Hileni Jabbur was a passenger on the Titanic.
Background[]
Hileni Jabbur was a native of Sar’al in what is now Lebanon but was located in Syria back then, as the Turks, who ruled a large empire containing large parts of the Middle East, had decided. She must have been born there close to or in the year 1896.
Titanic[]
She appeared on Titanic in Cherbourg on the 10th of April, in the evening. Hileni was among the Third Class passengers with her namesake Thamine Jabbur, possibly a relative. Her profession was marked as a housekeeper of young age, 15 to 17 years.
On the night of 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic had a sticky situation. For a long time, she was in an icefield and nothing happened until an iceberg, largely invisible to the naked eye till she was too close, got in her way. The lookouts rang a bell and phoned the bridge to tell them what they saw. The First Officer turned to port and reversed the engines but it was too late. Titanic struck the iceberg on starboard side, so she didn’t come off unscatched. Rather, the damage was worse than it would’ve been with a frontal collison, as a larger part of her hull had gotten small cracks from the grazing motion. Those parts were under the water line so this meant trouble. Seawater flowed in at a steady pace.
On April 15, just after midnight, the ship’s master had investigated most of the damage. Titanic’s designer Thomas Andrews estimated that this would ultimately lead to her sinking in just 2 hours. Upon those haunting words, the Captain put his men to work on the lifeboats at 12:05 A.M.
At a 2.20 A.M, RMS Titanic disappeared beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, a disaster that resulted in the loss of more than 1500 lives, almost two-thirds of the people on board. Hileni’s actions during the night remain unknown but she likely didn’t find a lifeboat to get off the ship and perished. Thamine Jabbur shared the same fate.
When the White Star Line’s CS Montmagny had sailed out to the wrecksite and had picked up the 328th body, it turned out to be Hileni’s later, as it had taken months to establish her identity. She was given a burial at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Halifax, Canada. Here, lots of deceased and recovered Titanic victims were laid to rest.