in the sea, there were a thousand and two hundred people on board who drowned.

This is the true account from the crowd of newspaper writers as well as those on the ships what scurried to assist the vessel.

The story of this tragedy is the worse of all maritime disasters know in history; news keeps arriving daily adding to the horror and sadness.

Two hours after the ship collided with the piece of ice, it sank in a shallow part of the ocean between Sable Island and Cape Race.

It is now known that it ran on top of a solid mass of ice that was blanketed by the sea, and some hundreds of feet tall, while the steamship was travelling through dense fog. This chunk of ice which damaged the ship was a mile across, according to reports received, and it was like an island made of ice, and not a chunk of ice. There was no definitive word on the massiveness of this calamity from the people who were rescued. They all stated that they had no clue that they’d meet with tragedy in the dark, frigid waters of the North Atlantic, until the steamship collided. The hit was at an angle, but it was peeled off like the bark of a tree is shaved off by a plane.

When the ship ran in to the mass of ice, the boards in the bow of the ship snapped, and this snapping sounded like many cannons going off. The sea water rushed into the ship and washed over the deck passengers, who were all done for like rats dying in their holes, while they reached about and climbed to get to the top of the deck. The elevators that the ship was equipped with were filled with water and were not functional; and there were many who were trapped and drowned in them between floors of the ship.

In the first-class cabins, the horror was almost the same. The first-class passengers had a half billion dollars or more between them, and yet that wealth could not save any one of them. Benjamin Guggenheim, the fifth of the famous copper millionaires was on the ship. George Wideness [Widener], the son of Peter Wideness [Widener], the head of railroad track laying in Philadelphia, and partner of O’Brien and Thomas Fortune Ryan, deep in their money making schemes, was a passenger on the ship, and was headed home from Europe. Isidor Straus, a multimillionaire and a wealthy man famous for his philanthropy is one of the drowned; that is what is heard.

[This article appears to have been taken from the first page story of the Hawaiian Gazette on April 16, 1912. All three Hawaiian-Language Newspapers of the time were covering this tragic story.]

(Kuokoa Home Rula, 4/19/1912, p. 1)

Kuokoa Home Rula, Buke X, Helu 16, Aoao 1. Aperila 19, 1912.