Because so few photographs existed of the Carpathia, this postcard depicts an altered image of the RMS Mauretania. Three of Mauretania’s four funnels have been removed and the name Carpathia written on the bow. (Piazza)
This is a very early post-sinking postcard of the Carpathia, probably no more than a few days after the accident. Taken from a drawing that already existed, lifeboats, rope lines and even a person in the water was added. In the haste several errors were printed, such as Capt. Rostron's name is spelled with an "M", the death toll is listed as 1,600 and it states the Carpathia had 200 passengers (there were about 750). ("Postcards")
A rare postcard featuring the Cunard Liner RMS Carpathia. The Carpathia was under the command of Captain Arthur Rostron. (Online Titanic Museum)
Because so few photographs existed of the Carpathia, this postcard depicts an altered image of the RMS Mauretania. Three of Mauretania’s four funnels have been removed and the name Carpathia written on the bow. (Piazza)
The Carpathia
When news broke out that the Cunard Line’s RMS Carpathia had rescued Titanic’s survivors, postcard publishers started to panic. The Carpathia was a “pokey little vessel” that had “plied Atlantic waters for nearly ten years in relative obscurity” (Piazza). The ship was neither large, nor fast, nor elegant, and therefore, few photographers had tried to capture her image (Piazza). Yet, now that the Carpathia had become newsworthy, postcard publishers wanted to capitalize on the market for Titanic disaster postcards (Piazza). Some publishers employed hasty strategies in order to produce Carpathia postcards including altering photographs of other ships, using drawings of the Carpathia, and even using an image from the top of the Carpathia’s dinner menu (“Postcards”).
The creation of these Carpathia postcards indicates both the ways in which visual “images as history as well as images in history” (Finnegan 199). Finnegan explains that in the former, discourse is studied “as a force in history,” that is, as a part of the history of a culture (200). In the latter, one applies rhetorical concepts to history itself, “conceiving of people, events, and situations, as rhetorical problems for which responses must continually be formulated, reformulated, and negotiated” (200). The production of postcards depicting the Carpathia, in a sense, act as a force in history that makes the event—the Carpathia rescuing Titanic survivors—real. Sontag claims that a photograph works as a kind of proof that a given thing happened (5), and moreover, “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” (3). Images of the Carpathia on these postcards and otherwise, then, solidify the Carpathia as a newsworthy, important ship. Additionally, the hasty production of the Carpathia postcards suggests that production companies were attempting to respond to a particular rhetorical problem: how do you make an obscure, inelegant ship appear memorable and heroic? These postcards offer some formulated responses to this problem.