*Please note that this dispatch appears as it did during the 1998 Expedition. Information appearing in this report pertaining to the location of The Big Piece was later found to be incorrect.  See Daily Report 17 for more details and the correct cabin assignments.

---

Wednesday, August 12, 1998

"Every year when the date of the Titanic came he used to pop off on his bike and my mother used to say to me, ‘You know where he’s gone don’t you?’. He never said anything, just used to go to the Titanic memorial and I suppose to pay his respects and remember."

—Joan Symons Masee
City Heritage Oral History
Southampton, England

On Monday, as the Titanic’s portholes slowly rose out of the water, we could gaze through them for a moment, as though we were looking through the liner’s windows. We saw splashing waves where passenger rooms should be. That is what survivors, too, saw from their lifeboats on the morning of April 15, 1912.

Those portholes looked out, in the early hours of that day, from five first-class staterooms on C-Deck—C-82, C-84, C-86, C-88, and part of C-90. (*See note above)

C-82 belonged to Mr. and Mrs. George Dunton Widener and their son Harry, from Philadelphia. George and Harry Widener perished near this spot on the Atlantic Ocean on the morning of April 15, 1912.

C-90 was the cabin of a woman traveling under the name of Madame Berthe de Villiers. She escaped from the sinking liner aboard lifeboat number 6.

In stateroom C-86 were Mr. and Mrs. Walter Douglas from Minneapolis. Walter Douglas did not survive the Titanic’s sinking.

Less than a month later, his wife, Mahala, testified to what she had seen and heard that night behind these same C-Deck portholes:

"We dined in the restaurant, going in about 8 o’clock....As we went to our stateroom...we both remarked that the boat was going faster than she ever had. The vibration...was very noticeable.

"The shock of the collision was not great to us; the engines stopped, then went on for a few moments, then stopped again. We waited some little time, Mr. Douglas reassuring me that there was no danger before going out of the cabin. But later Mr. Douglas went out to see what had happened, and I put on my heavy boots and fur coat to go up on deck later. I waited in the corridor to see and hear what I could. We received no orders; no one knocked at our door; we saw no officers nor stewards—no one to give an order or answer our questions....

"Now people commenced to appear with life preservers, and I heard from some one that the order had been given to put them on. I took three from our cabin, gave one to the maid, telling her to get off in the small boat when her turn came.

"Mr. Douglas [and I]...went up on the boat deck. Mr. Douglas told me if I waited we might both go together, and we stood there waiting. We heard that the boat was in communication with three other boats by wireless: we watched the distress rockets sent off—they rose high in the air and burst.

"No one seemed excited. Finally, as we stood by a collapsible boat lying on the deck and an emergency boat swinging from the davits was being filled, it was decided I should go....I asked Mr. Douglas to come with me, but he replied, ‘No, I must be a gentleman," turning away....

"The rowing was very difficult, for no one knew how....Several times we stopped rowing to listen for the lapping of the water against the icebergs.

"In an incredibly short space of time, it seemed to me, the boat sank. I heard no explosion. I watched the boat go down, and the last picture to my mind is the immense mass of black against the starlit sky, and then—nothingness."