RMS Carpathia

Around 1900 Cunard was under pressure from the White Star Line and the German companies, having lost the Blue Riband to Norddeutscher Lloyd's Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1897. Rather than chase records, the line ordered three ships built for profitability — Ivernia, Saxonia and Carpathia — designed for immigrant traffic and fuel economy rather than speed. Carpathia was a modified Ivernia design, about 40 feet shorter than her half-sisters, with a long hull, a low superstructure and four masts fitted with cargo cranes.

C. S. Swan & Hunter built her at Wallsend on the Tyne. Her keel was laid on 10 September 1901; she was launched on 6 August 1902, christened by Miss Watson, daughter of Cunard's vice-chairman, and ran her trials from the Tyne to the Mersey in April 1903. Seven single-ended boilers with the Howden forced draught system worked at 210 psi, feeding two sets of four-cylinder quadruple-expansion engines built by the Wallsend Slipway and Engineering Company, for an intended trial speed of 15.5 knots.

She had four complete steel decks and, at completion, a gross tonnage above 13,500. Third-class accommodation was unusually generous for the time: a dining saloon running the full width of the ship and seating 300, panelled in polished oak and teak, with its own smoking room and ladies' room. The lower decks were ventilated by deck ventilators and electric fans blowing over coiled thermotanks that could be fed cool water in summer or steam in winter. Over 2,000 electric lamps were backed by oil lamps.

Carpathia sailed from Liverpool for Boston on her maiden voyage on 5 May 1903, then worked between New York and Mediterranean ports — Gibraltar, Algiers, Genoa, Naples, Trieste and Fiume. Without the speed or grandeur of the express liners, she earned a reputation as a comfortable ship in rough weather, helped by a wide breadth-to-length ratio, bilge keels and the absence of the vibration that came with powerful engines. She had no first-class accommodation at all until 1905.

After Cunard's 1904 partnership with the Royal Hungarian Sea Navigation Company Adria, she was given the duty of carrying Hungarian emigrants, and a 1905 renovation raised her capacity from 1,700 to 2,550. Small third-class cabins became large shared dormitories while former second-class spaces were upgraded to first. By 1912 her tonnage stood at 13,600 and her capacity at 2,450 — 2,200 of them in third class — with a crew of about 300, six of them officers, and twenty lifeboats.

Carpathia left New York on 11 April 1912 for Fiume with about 240 crew, a quarter of them Croatian sailors, and 128 passengers in first class, 50 in second and 565 in third. Just after midnight on 15 April her wireless operator, Harold Cottam, still listening after his shift had ended, signalled Titanic that Cape Cod had traffic for her and received the distress call in reply. He took it to First Officer Horace Dean and woke Captain Arthur Rostron, who turned the ship at once.

Rostron shut off the heating and hot water to give the engines every pound of steam, posted extra lookouts for ice, and stationed a doctor in each class's dining saloon with blankets, ladders and mail sacks at the gangway doors. He later testified that the distance was 58.22 nautical miles and that the run took three and a half hours. Carpathia reached the edge of the ice field by 02:45, dodged bergs for two hours as growlers ground along her hull plates, and arrived at 04:00.

Titanic had gone down about an hour and a half earlier. Over the next four and a half hours the crew took 712 survivors from her lifeboats, hoisted aboard through the between-deck entrance nearest the waterline, where Árpád Lengyel made the first assessments because of his paramedic experience. Carpathia's own passengers gave up food, hot drinks, blankets and cabins. Rostron weighed the Azores and Halifax before settling on New York, and docked there on the evening of 18 April in heavy rain.

The crew were given medals by the survivors — bronze for the men, silver for the officers — and Rostron a silver cup and a gold medal presented by Margaret Brown. He was knighted by George V and received the Congressional Gold Medal at the White House from President Taft. Josip Car, an 18-year-old waiter from Crikvenica, kept a Titanic life jacket and donated it in 1938 to the museum in Rijeka, where it remains the only one on permanent display in Europe.

In the First World War Carpathia carried Canadian and American Expeditionary Force troops to Europe, at least some voyages in convoy from New York through Halifax to Liverpool and Glasgow. Her Cunard red funnel was painted battle grey, and by early 1918 the whole ship wore dazzle camouflage. She left Liverpool on 15 July 1918 in a convoy bound for Boston with 57 passengers and 166 crew, zig-zagging under escort; the escort left early on the 17th and the convoy split in half.

At 09:15 a torpedo was sighted to port. The engines went full astern and the helm hard a-starboard, too late: SM U-55 hit her near No. 3 hatch, then again in the engine room, killing three firemen and two trimmers and wrecking her wireless. Captain William Prothero, in command since 1916, fired rockets and signalled the convoy by flag. All 218 survivors of the 223 aboard got away in eleven boats; U-55 put a third torpedo into her and she sank at 11:00.

The Azalea-class sloop HMS Snowdrop drove the submarine off with gunfire and picked the boats up around one o'clock, reaching Liverpool the following evening. Carpathia went down about 120 miles west of Fastnet — the fifth Cunard steamer sunk in as many weeks. In 2000 Clive Cussler's National Underwater and Marine Agency found her wreck sitting upright in 500 feet of water, a 1999 claim having turned out to be the Hamburg-America liner Isis. A seamount southeast of the Grand Banks carries her name.