14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most fascinating and distressful accounts of the Titanic disaster has come to light through a letter apparently written by a survivor of the infamous sinking that took place on April 15, 1912.
It is believed that the newly surfaced letter was written by a French woman called Rose Amelie Icard, a maid for rich American passenger Martha Stone, who survived the disaster, and was addressed to the daughter of another woman, whose mother also survived the sinking.
Ms. Icard and Mrs. Stone escaped from the sinking ship in one of the lifeboats and were rescued by the Carpathia vessel before being taken to New York.
If it is authentic, the missive offers a reliable account of the night when almost 1,500 died, after the Titanic had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean and sank.
The captivating document, dated August 8, 1955, was brought to light after a man bought it at an auction approximately two years ago and asked for help via Reddit to translate it from French to English, the Mirror reports.
Rose Amelie's letter describes in terrifying detail the events on that fateful night and provides first-hand account of impressive scenes of horror and heroism.
“Towards eleven o'clock Mrs. Stone and I went to bed. Three quarters of an hour later, as the liner was cruising at full speed, a terrifying shock threw us out of bed,” the letter reads.
The woman recalls helping Mrs. Stone get dressed and heading to the deck. She also remembers going back to the cabin to retrieve the jewelry of her employer, but she chose “the wrong stairwell and returned to the deck halfway there.”
“At this moment we witnessed unforgettable scenes where horror mixed with the most sublime heroism. Women, still in evening gowns, some just out of bed, barely clothed, disheveled, distraught, scrambled for the boats,” she continues, describing what happened on the deck.
Ms. Icard writes about Commander Smith, who was giving orders to save women and children first, and about couples who were being separated when wives were put aboard lifeboats. She also mentions Mr. and Mrs. Straus, owners of a store called Macy's, in New York, who helped their maid to get on a lifeboat, but the wife refused to leave her husband alone on the liner.
“She put her arms around the neck of her husband, telling him: ‘We have been married 50 years, we have never left each other, I want to die with you.’”
The note, written more than 43 years after the vessel had sunk and brought to light over one century later, was not verified yet, but if it is genuine, it could be considered the real story of the Titanic, the most tragic maritime disaster in history.
Rose Amelie was one of just 745 survivors out of 2,229 passengers and crew who were on board the massive vessel on its maiden journey from Southampton to New York. She died in 1964 and was the longest-living French person to have survived the tragic collision.