The 46,328 tons RMS Titanic of the White Star Line which sank at 2:20 AM Monday morning April 15 1912. Photo / Getty Images
The 46,328 tons RMS Titanic of the White Star Line which sank at 2:20 AM Monday morning April 15 1912. Photo / Getty Images
IN AN effort to keep spirits high while awaiting rescue in the North Atlantic Ocean aboard Lifeboat No. 7, Helen Bishop told her frightened friends a story.
The Titanic had just sunk and the small group of wealthy passengers aboard the lifeboat had rowed further away to avoid suction from the sinking ship.
The Bishops, a newly married couple, were living the high life in 1912; they were young, good looking, and very, very rich. They married in November 1911 and had delayed their return home from a four-month honeymoon in Europe and North Africa to travel on the luxurious liner's maiden voyage.
While in Egypt, Helen recalled, a fortune-teller had predicted that she would survive a shipwreck and an earthquake before eventually dying in a car crash.
"We have to be rescued," she said on the lifeboat that fateful night, "for the rest of my prophecy to come true."
"We looked all over the deck; walked up and down a couple of times, and one of the stewards met us and laughed at us. He said, 'You go back downstairs. There is nothing to be afraid of. We have only struck a little piece of ice and passed it'.
The Bishop's testimony from the United States Senate inquiry into the sinking of the RMS Titanic along with newspaper interviews at the time, is providing new light on the experiences of passengers on-board the ill fated ship as the 105th anniversary of the legendary sinking approaches on April 15.
"Up to the time of the wreck we had a beautified passage," Dickinson told the Dowagiac Daily News a month later in May, 1912.
The sea was delightful. It was delightful that Sunday night, as calm and as quiet as a mill pond. I will never forget the sunset that night Everybody had enjoyed it.
When they alerted that the Titanic had begun to list, The Bishops gathered with a group of wealthy First Class passengers on A deck, one of whom was the famed John Jacob Astor, the richest man on the Titanic.
"The captain told him something in an undertone. He came back and told six of us, who were standing with his wife, that we had better put on our lifebelts.
"We thought of nothing at all except the luxury of the ship; how wonderful it was."
The Bishops and their friends were completely unaware of the terrors that were about to unfold before their eyes, despite being some of the first passengers on Titanic's deck after striking an iceberg that would ultimately seal her fate.
The women were sent back to their rooms so they could be "thoroughly dressed" and were "pushed in" the first lifeboat lowered from Titanic, Lifeboat No. 7, at 12:45am after returning to deck. It was filled to less than half its capacity.
"Someone said, 'Put in the brides and grooms first,'" Helen recalled.
"There were three newly married couples who went in that boat."
Dickinson was pushed in with wife and the boat was lowered away with 28 people inside.
"It was exceedingly difficult to be understood on the deck, such was the noise from the escaping steam which began [to] blow off as soon as the engines stopped," Dickinson said.
The Bishops would spend the rest of the night in that lifeboat.
Survivors of the 'Titanic' disaster in a crowded lifeboat. Photo / Getty Images.
"The water was like glass. There wasn't even the ripple usually found on a small lake. By the time we had pulled 90 metres away the lower row of portholes had disappeared.
"Indeed everything seemed to be quiet on the ship until her stern was raised out of the water by the list forward. Then a veritable wave of humanity surged up out of the steerage and shut the lights from our view.
"We were too far away to see the passengers individually, but we could see the black masses of human forms and hear their death cries and groans."
"For a moment, the ship seemed to be pointing straight down, looking like a gigantic whale submerging itself headfirst.
"The lights burned brilliantly to the last."
The lifeboat may have been far from the Titanic when she sunk, but it wasn't far enough for the Titanic's victims to catch the lifeboat's eerie green lights, brought aboard a dining room steward.
"They cast a ghastly light over the boat, but you know we had no light of any kind. Whenever we would light one of these diminutive torches we would hear cries from the people perishing aboard. They thought it was help coming."
The lifeboat drifted in the water for about five hours, from 12.30 until approximately 5am. It was the fourth to be picked up by rescue ship Carpathia.
"There was a German baron (who was later discovered to be a fraud) aboard who smoked an obnoxious pipe incessantly and refused to pull an oar. The men were worn out with the work, and I rowed for considerable time myself," Helen said.
"After we had been afloat for several hours without food or water and everyone suffering from the cold, I felt certain we should all perish. I took off my stockings and gave them to a little girl who hadn't as much time to dress as I had."
As soon as the Carpathia was spotted, there were indescribable scenes of joy.
"On landing from the Carpathia they found themselves almost destitute of everything, all their personal belongings having gone down with the Titanic," read the Dowagiac Daily News.
A special issue of the Kalamazoo Gazette reported Helen was the first woman to leave the Titanic.
The couple eventually recovered, staying in New York to testify in the Congressional hearings, and the psychic's prophecy continued.
On vacation in California after the sinking, the couple found themselves in an earthquake which fulfilled the second part of the prophecy, according to Encyclopedia Titanica.
Then, on November 15, 1913, Helen was badly injured in a car accident after the couple were returning to Michigan and their vehicle span out of control and struck a tree.
Helen "suffered a severely fractured skull and was not expected to live".
"She recovered with a steel plate placed in her skull, but the accident caused a change in her mental condition and their marriage suffered. In January 1916, the couple divorced," read Encyclopedia Titanica.
It turned out Helen had developed epilepsy.
"Three months later Helen fell while visiting friends in Danville, Illinois. On March 16, 1916, she died and was buried in Sturgis, Michigan.
"The article announcing her death was on the front page of the Dowagiac Daily News. "Ironically the marriage of Dickinson Bishop to his third wife, Sidney Boyce of Chicago, appeared on the very same page."
