Wreckage of Titanic’s Rescue Ship Found Intact

A U.S. expedition confirmed Friday it had located the wreck of the Carpathia, the ship that rescued survivors from the Titanic and that was later torpedoed by a German submarine.

The wreck, which was found May 27, rests 514 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean in waters 120 miles south of Fastnet, Ireland.

The Carpathia was the first ship on the scene after the Titanic sank in 1912. It raced at high speed over waters filled with icebergs to reach the survivors. Its crew pulled 705 men, women and children from lifeboats bobbing in the icy water.

At a news conference Friday in Halifax, the Nova Scotia documentary film company Eco-Nova productions presented film showing that the Carpathia was intact and lying upright at the bottom of the sea. There are huge tears in the side of the ship’s hull, and the boilers appear to have exploded as the ship sank.

The search for the Carpathia was funded largely by fiction author Clive Cussler, who has used royalties from his many best-selling books--including the fictional “Raise the Titanic”--to fund expeditions to locate and preserve shipwrecks around the world.

Founder of the National Underwater & Marine Agency, which first existed in his fiction, Cussler said the wreck that was found last spring was confirmed as the Carpathia last week.

The ship was sunk on July 17, 1918, while in a convoy from Liverpool, England, to Boston after being hit by two torpedoes from a German submarine. A third torpedo slammed into the ship’s hull as lifeboats were being lowered, killing five of its crew. The ship slipped beneath the surface the following day and the surviving crew and 157 passengers were picked up by a British warship and safely returned to Liverpool.

The Titanic, the wreck of which was found in 1985, sank off Newfoundland on its maiden voyage from Britain to New York in April 1912 after striking an iceberg. About 1,500 people died. The only survivors were those rescued by the Carpathia.

Interest in the Titanic soared after the 1997 movie “Titanic,” which set box-office records and won an Academy Award for best film.

“Now we have footage of the RMS Carpathia,” Cussler said at a news conference at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax.

Video released Friday clearly shows the ship’s stern, a propeller and winches used to load cargo.

“My goal was to preserve maritime history. We have been succeeding beyond my wildest dreams. I did not think this would happen in my lifetime,” Cussler said.

A never before published four-page letter, hand-dated April 24, 1912, by Luke Hoyt--a passenger on the Carpathia describing what he called the “greatest tragedy of the seas”--was also released Friday, telling how Titanic survivors were rescued from lifeboats in the dark by the Carpathia.

Hoyt wrote to a friend: “It was a tragedy. The horror of it all was appalling.

“It took everyone two or three days to get over that,” he added. In his letter, Hoyt praised the courage of surviving women and wrote that he saw the iceberg “that did it.”

“It was immense, estimated by a civil engineer as 180 feet in height,” he wrote.