The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria by Greg King

Author:Greg King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter Thirteen

As the long, uncertain night edged toward dawn, lifeboats continued racing from the injured Doria to the flotilla of rescue ships that lay silently in the gray light. On Stockholm, two doctors and five nurses who had been traveling on the Swedish liner volunteered their services to the ship’s own small medical crew, and officers cleared out of seven cabins near the infirmary so that the injured could be treated and rest in private.1

Many of the rescued passengers were horrified to see their lifeboats approach the damaged Stockholm. The ship loomed white against the waning night: the only sound, as Klaus Dorneich recalls, was steel in her ruined bow, “pounding rhythmically against an iron plate as though it were beating the time to this symphony of horror.”2

Without shoes, and wearing only a light summer dress of cotton, Cecilia Pick shivered in her lifeboat. “It was cold and horrid,” she wrote. “Once in the lifeboats we bumped and bounced on the Atlantic for about one-and-a-half hours, as we had to look for another lifeboat that had gone astray.… I only had a light summer sleeveless dress on.” When they finally arrived at Stockholm, the Picks found three other lifeboats waiting at the ladder; Cecilia and John had to step across them to reach the side of the liner.3 “As my wife was being helped aboard the Stockholm,” Pick said, “she fainted.”4 Crew members carried her to the infirmary, but she had temporarily succumbed to nothing more serious than exhaustion.

Once aboard Stockholm, rescued passengers drifted in shocked silence through the corridors, the injured to the infirmary or to the Tourist Class Dining Room, where tables covered with blankets served as temporary beds, and the rest to the Tourist Class Lounge, where they were offered sandwiches, coffee, water, and tea.5 Stewards on the Swedish liner had rounded up what they deemed necessities—blankets, extra clothing, and cigarettes—and handed them out as passengers filtered through the lounge.6 “The staff crew of the Stockholm did their best,” recalls Klaus Dorneich. “Everybody was intensely concerned with the shipwrecked.” He thought the lounge “resembled a camp. Stunned and crowded, the passengers of the Andrea Doria sat there—the shock of the past experience plainly inscribed on their faces.”7

It did not take long for the issue of the behavior of some of the Doria’s crew to again become a point of contention. “The Swedish crew members,” said Cecilia Pick, “told us that the first lifeboat to arrive was filled with nothing but Doria crew members.”8 The atmosphere was embittered. Members of Stockholm’s crew manning the buffet tables found themselves handing over sandwiches and drinks to several hundred men wearing the white stewards’ jackets of the Italian Line or carrying the gray life jackets issued to the Doria’s crew.9 Apparently the Swedish crew expected their rescued Italian counterparts to help serve the Doria’s passengers; they were surprised when some refused, saying that they, too, should be treated as survivors.10 It was clearly too much for some of the passengers: waiting

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