Incredible photos of Titanic’s last lifeboat show rotting bodies one month after the disaster and 200 miles away

WITH a groan of tortured metal and the screams of the remaining passengers still clinging to her hull, Titanic sank beneath the waves and the last unlaunched canvas lifeboat was washed from her deck into the foaming, whirlpool of freezing water.

Third class passenger Edvard Lindell, floundering in the maelstrom, struck out desperately in the direction of the half-submerged craft and managed to drag himself aboard but wife Gerda, already exhausted by the numbingly-cold water, did not have the strength to clamber into the swamped Collapsible Lifeboat A.

Like a scene from James Cameron’s Titanic movie, she held on for as long as she could but, as she finally lost her grip and sunk beneath the waves, all husband Edvard had left grasped in his hand was the wedding ring that had slipped from her finger.

Edvard did not last much longer himself and, having succumbed to the cold, his fellow survivors pushed his body overboard to lighten the load in the stricken vessel until the few that were still alive hours later were rescued and Collapsible Lifeboat A was abandoned to drift off into the Atlantic.

Now, 104 years later, photos and eye-witness testimony have emerged of the dramatic moment, a month later, when the ghost lifeboat was spotted by another White Star Line ship, RMS Oceanic, floating 200 miles away, still with three bodies in it.

Whitened by the chill wind and salt spray, two dead Titanic firemen lay prone in the water-logged wreck.

Beside them was the corpse of first class passenger Thomson Beattie, 37, still in his dinner suit and, in the bottom of the boat, a gold wedding ring inscribed ‘Edvard to Gerda’.

The long-hidden account of the recovery has come to light because the photos and gruesome testimony of the discovery, and of the reburial at sea of the decomposed bodies, are being put up for sale on Saturday, St George’s Day, by auctioneers Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, Wiltshire.

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Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said: “These are three first generation photographs of the recovery of Titanic’s last lifeboat.

“Accompanying them is a very graphic handwritten description by a passenger of the condition of those on board and the recovery operation.