Tannous Nasrallah Elias was a passenger on the Titanic.
Background[]
Tannous Elias was the son of Joseph Elias. He came into this world in 1885 in the village Kafr Mishkī, Béqaa Valley, Syria. This part of Syria now belongs to the Lebanon.
Tannous was the elder brother of Joseph Elias junior, who was born in 1887. Tannous’ mother became an emigrant and left for Ottawa, Canada at some time. Her name is not known and she had three more children of unknown identity. All of these other children were reportedly ill on the day that it was time for Joseph, Joseph Junior and Tannous to follow the steps of the wife and mother, 7 years after she left. She had built up a small business in Canada and now the father had sold the farm to accost the journey they undertook in 1912. Due to the illness, those other children stayed behind with Joseph senior’s mother. Tannous was a married man at the time. His wife would stay in Kafr Mishkī for now.
Titanic[]
As Third Class passengers, they boarded in Cherbourg on the 10th of April in the evening.
On the late night of April 14, an emergancy happened. Titanic was now in an icefield and soon enough, she encountered an immovable object. It was an iceberg but it somehow couldn’t be seen on Titanic until it was right in front of them. Quickly, the First Officer turned her to port to try and keep her starboard side away but it was already too late. Titanic’s bow went past the iceberg for the most part, but underneath the water line, she hit it. This caused a breach of the hull and an inflow of sea water. It was over a great length that the Titanic had sustained this damage, which looked small, but had large consequences. Within minutes, tons of water had found their way into the Titanic.
It was April 15, twenty minutes after the incident that the Captain had learned enough about the state his ship was in. It was a grave situation. She was going to founder according to her designer’s calculations. Upon this, Captain Smith readied the lifeboats.
Although lifeboats were launched throughout the night, Joseph, his father and brother couldn’t get off the ship in one. Many passengers ended up in the water when Titanic sank entirely at 2:20 A.M. The freezing cold proved too much for many of her occupants and they succumbed one by one. This could probably have been the fate of the Elias family too. None of their bodies were ever found.
Mariyam Assāf Khalīl, another steerage passenger from Khafr Mishkī, survivor of the Titanic disaster and related to the Elias men, told the press of an other way that Tannous lost his life. She said it must have been an Officer shooting him through the chest in cold blood after Tannous only tried to reason his way into a lifeboat.
Tannous' widow soon found another man to marry following the news of his demise in that fateful night.