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White Stars, Black Sea, Wilton, NH (2026)

07/28/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 28th, 2026 - As this seventieth anniversary season comes to a close, so too does our daily “live” timeline in commemoration of the tragedy. Through the last days of normality aboard one of the world’s most beloved liners to the terrible ordeals faced by her passengers and crew in her final hours, it has been an immense pleasure sharing this time with all who have joined us in this inaugural year. Many have been very kind to share their personal connections to this story - a number of them quite profound. In a world that seems ever faster and increasingly disconnected from the lessons of the past, it has been a humbling reminder that this history lives on amongst all of us to this day, and is still remembered firsthand by those who experienced it.

Seventy years on, the loss of the Andrea Doria and the miraculous rescue of 1,660 of those aboard her remains one of the most immediate and yet still poorly understood maritime events of the twentieth century. In the weeks after the disaster, hearings held in New York City beginning on September 19th at the behest of both the Italian Line and the Swedish American Line gained initial momentum and were covered widely by the press to inform a public ravenous for answers as to who was to blame for the tragedy. Officers of both vessels and representatives of each shipping line testified, with further testimony scheduled to stretch into the early months of the following year. Then, on January 25th, 1957, exactly six months after the collision had occurred, Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman announced that a settlement had been reached between the two lines, and the inquiries abruptly ceased. With both vessels insured by Lloyd’s of London, it seems likely that the decision to settle was at least partly influenced by a desire to keep costs from mounting for the companies, each of which looked to the other for compensation - $30 million by the Italian Line for the loss of Andrea Doria, and $2 million by the Swedish for Stockholm’s damaged bow as well as the revenue lost while repairs were underway. In the end, the Italian Line would provide $4 million, while the Swedish American Line contributed $1.8 million toward the $116 million sought overall by the victims of the disaster. Most ultimately received less than five percent of the compensation they had sought.

In the absence of any formal ruling, rumors and poorly understood information circulated widely, fueled in no small measure in the United States by a lingering prejudice toward the Italian people themselves in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Swedish American Line handled the barrage of press coverage deftly, allowing access almost immediately to Stockholm’s officers and crew. Within a year, Captain Gunnar Nordenson and Third Officer Johan-Ernst Carstens-Johannsen had both been promoted, serving together once again aboard the line’s new 23,150-ton liner Gripsholm on her maiden voyage in May 1957. Built by the same shipyard at Ansaldo that had constructed Andrea Doria six years before, the new liner became the center of a minor mutiny among the yard men when they learned who would be responsible for her first sailing. With the workers refusing to hand Gripsholm over to the men who had been in command of Stockholm that terrible night, the Swedish American Line was ultimately forced to appoint temporary replacements for both captain and third officer for the vessel’s inaugural departure from the yard.

By contrast, the Italian Line sought to protect itself through silence - a tactic that largely backfired. For weeks, photographs of Andrea Doria’s tired and shell-shocked officers, taken in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, circulated widely in newspapers, their weary expressions often deliberately presented by the press as evidence of guilt. For Captain Piero Calamai at least, the feelings of responsibility were genuine, and he never again went to sea. In 1971, American chief naval engineer John C. Carrothers completed an extensive forensic study of the disaster for publication by the US Naval Institute. On March 10, 1972, he wrote to the then seventy-four-year-old Calamai, expressing his conviction that the captain should be absolved of responsibility for the collision, concluding his letter with the line: “Rest assured, Captain Calamai, there are many of us who would be more than willing to serve under your command at any time.” Just under a month later, on April 9, 1972, Piero Calamai died, after which the still unopened letter from Carrothers was found among his possessions by the Calamai family. His daughter Silvia would later recall his final words: “Is it all right? Are the passengers saved?”

I extend my many thanks to all who have so kindly supported this first effort to present Andrea Doria Live in an annual format. This is an incredibly complex story to tell properly, and I anticipate growing this series in future years to include more information on the many subjects of which we have only been able to scratch the surface this time around - as we have been able to do for years now with our Titanic Live series. As always, the sharing of personal connections and anecdotal information by members here has been exceptional, and I am truly moved to have been able to discuss this subject with so many who remember the story well. In a world where the internet is so often used for fleeting vapidity, it has been a remarkable experience to connect with those so intimately connected to this tragedy, and I thank all contributors profusely for their very kind support.

As we move away from this direct timeline, there will be more Andrea Doria-related postings as they unfold over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I hope readers will continue to enjoy these stories, which will remain available in chronological order until our next running for the 71st anniversary in 2027. As usual, our upcoming Titanic Live series (the eighth edition!) is already in the midst of being overhauled nearly completely for release next April. And inevitably, as this format has proven itself to be fairly adaptable to subjects beyond Titanic, the question must be asked: which shipwreck will we be covering for the next Live series?

Grazie mille,
White Stars, Black Sea
July 28th, 2026

Andrea Doria enters New York at the conclusion of her maiden voyage
Photograph via L’Ovetto di Colombo - January 23rd, 1953

07/28/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 2026 - In memory of the fifty-one killed as a result of the collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm and its terrible aftermath, July 25th-26th, 1956 - and to the survivors of both vessels, their rescuers, and their families. Theirs is a living memory, and one which will remain vibrant and alive as long as there are those who remember their story well.

In special memory this 70th anniversary of Pat Mastrincola
January 26th, 1947 - February 21st, 2026

Names and ages of Andrea Doria passengers lost:

Agnese Baratta - 43
Margherita Pontecorvi Baratta - 76
Laura Bremmerman - 31
Jeanette Carlin - 65
Margaret Carola - 39
Camille Cianfarra - 49
Joan Cianfarra - 8
Giuseppe Cirincione - 75
Rosalia Cirincione - 51
Christina Covina - 67
Giuseppe DiGrandi Jr. - infant
Lucia DiGrandi - 23
Theresa Del Gaudio - 31
Angelina Diana - 49
Biaggio Diana - 9
Victoria Diana - 6
Maria di Luzio - 44
Concetta di Miche - 42
Norma di Sandro - 3
Josephine Ferraro - 59
Angelina Gonzales - 51
Marie Grechi - 29
Angeline Greco - 48
Antionette Guzzi - 55
Giuseppe Guzzi - 66
Amelia Iazzetta - 72
Marie Imbelloni - 50
Anita Leone - 54
Domenico Palmeri - 29
Francesca Palmeri - 3
Martha Peterson - 54
Giovanna Russo - 14
Maria Russo - 37
Michael Russo - 44
Vincenza Russo - 10
Anna Maria Sergio - 10
Domenica Sergio - 7
Giuseppe Sergio - 13
Maria Sergio - 43
Rocco Sergio - 4
Michelina Suozzi - 49
Ferdinand Thieriot - 35
Frances Thieriot - 35
Carl Watres - 55
Rose Zumbo - 26
Vincenzo Zumbo - 30

Names and ages of Stockholm crew lost:

Alf Johansson - 30
Carl Jonasson - 17
Karl Osterberg - 55
Sune Steen - 18
Evert Svensson - 19

Photograph via the archives of the United States Coast Guard

07/28/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 1956, 9:15 PM – After waiting nearly eighteen hours by their three-year-old daughter’s bedside at Brighton Marine Hospital, Tullio and Filomena di Sandro are informed by an Italian priest that the long struggle to save her is over. The child had stopped breathing around twenty minutes earlier, and the di Sandros had been hurried from the room while Dr. David Hurlbut and Dr. Paul Becker attempted to revive her using artificial respiration. Every effort has failed, and at 9:15 PM, Norma dies. Inconsolable, her parents spend several minutes alone with their daughter before being led away to Tullio’s brother Nicando’s home in Providence, Rhode Island.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, July 31st, 1956, Norma will be buried in a public ceremony at Pawtucket’s Saint Francis Cemetery, attended by hundreds of mourners unknown to the family along with her parents, her two uncles and their wives and children - and seventeen of the classmates she would have attended school with at St. Ann’s Church, all of them dressed in pure white. She will remain there for eleven years before the di Sandros, along with the three children born to them after the disaster, return home to Italy, where Norma will be reburied at Marzano Appio outside of Naples in 1967.

Her resting place there - as well as those of passengers Carl Watres, Angeline Greco, and Swedish crewman Alf Johansson - today mark the only occupied graves of those who died as a result of the collision between Andrea Doria and Stockholm.

All forty-seven others have been lost forever to the sea.

Norma di Sandro via Life Magazine - July 27th, 1956

07/28/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 8:00 PM – Edward Morgan had awakened to the ringing of his telephone on the morning of July 27th after an awful night spent mourning the death of his daughter Linda aboard Andrea Doria. Fearing another request for information on her, he answered to find instead that it was his editor in chief at ABC News Radio, Francis Littlejohn, with a shocking bit of news. “The Times just phoned. They have a list of survivors coming in on the Stockholm and the name Linda Morgan is on it. Probably a mistake, but the ship is docking now and you’d better go down and find out.”

After rushing down to Pier 97 in disbelief, Morgan is informed by Stockholm‘s Chief Purser Curt Dawe that Linda is indeed alive, and that she has already been taken to Roosevelt Hospital on West 59th Street. A second, and then a third taxi ride after Morgan is informed that she is instead at St. Vincent’s Hospital on West 11th Street finally brings him to his daughter’s bedside, just as she is about to be x-rayed for her injuries. Linda had been told by hospital staff that her father was on his way to see her, and has to hide her disappointment when she sees that it is her birth father rather than her beloved stepfather, Camille Cianfarra, whose body went down with the ship. “I wanted to see the family who had tucked me into bed a few days earlier,” she will later say.

Nonetheless, the reunion is joyful for Edward Morgan, who speaks privately with his daughter for a short time before she is taken away again by nurses for her x-rays. After leaving the hospital, Morgan returns to his studio at ABC in a state of elation and relief. Gone are the measured words of the previous night’s broadcast, and for the first time the reporter reveals to his listeners his direct connection to the “Miracle Girl” of the Andrea Doria:

“How does a reporter cover a story in which he himself is partly involved? Especially a story that touches emotions springing from the very roots of being, the emotions that are now the lovely flower of life, now the hard, piercing cactus of death. Within the space of twenty-four hours, this reporter has been pushed down the elevator shaft of the sub-basement of despair and raised again to the heights of incredible joy, washed, one suspects, with a slightly extravagant rivulet of some heavenly champagne. Last night, as far as the world at large was concerned, a girl, age fourteen, nationality American, was dead. She happens to be this reporter’s daughter. She had been killed, according to the incontrovertible evidence of an eyewitness, by the crash of the liner Stockholm into the very stateroom on the Andrea Doria which her stepfather, New York Times correspondent Camille Cianfarra, and her mother, Jane Cianfarra, occupied. Linda and her half sister, Joan, were sleeping in their cabin just forward of the Cianfarras. But Linda is not dead. One can only deduce that the impact hurled her from her bunk into the wreckage of the bow of the Stockholm, where she was found, alive, painfully, but not critically hurt. There is something sacred I feel about the mystery of life which, in the alchemy of the unknown, enables people, as they face the supposed tragedy of death, their own or that of another. It makes other things seem so petty and unimportant. Through all this incredible blackness and sunshine I kept remembering what a wonderful human being from Philadelphia named C. Jared Ingersoll once told me in recounting how he kept right on going after the death of his wife and then his son. ‘I try to live fully,’ he said, ‘so that when my luck changes there will be little room for regret or recrimination over time lost or misspent.’ This reporter hopes tonight he has learned that lesson well enough to teach it with tenderness to a girl young enough to grow with it into a full blossom that will give joy to others for her very living. Perhaps, perhaps, she has learned it already herself. This is Edward P. Morgan, saying goodnight from New York.”

A few days later, Bernabé Polanco García, who had saved Linda Morgan from the wreckage of Stockholm‘s bow, also comes to visit her at her bedside in St. Vincent’s Hospital. Bringing the girl three red carnations, he offers a few words to Linda, which Edward Morgan later translated from the original Spanish for the New York Times:

“I now know that you have both a father and a mother here, which I had gravely doubted at the time I found you in the improbable cushion of steel. But if for any reason you ever needed a father, or a friend, my home is yours.”

Edward Morgan and Bernabé Polanco García via The New York Times

07/27/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 1956, late afternoon – With the survivors safely ashore along with Stockholm’s passengers, as well as a number of her crew for whom there will be no work while the liner remains out of service for repairs, Captain Gunnar Nordenson holds a press conference in the ship’s First Class Lounge. Around thirty members of the press follow the captain and Swedish American Line attorney Charles S. Haight up to the spacious room on the Verandah Deck, where reporters and photographers crowd in as Nordenson speaks in an even but quiet tone, choosing his words carefully as he recounts the events of the previous two days. The captain is already aware of an offer by the Italian Line to settle out of court for half the value of the lost Andrea Doria (roughly $15 million, or about $185 million today), an offer that has been immediately rejected by the Swedish American Line. With the case now apparently headed for a public trial, the crews of both ships are under strict orders from their respective companies to remain silent on all matters pertaining to the cause of the collision and questions of fault.

Nordenson describes the circumstances of the rescue and the efforts to save his own vessel after the collision, praising his crew for their conduct throughout the ordeal. Asked about Stockholm’s radar, he replies that it was “in tip-top condition and scanning the horizon,” adding that “it is normal for ships to maintain high speeds in any weather if they are equipped with modern devices.” When questioned about the collision itself, or the claims that the first survivors brought aboard Stockholm had all been members of Andrea Doria’s crew, Nordenson declines to comment. “I don’t want to boast and I don’t want to blame anybody. I don’t know anything about that. We took off survivors. We couldn’t tell what kind of people came off.”

A short time later, after the last of the assembled reporters has been es**rted down the gangways and ashore, a small derrick barge is brought alongside Pier 97 by tugboat and secured just forward of Stockholm’s mangled bow. There, workmen from Bethlehem Steel Company in Brooklyn begin an overnight operation to cut away twisted ribbons of steel from the shattered liner with acetylene torches while heavy chains pull the wreckage clear. Tomorrow, Stockholm will be backed away from her berth and towed the nine miles (14.5 km) to Bethlehem Steel’s Brooklyn yard, where she will spend the next three months receiving her replacement bow.

Photograph of Nordenson’s press conference via Bettmann/AP

07/27/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 1956, afternoon – The frantic search for their three-year-old daughter Norma had begun in earnest for Tullio and Filomena di Sandro as soon as they had stepped aboard Île de France, where the couple had wandered the decks for hours looking for any sign of their lost child. Having no idea where she had been taken or which vessel she might be on, the desperate parents had waited behind after all of the other survivors had disembarked from the French liner, searching the crowds of faces and asking anyone they recognized whether they had heard any news of the girl. None had. Upon being told by a police officer that another ship was due to arrive at Pier 84, the di Sandros had rushed the four blocks south to meet the freighter Cape Ann, where they repeated their sad vigil, but again learned nothing more about their missing daughter.

Shortly before 10:00 PM, while awaiting word on the arrival of the USS Edward H. Allen, the couple had been approached by Friedl Orlando, a forty-one-year-old journalist and Holocaust survivor from Frankfurt, Germany, now working for the Italian-language weekly newspaper Espresso. Orlando had interviewed the di Sandros as they disembarked from Île de France, and Tullio had told her about Norma’s ram’s horn bracelet, as well as a prominent scar on her knee. After returning to her office, Orlando had received a bulletin describing a child wearing such a piece of jewelry, and after telephoning Brighton Marine Hospital in Boston, the reporter had all but confirmed the girl’s identity with the hospital’s superintendent, Dr. Nicholas Retovskie. Rushing back to the pier, she found the two parents still waiting with Filomena’s brother, Alfred de Matteo, who had joined the couple from his home in the Bronx to help search for his young niece. After informing the family of her discovery, Orlando had offered to es**rt the di Sandros by car to Boston herself.

Now, after a frantic drive from New York City to Boston through Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, and aided by two separate state police es**rts, the di Sandros have remained at Norma’s bedside since 3:30 this morning at Brighton Marine, where hospital’s doctors have already performed emergency cranial surgery to relieve the growing pressure on the injured child’s brain. She is still considered critically injured and remains unconscious, however, and all that can be done now is to wait.

Filomena and Tullio di Sandro via Life Magazine - July 27th, 1956

07/27/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 1956, 2:00 PM - Twenty-eight hours after Andrea Doria had come to rest on the bottom of the Atlantic, the liner is visited for the first time in her grave. Divers Peter Gimbel and Joseph Fox had located the site easily, following a long trail of broken debris and oil out to the area above the sunken liner, where they found the yellow drum left by USCGC Evergreen yesterday afternoon surrounded by a frothing sea of escaping bubbles. Nearby, blue sharks circle among scattered pillows and splintered wood, and the occasional breach of a whale is seen as the men suit up and prepare for the 140’ (42.6m) descent to the exposed port side of the hull.

Following a drop along the guide line placed from their boat, the divers crawl along the side of the liner, which has come to rest with her starboard side lying flat on the sandy ocean bottom. Though some blown-out portholes and other damage are visible, the ship appears remarkably intact, gleaming even in the dark gloom near the sea floor. All around her and throughout her interior, the delicate everyday items of life aboard Andrea Doria now drift aimlessly in the current, where “drowned curtains and mattresses and elegant furniture float in strange suspension.” Shoes lie scattered throughout the wreck, while luggage stacked upon the liner’s Promenade Deck on Wednesday afternoon now floats against the ceilings of the enclosed space, some of the suitcases hanging open and spilling their contents into the swift currents. Clothing, blankets, sheets, and still-legible scraps of paper drift through the darkness, creating ghostly shadows in the narrow beams of the divers’ flashlights. As the men search, continuous crashing sounds echo throughout the vessel as yet another china cabinet, piece of furniture, or trapped pocket of air violently gives way somewhere in the darkness beyond the reach of their beams.

Their time on the bottom during this first-ever dive to the wreck site is short. Breathing compressed air, the nitrogen in their air supply can create an intoxicating effect under the immense pressure experienced at such depths, a phenomenon known as nitrogen narcosis - or the “Rapture of the Depths.” Fellow diver Bob Dill, who will make another early descent to the wreck only days later, vividly described the disturbing effects experienced by those exploring Andrea Doria in the confusing darkness of the deep: “You get to thinking about things that could happen. Practical things, such as a door closing or an air hose ripping - or fantastic things, like white hands reaching out through a porthole to grab you.”

Before returning to the surface, Gimbel points his camera at Fox just as he swims alongside the upright Lifeboat No. 2, its home port still clearly designated as “GENOVA” in the dim light. Suspended in this position by its buoyancy tanks, the boat seen here will remain beside the wreck for nearly twenty-five years, until its rotting lashings finally break free and allow it to rise to the surface in early 1981. Later that year, it will be discovered washed ashore on Staten Island.

Photograph by Peter Gimbel/Life Magazine - July 27th, 1956

07/27/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 1956, noon - Amidst a crowd of press photographers, Ruth Roman has at last been reunited with her son Richard at the Swedish American Line pier, nearly thirty-six hours after the pair had been separated during the evacuation of Andrea Doria. The following quotation, describing the events of that morning, is an excerpt from a story written by Ruth Roman for Modern Screen Magazine in November of 1956:

“On July 27th, one day after the Île brought me back, the Stockholm was due in at Pier 97 on the Hudson River. There was a crowd of people waiting, as I was waiting. I stood at the far end of the dock. The Stockholm pulled into sight; her bow was completely destroyed by the collision. It was a fearful sight. All night I had known that the danger wasn’t over yet, listening to the radio. The Stockholm was on shaky legs. We had heard it was possible that she might also sink. She came into view and all of us on the dock gasped, watching. Surely she couldn’t make it another mile, surely she would go down and it would all begin again.

“But she made it into port. I didn’t know, but I guess I had been crying. I looked and looked but I couldn’t see Dickie. Then on the lower deck at the rails, I saw people I knew from the Doria - Italian people, but not Mrs. Fantana. I shouted to them and they saw me. I called ‘Mia bambino - ‘ They pointed up. ‘Supra!’ they shouted.

“I looked up, up, to the top deck. I saw Dickie.

“Mrs. Fantana was holding him. I jumped up and down and waved. There were tears pouring down my face. ‘Dickie, Dickie, Dickie,’ I called.

“He saw me. He hollered ‘Mommy!’ Then he called ‘How is Elsie?’

“I was having a conversation with my son. ‘She’s fine,’ I shouted. Then I called out, ‘Dickie, where’s your red balloon?’

“‘It popped!’ he shrieked. I began to laugh. My son was coming home to me. We had been shipwrecked at sea, separated - and I was asking him about balloons. I went on laughing and I went on crying.

“Mrs. Fantana carried him off the ship, leading her little girl by the hand. She came down the gangplank and we couldn’t get to each other. There were crowds and there was a long wooden barrier. On one side of the barrier, she walked towards the opening. On the other side I ran. I waited for them with my arms stretched out. And then I held Dickie again.

“I tried to thank Mrs. Fantana. She wouldn’t let me. ‘He was fine,’ she told me. ‘He kept asking for you, but I said we would see you in a little while, and he was good.’

“I looked at my baby. He had on a pair of blue shorts I had never seen before. He was wearing somebody’s little white shirt, with lace on it. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

“‘How are you?’ I kept asking him.

“‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I had a wonderful trip.’ He looked at me gravely. ‘Mommy,’ he said. ‘Do you know the Andrea Doria went down with all my cars on it?’

“‘I know, Mouse,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you some more.’ And my baby and I set off for home.”

Photograph from the archives of The New York Times/CNEMM

07/27/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27, 1956, 11:00 AM - After being gently eased into her berth at Pier 97 by four harbor tugs, Stockholm returns to the same dock from which she departed exactly forty-eight hours earlier. This time, however, the usual lively shouts of well-wishers waiting along the waterfront are replaced by an uneasy silence of anticipation. An audible gasp rises from the crowd as the battered liner slowly comes into view from around the corner of neighboring Pier 96. Nearly 80’ (24 m) of her forward section has been torn away, reduced to a twisted mass of hanging steel ribbons, splintered woodwork, and tufts of insulation ripped from the exposed bulkheads. Along her port side, the first three letters of the ship’s name have been crushed into the remaining hull plating, leaving only the ominous remains: “CKHOLM.”

After docking, the 545 survivors of the Andrea Doria carried back to New York aboard the Stockholm begin streaming down the gangways toward the waiting family members and friends who have been anxiously crowding the pier now for hours. Outside, a line of ambulances stands ready to receive those passengers and crew who remain badly injured, while a second line of buses hired by the Italian Line idles near the pier gates. These vehicles will transport survivors the short distance of thirteen blocks south to Pier 84, where the line has prepared piles of clothing, shoes, and other necessities, along with small amounts of cash for those who have lost everything. The American Red Cross is also present, helping oversee the distribution of supplies and emergency funds while providing additional assistance to immigrants who have arrived with little more than the clothes they are wearing - their savings and personal documents having disappeared with the ship. For a number of these survivors, the relief effort will continue for weeks, extending as needed in many cases well into the early months of 1957.

Still in considerable pain and in a state of confusion worsened by the effects of sedatives, Linda Morgan is carried by stretcher down to the pier, where a crowd of reporters and photographers presses forward for a glimpse of the young survivor. She speaks quietly to a few of them as she is carried past, explaining that she still does not know what has happened to the rest of her family and that the events of the night remain a confused blur - she can only recall that she was pulled from the crushed bow of Stockholm by “a Spanish man.” Shortly afterward, she is carried through the entryway and placed into an ambulance to be taken toward Roosevelt Hospital before eventually being transferred for treatment at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village.

Photograph via the Museum of the City of New York - July 27th, 1956

07/27/2026

Andrea Doria Live: July 27th, 1956, 10:00 AM - At mid-morning, the familiar white silhouette of MS Stockholm enters New York Harbor, steaming slowly at around four knots as she crosses Upper Bay and by the Statue of Liberty, her bow now an unrecognizable mass of twisted wreckage which continues at times to break away and fall into the harbor in small pieces as she moves ahead. Onlookers by the thousands have flocked to see the vessel arrive in the city, lining the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan and the shorelines of Brooklyn and New Jersey, while the liner is flanked by dozens of smaller boats and a group of three helicopters. Gone are the rapturous cries and celebratory whistle blasts that accompanied Île de France into harbor the previous evening, replaced instead by stunned silence and the mournful sound of her fog horn as the evidence of the awful collision is presented firsthand to the public for the very first time. Among those watching are a small group of officials from both the Swedish American Line and the Italian Line, the latter observing the incoming Stockholm from their offices adjacent to the Battery at 24 State Street with “daggers in their eyes.”

As the liner makes for her berth at Pier 97, she carries with her a number of injured passengers among the 545 survivors onboard, along with the body of a forty-ninth victim of the disaster (though two more would die later, bringing the total to fifty-one). Carl Watres, a fifty-five-year-old Andrea Doria passenger from Manasquan, New Jersey, had been overcome by waves of nausea after arriving safely aboard the Stockholm. A popular man already among those aboard the Doria, who remembered him for his singing and piano playing during the course of the voyage, Watres had spent the evening exerting himself greatly helping others descend rope ladders and make their way across the tilting decks. Collapsing into a deck chair, he had been lying with his eyes closed when he suddenly toppled to one side. Nearby passengers had quickly summoned one of the doctors making rounds of the injured, but nothing more could be done. Upon docking this afternoon, his wife Lillian Watres will have some bitter words for the press as she disembarks with her husband’s body:

“He never had heart trouble in his life. But he wore himself out trying to get other passengers off the ship. There were old women, large women, who simply couldn’t climb up over the rail to go down the ropes to the lifeboats. One old man sat there helping others along that slippery deck. He said ‘On this ship, it’s every man for himself, but I’m old and it doesn’t matter.’ I don’t know his name. We made so many fast and loving friends that night whose names we don’t know, helping each other. But no one told us what to do. The only instructions over the loudspeaker were in Italian, and the Italian-speaking passengers said they were just instructions to the crew.”

Photo of MS Stockholm via the archives of The New York Times

White Stars, Black Sea

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