The forgotten Titanic story of Ottawa’s Syrians

When she stepped from the Grand Trunk Railway train at Ottawa’s brand new central station on April 23, 1912, Mariana Assaf cried out, then promptly fainted into the arms of her nephew’s wife.

Small wonder. Eight days earlier, the 45-year-old Ottawa woman had been rescued from a lifeboat she’d been shoved into barely an hour before the world’s largest and most famous passenger ship, the Titanic, disappeared into the depths of the North Atlantic.

Assaf had first come to the city in 1907 or 1908 from present-day Lebanon, then part of Syria. She was a greengrocer who’d made a good living selling produce to Ottawa’s wealthy. By 1912, she’d earned enough to return to Kafr Mishki, a small Roman Orthodox village in the lower Bekaa Valley, to visit her husband and two sons.

When the Titanic went down, Assaf was on her way back to Ottawa, accompanied by more than a dozen others — mostly cousins — from the tiny, impoverished village. They’d boarded the ship in Cherbourg, France, and all were bound for the far-off Canadian capital. She alone survived.

The Kafr Mishki villagers were part of a contingent of 125 Syrians who’d booked passage on the Titanic hoping for a better life in North America. Of those, an astonishing 102 died in the disaster.

The tale of the Ottawa-bound Syrians is one of the Titanic’s forgotten stories. Among them were a newlywed couple, the son of an Ottawa merchant, a father and his two teenage sons and at least two journalists.

Speaking through an interpreter, voice hoarse with sobs, Assaf told her harrowing story to a reporter from the Ottawa Evening Citizen.

She and her relatives, all travelling in steerage, were mostly in bed when the ship struck the iceberg.

“Although it did not seem to be much at first and we did not feel much except a jar, some of us wanted to go up on deck and see what had happened,” she told the newspaper.

They were told that all was well, but began to have doubts when the ship remained dead in the water.

“I think somebody must have said that the boat was going down,” she continued, “for suddenly there was a great confusion and everybody tried to rush on deck.”

They were driven back by Titanic Capt. Edward Smith and his officers, who fired their revolvers at the steerage passengers, killing several.

“They were not given a chance to escape,” Assaf said.

When she realized the ship was sinking, “I forgot everything and I rushed away from the steerage and up to the deck where the first-class passengers are.”

A sailor spotted her and pushed her into a lifeboat nearly full of women and a few men. The crew lowered the boat and the men rowed it away from the sinking ship.

Some passengers said they heard the band playing “but I could not hear it myself, I was so out of my mind,” Assaf said.

Within an hour, the giant ship went down. Assaf’s lifeboat drifted all night. There was so much ice that some of the lifeboat passengers mistook it for land.

“It was terribly cold and I could not forget all my relations and my friends whom I would never see again,” she said. “When I thought of them, I felt that I was going to go crazy.”

After about six hours, the RMS Carpathia appeared and collected Assaf and the other survivors. She was treated in a hospital in New York, then put on a train for Ottawa.

According to the 1912 Evening Citizen story, Caram, 28, had returned to Kafr Mishki, his birthplace, to marry Maria, an 18-yearold who’d caught his eye before he emigrated to Canada. The trip on the Titanic was effectively their honeymoon.

It appears the couple planned to settle in Ottawa. When his body was found, Caram was carrying the name and address of a wholesaler in the garment trade, Shahin Bros. One of the owners, David Shahin, was Mariana Assaf’s nephew.

Maria Elias Caram’s father, Joseph Elias, was travelling with the newly married couple along with his teenage sons, Tannous and Joseph Jr.

He was coming to Ottawa to join his wife, who’d moved there eight years earlier and worked as a pedlar. Elias had sold his farm in Kafr Mishki for $1,500 and was carrying the cash with him when the ship went down.

He’d also left three other children, ages eight, 12 and 21, who were ill, with their grandmother.

Two other casualties were 27-year-old Solomon Khalil and Gerios Assaf, 21, both relatives of Mariana Assaf.

The Evening Citizen story said Solomon Khalil was returning to Ottawa after an absence of three years. Like Caram, he’d gone back to Kafr Mishki to marry. He’d left his new and pregnant wife in the village with the idea of bringing her to Ottawa at a later time.

The elder Khalil had been “in a state of pitiful anxiety” awaiting word of his son’s fate, the Evening Citizen reported. Mariana Assaf confirmed his worst fears.

According to Titanic author Alan Hustak, the Ottawa-bound party also included two naturalized Canadian journalists from Kafr Mishki: Mansour Hanna and Mansour Novel. The website Encyclopedia Titanica lists a third journalist from Syria, Sleiman Attala, whose last residence, it says, was Ottawa.

The remaining Ottawabound victims from the village were Catherine David Barbara, 45, and her daughter Saiide, 18, both housekeepers, and 18-yearold Boulos Hanna, a general labourer.

As for Mariana Assaf, she reportedly made a small fortune in Ottawa and eventually returned to Kafr Mishki.