A harrowing account from Titanic survivor Frank Prentice has resurfaced on social media in the wake of this week’s Titan submersible tragedy.
An assistant storekeeper on the doomed ship, Prentice gave an interview to the BBC in 1979.
He recounted that sorrowful day in April 1912 when the RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage from England to America, killing over 1,500 people. There were 705 survivors.
Prentice, who passed away in 1982 at the age of 93, survived by swimming to a nearby lifeboat.
He recalled that the Titanic seemed to stop as if you were “jamming your brakes on a car” — it was sudden.
“We had a porthole open, and I looked out. The sky was clear, and the stars were shining. Sea was dead calm. And I thought, I couldn’t understand it,” Prentice explained.
“So I came out of my cabin, and I thought I’d go forward, and I went forward to the well deck on the starboard side, and I could see ice on the well deck. There was no sign of an iceberg then, ’cause it passed us. And the lights were shining on the water from the portholes, and there was no sign of damage above waterline.”
Orders came to take the lifeboats out, with women and children getting on first.
Prentice shared how the first few boats didn’t have many passengers on board, only about 50 each, as most people were afraid of the 70-foot drop to the water. Others thought the Titanic, in the end, would not sink.
“If they’d been filled, we could have saved 800. Whereas we only saved 500,” Prentice said of the lifeboats.
Prentice said he and other men were instructed to gather all the snacks and cookies they could find. But as he attempted to make his way back to the boat deck, he realized he couldn’t get near the lifeboats.
“Some people were scrambling to get in and being pushed back,” he said, adding that at that point, the ship had been leaning to one side very heavily, and they could not get the rest of the lifeboats out.
As Prentice was about to put his lifejacket on, he met a young couple who had just honeymooned in France. Prentice noticed the woman was having trouble with her life vest, so he helped her.
Prentice then convinced the woman, who was passenger Virginia Estelle Clark, to get on Lifeboat 4. A nurse, she said she did not want to leave her husband.
But Prentice comforted Clark by telling her this was all “precautionary,” and her husband, Walter Miller Clark, would follow later on.
“Then I picked up my own life vest and put it on,” Prentice said after leaving Clark to go on her way. He then noticed the third-class passengers filling the decks. He said he helped them the best he could.
“I thought, now I will go up and get out of all this scrumming and go on the poop deck [a deck that forms the roof of a cabin built in the rear, or ‘aft,’ part of the ship].
“And she [the Titanic] was sinking fast then,” he continued. “All of a sudden she lifted up quickly. And you could hear everything cracking. Everything that was movable was going through. And then she went down and seemed to come up again.”
Prentice was referring to the Titanic breaking in two before it lifted up and violently sank down. He accepted his fate calmly.
“So I thought, ‘Well, now I’m going to leave,’ and I was hanging on to a board — we had two boards, starboard and port, which said, ‘Keep clear of propeller blades.’ And I was hanging on to one of these, and I was getting higher and higher in the air, and I thought, ‘Well, now I’ll go,’ and I dropped. And I hit the water with a terrific crack. Luckily, I didn’t hit anything when I dropped in.
“There were bodies all over the place. And then I looked up at the Titanic — the pillars were right out of water. The rudder was right out, and I could see the bottom, and then gradually she glided away. That was that… the last of the Titanic,” Prentice went on. “I didn’t want to die. I mean, I didn’t see much chance at living. I was gradually getting frozen up.”
“And by the grace of God, I came across a lifeboat. They pulled me in, and there was a fireman dead in the bottom. There was about a foot of water in this boat.”
Prentice said he spotted a man, who seemed to have been traumatized, trying to leave the safety boat, but others were holding him down.
He said he then realized he was sitting next to Clark, the woman he had helped into the lifeboat. He said she asked about her husband, Walter, as she wrapped him in a blanket. It would be discovered later that Walter had died.
“I think she probably saved my life. I don’t know. I saved hers or so I think I did. And she saved mine,” Prentice declared.
The RMS Carpathia steamship, which was already carrying some 700 passengers, welcomed those who were on lifeboats before heading to New York.
In the interview, Prentice is asked about the watch he wore on the Titanic. He revealed it had permanently stopped at 2:20 a.m., the exact time the ship sank.
“Talking about it, I should probably dream of that tonight — have another nightmare,” he says, ending the interview. “You’d think I’m too old for that but you’d be amazed. You lie in bed at night and the whole thing comes round again.”
Prentice was the second-to-last member of the crew to pass away, being survived only by Sidney Edward Daniels — a third-class steward who died in 1983 at 89.
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