A Concealed Truth

Everyone called it " The Ship of Dreams". The Titanic was the cynosure to everyone's eyes since the day it was completed, and it was deemed to be unsinkable because of its foundations and the way it was constructed. As you may well know, that turned out to be the biggest irony and mystery of the year. Even after a century and a decade, people still seem to believe that the Titanic went down because it hit an iceberg. As the only living survivor left to tell the tale, it is my duty after a long one hundred and twenty nine years alive to expose the truth before my time comes.

On April 10th, 1912, almost two thousand and five hundred souls boarded the Titanic, but certainly not everyone was lucky enough to experience the luxuries this ship had to offer. Personally, I was merely a coal trimmer getting paid under the minimum wage to keep this ship floating. I never got to see the light of day nor the scintillating stars at night, I only stayed where I was told at the lowest deck with the other workers.

Inarguably, at the first glance, this ship was the most glorious, eyes-catching piece of machinery ever built by mankind. The moment I laid eyes on that beast, I froze and stood right in the middle of the port in Southampton, and I stared at it for a good ten minutes until my coworker and friend nudged me a few times on my shoulder. I snapped back to reality and we continued to head to the back of the ship where the crew was meant to board.

One of the officer escorted us from the entrance to our bunk rooms, and every room had fifteen beds. Needless to say, they should have added a couple of extra miniature beds for the rats that kept us company during the stay. To be honest, the positive outcome that came out of that tragedy was that we had to endure the smells and rodents in the lower deck for only two days. However, those two days did feel like two weeks down there. We spent 19 hours of the day standing and shoving coals, and the rest of the hours were spent sleeping.

The next day, one of the officers requested the presence of some of the trimmers back in the storage deck to assist in a clean-up. As we arrived, there were many officers, reporters, and passengers gathered around some parked vehicle that probably belonged to one of the passengers. Little did we know that right there in front of us lied a body of a young passenger from first-class, and we had to help with the clean-up after the investigation was complete.

I was in utter shock, there she was as pale as a lily-white corpse, and as cold as the waters below our feet. I turned back to my friends and exclaimed, "Is this for real or am I just hallucinating from the odors in the bunk?"

My friend lets out a little sigh and says, " This is as real as those rats sleeping under our beds."

I watched as four officers carried the body of the young woman away, then we gabbed our mops and cleaning tools and started making the place sparkle again. When we finished the job, we were escorted directly back to our bunk rooms for a good 5-hour sleep.

On April 12th, I woke up per usual and heading back to work. After a few hours of tossing coal around, I reached out to my pocket of my uniform and noticed that my most valuable possession was missing. The pocket watch my father left me after he died was not there. I panicked and turned to my closest friend to ask him if he can cover for me while I sneak away and look for the watch. My friend gladly agrees, and I headed back to the bunk first which turned out to be a total waste of my time. The watch was nowhere to be found in that room. After a while, it occurred to me that I might have dropped it while cleaning the crime scene the day before.

Access to that storage deck was forbidden for us trimmers and we did not have clearance. I made sure no one was around me and I hustled down the passages to the deck. Thankfully I got there without a scratch or anyone noticing, so I began my search.

After a few minutes, I sighed in relief as I found my watch behind some boxes, so I turned away and headed for the exit. All of a sudden before I could reach the exit door, I see a stranger darting towards me. A typical flight response would be to leave immediately before he could get to me, but of course not, I had to freeze in place again. He manages to get right in my face, grabs both of the arms and starts shouting, " WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HEAR? DID YOU HEAR ME TALKING TO MYSELF? OH WHAT HAVE I DONE! NO ONE CAN EVER KNOW WHAT I DID TO HER YESTERDAY, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT !!"

I could feel my eyeballs almost pop out of their sockets. I was paralyzed and the fear took over my body. Did someone just confess a murder to me? Clearly the guy was startled and shaken to see me, but weirdly enough I did not any talking or mumbling as he claimed, he thought I did and that is why he confessed to me.

Once I got a grip of myself, I tried talking some sense into him to try and calm him down. I asked him what happened, and all he could say was, " No one can ever find out, no one can ever find out."

He grabs an axe and starts banging on the ship walls as he mumbled to himself, " This ship must go down and take everyone with it, no one can ever know." I yelled and yelled for him to stop, but I could get close or else he could hurt me with the axe. Before I knew it, water started flowing in as he managed to crack the ship's side. The crack was the size of a basketball at first, but as more water streamed through, the pressure caused the crack to widen and widen, until the entire side of the deck was gone. The stranger stood right in front of the crack with open arms, as he waited for water to take him away. I, on the other hand, bolted through the door into the crew passage and ran as fast as I could. I just kept running and moving to the upper decks, until I found myself on the first class deck.

Just as saw someone and wanted to call for help, I felt a huge thud behind me, only to see that a huge chunk of ice fell to the stern of the ship. There was panic and a lot of shouting from the the captain's quarters. Two minutes later, the ship came to a complete stop. I walked to the rails and looked over the edge to try and figure out what happened, but there was a significant distance between the iceberg and the ship from the bottom. The thud was simply the tip of the iceberg falling on the deck, nothing hit the ship from the bottom, except a disturbed man with an axe.

I eventually went to get help and to explain the situation, but the officers I tried talking to called me crazy. They said that I was wasting their time, and that the iceberg had scraped the bottom of ship. They instructed me to go warn my friends before it was too late, but they were unaware of the water that had already flooded the bottom deck. I knew I could not go back, so I had to come up with a plan. I had to survive. Luckily, a young man by the name of Jack Dawson saw me trembling in place, so he approached me and offered me a good meal and some change of clothes. I could easily pass as a first-class passenger after that.

Things started to escalate when the water rose to the fourth deck. That is when the chaos started. The officers had just announced that everyone should get to a lifeboat immediately, and there was just madness on the upper decks after that. Jack insisted that he was going to help me get to a boat, and he did. He made sure I got on a boat and watched me as a faded into the Atlantic. All I could think about at that moment was the man with the axe and what happened to him.

I guess the only thing that they still truthfully tell about the titanic was that they did actually board woman and children first on the life boats. Yes, I was indeed the first and only female coal trimmer on that ship, and my name is Rose.

While I sailed on those small boats in the ocean, I observed the last bits of the Titanic sink into the darkness. It took a few hours before the rescue ship got here and everyone boarded it. I tried to look for some of my friends amongst all the survivors, but I ended up bumping into Jack again. We stayed seated together in a corner and shared a warm blanket. We had a few conversations and we got along quite nicely. At some point, he noticed some bruising on my arm and asked what happened. I told him the truth about it all, the watch, the murder, and the man with the axe. He was the only one who believed my version of the events.

Jack and I did not lose touch, even after the rescue ship docked in New York City. After a couple of years, I became Mrs. Dawson and I had two beautiful girls and a boy. Sadly, Jack passed away ten years ago, but he left me with more than a century of precious memories and gifts. He also left me with nine amazing grandchildren, and eighteen great-grandchildren who will now know the truth about the Titanic and live longer than me to tell the tale.