HALIFAX – As a 20-year-old electrician aboard the cable ship Minia, Francis Rickards Dyke wrote a letter to his mother as the vessel’s crew worked to recover bodies from where the Titanic sank April 15, 1912.
The Minia was sent to take over the task from the C.S. Mackay-Bennett, which recovered 306 bodies – 190 brought back to Halifax, 116 buried at sea.
Dyke was tasked with keeping the lines of communications open as the Minia’s crew searched for more victims. But between April 22, when it left Halifax, until it returned May 6 the Minia only retrieved 17 of the Titanic’s lost souls. They brought 15 back to Halifax and laid two to rest at sea.
The young Englishman began chronicling the tragic task his comrades had to take on in a letter dated April 27, 1912 at 2:20 a.m. – the same time the Titanic broke apart and sank 12 days earlier.
His letter, submitted to Global News by his granddaughter Patricia Teasdale, explains how the crew of the Minia picked up bodies and debris much farther afield, some as far as 209 kilometres (130 miles) from where the wreck lay at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Dyke continued to work aboard the Minia in the years following the disaster, becoming chief electrician three years later.
That’s about the same time he married a Dartmouth, N.S., woman named Jessie Higgins Austen. They had three daughters and seven grandchildren, including Teasdale.
Teasdale says her grandfather’s letter was not known about until after his death in 1972, at the age of 80.
The family submitted it to the Dartmouth Heritage Museum to be preserved.
- What is a halal mortgage? How interest-free home financing works in Canada
- Ontario doctors offer solutions to help address shortage of family physicians
- Capital gains changes are ‘really fair,’ Freeland says, as doctors cry foul
- LGBTQ2 rallies will be held across Canada next month. Here’s what to know
Comments