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Journalism of Courage
More than a hundred years after the Titanic disaster, the voices of those who lived through it still resonate. One of the survivors, Eva Hart, was only seven years old when she boarded the ship with her parents, expecting to start a new life in Canada. Instead, she found herself caught in one of history’s most infamous tragedies—a night of chaos, terror, and loss that would stay with her forever.
Eva’s mother had an unsettling feeling about the voyage from the very beginning. Unlike most passengers who embraced the Titanic as an “unsinkable” marvel, she remained deeply uneasy. “She said that calling the ship ‘unsinkable,’ as the whole world was saying, was flying in the face of God. She begged my father not to go,” Eva later recalled in an interview with CBC’s The Journal when the wreck was discovered in September of 1985. Her mother even refused to sleep at night, she’d said, staying awake in case something happened. And when disaster struck, that instinct saved them.
Late on April 14, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg, and as panic spread, Eva’s father acted quickly. He placed Eva and her mother into a lifeboat, staying behind as the ship continued to sink.
“Tears are over the sea, don’t you see? No man was going to take the place of a woman or child. By the time the women and children were in that lifeboat, it was full. Absolutely,” she recalled.
From her seat in the lifeboat, Eva watched the Titanic slowly disappear beneath the waves. The night was clear and full of stars, but the sight of the sinking ship haunted her for the rest of her life.
“It was a horribly dark night—starlit, but no moonlight. The tremendous ship didn’t sink for over two hours. It was a horrible sight, just a horrible sight,” she said.
In the confusion, Eva was separated from her mother as lifeboat passengers were shuffled around to balance the weight. For hours, she believed she was alone in the world.
“She thought I had been dropped in the sea. I was too terrified to understand what had happened—all I knew was that she wasn’t there, and that was terrifying,” Eva said in the interview. Fortunately, the two were reunited the next day aboard the rescue ship, Carpathia.
Looking back on the tragedy, Eva believed the loss of life was preventable. The ship simply did not have enough lifeboats for everyone on board.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. I know what the fault was. The fault was that the ship was allowed to go to sea with too few lifeboats. The 1,513 people who died that night need not have died. It took a disaster like that to force regulations to change, ensuring that ships must have enough lifeboats for everyone. Because nothing is unsinkable. Absolutely nothing.”
Her words serve as a reminder of the human cost of arrogance and oversight. The Titanic may rest at the bottom of the ocean, but the lessons it taught the world continue to shape maritime safety to this day.
