A survivor’s account of the sinking of the Titanic has been rediscovered after having been lost for decades and will be published next month ahead of the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
John B. “Jack” Thayer, who boarded the ship at age 17 with his parents, printed his recollections of the catastrophe as a family record in 1940 and made just 500 copies.
The tome was recently unearthed by Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, who recalled a family tie he had to the Titanic after Luke Pontifell, who runs handmade-book publisher Thornwillow Press, said he wished he could track down documents from the ship.
“Suddenly, I half-remembered that a distant cousin of mine had written an eyewitness account and had given my great-grandfather a copy,” Stein said. “My mother found the book in my grandfather’s library when he died.”
In the pages, Thayer recalls boarding in Southampton as a first-class passenger. As the ship sank 800 miles off New York on April 14, 1912, he was separated from his parents but assumed they had made it into a lifeboat. He describes how he jumped: “The shock of the water took the breath out of my lungs. Down and down I went, spinning in all directions.”
Thayer clung to an overturned lifeboat as he watched the Titanic go down. “Suddenly the whole superstructure . . . appeared to split . . . and blow and buckle upwards,” he wrote.
“We could see groups of the almost 1,500 people still aboard, clinging in clusters of bunches like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after-part of the ship, 250 feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a 65- or 70-degree angle.”
Thayer was rescued by a lifeboat. His mother survived, but his father perished.
Thornwillow is hosting a dinner April 4 at the St. Regis Hotel, where it has a library. The hotel was built by John Jacob Astor, who died on the Titanic. The imprint is making 5,000 copies of the book with a foreword by Stein.