jane 🍃

The woman taking out a pin from her own hair to give it to a little girl

The lady who decided she was not just gonne make a pony tail, she was gonne braid that little girl’s hair using a five strand method

The husband of the older lady pointing out she missed a piece of hair and being so attentive

All of them asking where her mom was and telling her not to talk to strangers

Just all these people not just helping her out but trying to comb her hair and make sure it looks nice and that she likes it

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.

right after mr. knightley comments on how emma’s drawn harriet too tall (and emma gives mr, knightley a solid “well, screw you too, buddy” look), mr. elton gets this line:

“it may not be miss smith’s height in terms of measurement, but it is surely the height of her character.”

that is a HELL of a line right there…

imo, the 1996 film does maybe the best job of leading the audience to believe, as emma does, that mr. elton seems quite enamored of harriet (at least, that was always the impression i got when i first watched it at the age of, like, nine), as opposed to other adaptations, where it seems more obvious that his feelings lie with emma and not with harriet.

sure! all of them should be available on libgen, so enjoy 🧚🏻‍♀️ i did focus on cultural histories though, rather than theory, otherwise it would get too long. virtually all of them are published by the academic presses, and well-sourced and peer-reviewed. no pseudoscience in this household, no sirree! (also, none of them have anything to do with my actual field of study. i’m just like that)

— Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies, — Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, — After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, — Darkness: A Cultural History, — Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris, — Angels & Angelology in the Middle Ages, — Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion 1250-1750, — Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, — The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, — Landscapes of Fear, — Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, — The Severed Head: Capital Visions, — Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, — Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, — When the Dead Rise: Narratives of the Revenant, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, — Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, — Religion and Its Monsters, — On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, — The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, — Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, — Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art, — Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, — From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, Or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends, — A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, — Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, — The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration, — Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds, — Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, — Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, — Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers,

Just Between Lovers | Doom at Your Service

Julian Onderdonk (1882 - 1922)

Sunlight and Shadow

Cactus in the Rain

Rocky Hillside Quiet Pool

Early Spring - Bluebonnets and Mesquite

October Sunlight