Eino Lindqvist
Eino William Lindqvist was born on Saturday 13 February 1892, in the town of Dalsbruk, Dragsfjörd, Finland, which was a Swedish-speaking town, hence the name. Its Finnish name was Taalintehdas. Eino Lindqvist was the son of Karl August Lindqvist and Liisa Mikontytär Wiik. The married couple were both native Fins, and had lived in Salo, an autonomous Finnish part of Russia, where they gave birth to Eino’s older sister, Helga Elisabeth. They had moved to Dalsbruk where his father had a job at a factory.
On April 3, 1912, Eino boarded the ship SS Polaris in Hang harbor and began his journey via Copenhagen to Hull in England, together with his sister Helga Hirvonen, who was now married, his niece Hildur, who was Helga's child, and a friend named August Abrahamsson, he was also from Dalsbruk. Eino was aiming to travel via Hoboken, New Jersey, to Monessen, Pennsylvania. It was Eino's first trip to America and he was a well-trained man who had spent a lot of time at the gym back home in Finland.
Titanic[]
The party boarded the brand new ship from the White Star Line, RMS Titanic on 10 April in Southampton. On board the Titanic, Eino and August were given cabin seats in the bow part of the ship, just like other single men in steerage. He was 20 years old at the time.
On the evening of April 14, after several calm days , he was amused by the merriment in the Third Class public places where people danced and made cheerful music with a few beers. His sister and niece had gone to bed early, but Eino stayed up until just before midnight and hadn't been in his bunk long before he felt what he described as a strong vibration. However, he didn’t feel it was something to worry about and dozed off again.
Moments later, August Abrahamsson, who suspected that something was seriously wrong, came and woke him up by shouting in his ear. He himself was reluctant to get up, he didn't think there was any danger. But August forced him up and they went up to the deck together, where they saw the ice that had been scraped off the iceberg. One of the crew took the lifebelt he had put on and said it would be alarming for other passengers to see him wearing it. They went back down to their cabins and found that the water had begun to rise there. Since Helga and Hildur had their berths in the stern, they headed aft to warn them.
Eino didn't find his sister in the cabin but, after looking around, he noticed her alone in a corridor, in a bit of a panic. She had left Hildur sleeping in the bunk, as she didn't know what to do. Eino went back to the cabin and wrapped Hildur in a blanket. Then he climbed with the girl in one arm and Helga convulsively clinging to his coat up two iron ladders. On the way they saw a mother trying to get life belts on all her children, which Eino estimated at seven, and he asked if they had any extra lifevest for them, but the woman couldn't miss any.
Eino helped Helga and Hildur get into lifeboat 15 and also gave a hand to a very old, Finnish woman named Hedvig Turkula to get onboard. When the boat was launched, he stepped back.
He remained on the Titanic until it was clear that the ship wouldn’t last longer and the Boat Deck was awash and flooding rapidly. He felt how the stern began to rise. Realising the liner was doomed, he jumped into the water and managed to survive thanks to his strong physique. He remembered thinking that the cold water was no worse than swimming in icy Finnish ponds, which he had done when he was a boy.
While struggling for his life, he witnessed the ship breaking apart and was lucky enough to find the overturned Collapsible B. He remembered that there was a fight over the places on the boat. According to Eino, the men jabbed, kicked and were even biting to even get on the boat or fend a newcomer off from also climbing on.
As the hours passed, Eino watched some men die slowly and slip away.
But some sources say all of this is his own fiction and he actually was saved by lifeboat 15 as he easily could have, since men were allowed to board lifeboats on starboard side, which was under supervision of First Officer Murdoch, who didn’t obey the ‘Women and children first’ order.
After the disaster[]
After Carpathia had rescued the survivors, he looked for Helga, Hildur and August Abrahamsson and was given one of the Firemen's overalls to wear. In New York, Eino, Helga and Hildur were taken to a hospital. After staying there for three days, they were taken to a large warehouse where they were given clothes, Eino's overalls being much too big for him. Then they received $50. During the hospital stay, they are said to have been reunited with Helga's husband Erik Aleksanteri Hirvonen and Eino who accompanied them to Monessen, but according to Phillip Gowan "they continued on to Pennsylvania where Eric Hirvonen was waiting".
Later life[]
In May 1912 he was involved in a fight. There had apparently been some misunderstanding with another man and Eino continued to argue with him. Friends of both sides tried to intervene but to no avail, the fight couldn’t be prevented. Eino gave the man a good hit before he disappeared from the scene.
In 1915 Eino, who was now called Ed, moved to Syracuse, New York. He worked as a ‘hammer man’ or ‘clubman’ at the Burke Steel Company.
In the 1920s he became an American citizen and possibly worked at the Halcomb steelworks in Syracuse, he was actually a colleague of his sister’s husband Erik Aleksanteri Hirvonen..He remained in the area until the early 30s.
He often traveled on long trips home to Finland and there became the father of his only child, a son out of wedlock. After the Second World War, he seems to have given up on his former partner and son completely. None of the family members ever heard from him again. He lived a vagabond life, never staying at the same place for a long time and never responding to any of the advertisements that his son Eino and brother Martin placed in various newspapers of the places where Eino had lived after they found some traces of him.
Brother Martin continued for a long time with this search up untill late 1940s, by advertising, writing letters, looking up old friends with whom he had lost contact with in the past. The son Eino Lindquist, who lived in Dalsbruk, was worried that he would never hear from his father again, which unfortunately is how it turned out.
The frantic search for Eino yielded no results and they resignedly accepted that they would probably never know what had happened. Martin died in 1966 without having received any answer. The son Eino died quietly in 1998.
But early in 2000, the mystery could be solved, thanks to clues given by Eino's brother Martin's only child, and Eino's grandson got the answer their father started the search for.
Eino had returned to the United States, after a visit to Finland, and traveled from place to place in the country. In the end, he rented a small, dirty apartment where he could store his few belongings while he unsuccessfully tried to find work. He also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia (which is listed on the death certificate as a contributing cause of death) and was committed to a state mental hospital. There he lived in exile while his family searched in vain for him.
He died on Friday 31st October 1958 of a stroke, aged 66. He was in Napa, California, where he was buried in an unmarked grave. His estate yielded $68.74 and was applied to the $2,665.48 claim made by the Department of Mental Hygiene.