I read a fragment of story, by a Titanic survivor. It (in essence) goes like this:
-after the captain announced the order to abandon ship. gangs of men were seen breaking into 1st Class staterooms and suites, stealing money and jewelry. These men also were able to stash the loot in lifeboats. After the survivors reached New York, the thieves took off and were never seen again. However, several pieces of expensive jewelry turned up years later, in pawn shops.
Is the story true? I thought that wealthy passengers wold put their jewelry/cash in the purser’s safe, to be retrieved when the ship made port.
Passeneger ships like the Titanic commonly had card sharps and cheats on board, who would rob wealthy passengers at card games. Is there any eveidence of looting, in the hours before the ship sank?
Here’s a brief news story from 1994 about the discovery of a briefcase that appears to hold evidence of looting on the Titanic.
I don’t know about cash, but I presume that women kept at least some of their jewelry in their cabins to wear for dinner.
No cite, but I remember reading from more than one source when the location of the wreckage was first publicized that if any safes were recovered they were expected to be empty due to looting by the crew.
During Bob Ballard’s second expedition to the wreck, while they were exploring the interior of the wreck with the remote submersible they found a safe and on a lark tried to open it. IIRC, the door came right off the hinges, but the back was also rusted out and whatever was in it was long since reduced to goo. The big steel safes apparently haven’t fared much better than the big steel ship they sunk in. Ballard sort of tells the story as being a moment of weakness, since he opposes removing anything from the wreck.
As I have mentioned here before, the grandparents of a high school friend were on the Titanic, first class. They got in a half-full life boat, assured that there were plenty of lifeboats for everyone, and pretty much leisurely left the sinking ship. I would imagine the the people in that area of the ship had time to take personal belongings, so who knows if crew took other belongings at the same time?
Her grandparents rarely spoke of it to her, but at the time they did have to go to Washington DC to testify to events. I think they even had to go there a couple of times.
Well, the Andre Doria’s safe was recovered, and opened (on TV). It containes a few thousand dollars, and little else. I assume this was because the ship was due to dock the next day, and most of the stuff had been taken back.
I wonder if there is any info on the web, relating to insurance claims against the White Star Line-a lot of expensive stuff musthave been lost in the sinking.
Moved to General Questions from Cafe Society.
Good points. Nitpick: The Italian admiral and the ship named for him were called (the) Andrea Doria.
On ships like the Titanic, it was common for the purser’s office to be kept open quite late, so that women passengers could stop by in the late afternoon, pick out the jewelery they wanted to wear that evening, and then return it to the safe after dinner & dancing. The shipping lines encouraged passengers to do it this way – keep jewels in the pursers safe, secure & out of temptation. Upper class hotels do the same today.
By coincidence, I was just reading an article about the last Titanic passenger to die. Milvena Dean died in 2009, at the age of 97.
Sadly, she was only half a mile from shore.
I read rather the other way - that many passengers from the 2nd and 3rd class died because they couldn’t even leave below-decks, since in the evening many of the gangways from 3rd and 2nd class to the deck were locked since the passed through 1st class and that was considered unacceptable for first class passengers to encounter 2nd or 3rd class people, and even in an emergency, nobody remembered or cared about unlocking those passageways, instead evacuating 1st class first and then letting the lower classes take their turn - only by then it was too late.
Wouldn’t the crew be rather busy overseeing the evacuation to think much about stealing valuables?