City Clerk Donnelly’s Cousin Sends Sympathetic Note to Official
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NOT A COWARD, BUT BRAVE AND GALLANT
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“Ismay was unjustly critcised and abused for his actions regarding the Titanic
wreck,” stated E. C. [sic] Taylor, one of the survivors of the steamship,
yesterday, and who is spending a few days at the residence of his cousin, City
Clerk E. R. Donnelly. Mr. Taylor, who with his wife, were [sic] saved in one
of the small boats, is a big stockholder in a paper cup concern. He and his
wife were on the deck of the Titanic a few moments after she struck the iceberg.

“We saw Mr. Ismay on the deck when he first came up. He looked as if he had
just tumbled out of bed, but he was as careful and energetic on getting the
people quietly into the boats as any of the ship officers.

Mr. Ismay did not leave the ship until the last of the collapsible boats was
launched and then he got in because there were no other people there to go. He
got in with a whole lot of women from the steerage, for their boat did not have
enough men in it. I was surprised, after I saw his work on the night of the
wreck, to see the way he was abused and criticized and I believed it was so
unjust that I wrote Mr. Ismay a personal letter, telling him I thought it was
entirely undeserved.

“I had known Mr. Ismay personally for some time and am confident he does not
deserve the censure generally given him.” Mr. Taylor described some of the
incidents of the wreck in a graphic manner.

“I have made eighteen trips across the ocean, but I never saw an iceberg until
this trip,” said Mr. Taylor. “Even then I did not see the iceberg which the
ship struck. It had floated by before I got on deck, but others, a few of the
crew who were on deck, said it was fifty feet high and floated away in the
darkness.

“When the sun arose the next morning I saw my first icebergs. It was the most
beautiful sight I ever saw,” he said. “As far as the eye could reach it was
one big white field, not glittering like ice, but soft and white as if it had
been snowing the night before. In a radius of ten miles or so there were maybe
a dozen icebergs, forty or fifty feet high and around the outer edge of the ice
field were other bergs, but no one seemed to distinguish the one which hit the
ship.

“There were thirty-six people in our boat and there was room for about ten
more. We were ordered into it and set afloat. We put three of our passengers
in one of the other boats, which had only about thirty people in it, later on
when our boats were tied together. The sea was as smooth as glass and the sky
was light and I never saw a more beautiful night in all of my trips.

“I saw one of the boats picked up by the Carpathia with only twelve people in
it.

“We steamed around on the Carpathia in the icefield for several hours looking
for survivors. The small boats and the ship picked up a few survivors, who had
been floating in the water until daylight, but we did not see any people
floating on the ice.

“While we were on the Carpathia we passed through a school of about a dozen
whales and later on we passed a seal that was floating on a cake of ice. A
little farther on we passed a big floe of ice on which there was a big white
polar bear prowling around.

“We never expected any such demonstration when we got back to the pier,” said
Mr. Taylor. “I never saw so much printed about any affair. A good many of the
survivors were half-sick or dopey when we landed and hardly could talk about
what they had been through.

“We were rushing along at a high rate of speed when the ship struck,” said Mr.
Taylor, “but I don’t know just how fast. I do not believe there was any dinner
party on the ship such as has been reported. I saw no indication of it on the
part of the ship’s officers nor aything [sic] like it at any time during the
trip.”