Sinking of the Titanic
Titanic at Southampton docks, prior to
departure
Titanic in Cork harbour, 11 April 1912
Source: From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikiwand
f 15
April 1912 in the North Atlantic Ocean, four days into her maiden voyage
from Southampton to New York City. The largest ocean liner in service at the time, Titanic
had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg at around 23:40 (ship's time)[a] on Sunday, 14 April 1912. Her
sinking two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 (ship's time; 05:18 GMT) on Monday, 15 April, resulted in the deaths
of more than 1,500 people, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime
disasters in
history.
Titanic received six warnings of sea ice on
14 April but was travelling about 22 knots when her lookouts sighted the
iceberg. Unable to turn quickly enough, the ship suffered a glancing blow that
buckled her starboard side and opened six of her sixteen compartments to the sea. Titanic had been
designed to stay afloat with four of her forward compartments flooded but no
more, and the crew soon realised that the ship would sink. They used distress flares and radio (wireless) messages to attract help as the passengers were put into lifeboats.
In accordance with existing
practice, Titanic's lifeboat system was
designed to ferry passengers to nearby rescue vessels, not to hold everyone on
board simultaneously; therefore, with the ship sinking rapidly and help still
hours away, there was no safe refuge for many of the passengers and crew with
only 20 lifeboats, including 4 collapsible lifeboats. Poor management of the
evacuation meant many boats were launched before they were completely full.
Titanic sank with over a thousand
passengers and crew still on board. Almost all of those who jumped or fell into
the water drowned or died within minutes due to the effects of cold shock and incapacitation. RMS Carpathia arrived about an hour and a half
after the sinking and rescued all of the 710 survivors by 09:15 on 15 April,
some nine and a half hours after the collision. The disaster shocked the world
and caused widespread outrage over the lack of lifeboats, lax regulations, and
the unequal treatment of the third class passengers during the evacuation.
Subsequent inquiries recommended sweeping changes to maritime regulations,
leading to the establishment in 1914 of the International Convention for the
Safety of Life at Sea
(SOLAS).
Background
At the time of her entry
into service on 2 April 1912, Royal Mail Steamer (RMS) Titanic was the second
of three[b] Olympic-class ocean liners, and was the largest ship in the world. She and
the earlier RMS Olympic were almost one and a half times
the gross register tonnage of Cunard's RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania, the previous record holders, and were nearly
100 feet (30 m) longer.[2] Titanic could carry 3,547 people in speed and comfort,[3] and was built on an unprecedented
scale. Her reciprocating engines were the largest that had ever been built,
standing 40 feet (12 m) high and with cylinders 9 feet (2.7 m) in
diameter requiring the burning of 600 long tons (610 t) of coal per day.[3]
Titanic at Southampton docks, prior to
departure
Titanic in Cork harbour, 11 April 1912
The passenger
accommodation, especially the First Class section, was said to be "of
unrivalled extent and magnificence",[4] indicated by the fares that First Class accommodation commanded. The Parlour Suites (the
most expensive and most luxurious suites on the ship) with private promenade cost over $4,350 (equivalent to
$122,000 today)[5] for a one-way transatlantic
passage. Even Third Class, though considerably less luxurious than Second and
First Classes, was unusually comfortable by contemporary standards and was
supplied with plentiful quantities of good food, providing her passengers with
better conditions than many of them had experienced at home.[4]
SS New
York in her near collision with Titanic
Titanic's maiden voyage began shortly after
noon on 10 April 1912 when she left Southampton on the first leg of her journey
to New York.[6] An accident was narrowly averted
only a few minutes later, as Titanic passed the moored liners SS City of New York of the American Line and Oceanic of the White
Star Line, the latter of which would have been her running mate on the service
from Southampton. Her huge displacement caused both of the smaller ships to be lifted
by a bulge of water and then dropped into a trough. New York's mooring
cables could not take the sudden strain and snapped, swinging her around
stern-first towards Titanic. A nearby tugboat, Vulcan, came to
the rescue by taking New York under tow, and Titanic's captain
ordered her engines to be put "full astern".[7] The two ships avoided a collision
by a distance of about 4 feet (1.2 m). The incident delayed Titanic's
departure for about an hour, while the drifting New York was brought
under control.
A few hours later Titanic
called at Cherbourg
Harbour in
north-western France, a journey of 80 nautical miles (148 km; 92 mi),
where she took on passengers.[8] Her next port of call was
Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, which she reached
around midday on 11 April.[9] She left in the afternoon after
taking on more passengers and stores.[10]
By the time Titanic
departed westwards across the Atlantic she was carrying 892 crew members
and 1,320 passengers. This was only about half of her full passenger
capacity of 2,435,[11] as it was the low season and
shipping from the UK had been disrupted by a coal miners' strike.[12] Her passengers were a cross-section
of Edwardian society, from millionaires such as John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim,[13] to poor emigrants from countries as
disparate as Armenia, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Syria and Russia seeking a new
life in the United States.[14]
The ship was commanded by
62-year-old Captain Edward Smith, the most senior of the White Star Line's captains. He had four decades of
seafaring experience and had served as captain of RMS Olympic, from which he was transferred to
command Titanic.[15] The vast majority of the crew who
served under him were not trained sailors, but were either engineers, firemen,
or stokers, responsible for looking after the engines; or stewards and galley
staff, responsible for the passengers. The six watch officers and 39 able
seamen constituted only around five percent of the crew,[11] and most of these had been taken on
at Southampton so had not had time to familiarise themselves with the ship.[16]
The ice conditions were
attributed to a mild winter that caused large numbers of icebergs to shift off
the west coast of Greenland.[17]
A fire had begun in one of Titanic's coal
bins approximately
10 days prior to the ship's departure, and continued to burn for several days
into the voyage, but it was over on 14 April.[18][19] The weather improved significantly
during the course of the day, from brisk winds and moderate seas in the morning
to a crystal-clear calm by evening, as the ship's path took her beneath an
arctic high-pressure system.[20]
14 April 1912
Iceberg warnings
The iceberg
thought to have been hit by Titanic, photographed the morning of 15
April 1912 by SS Prinz Adalbert's chief steward. The iceberg was reported to have a
streak of red paint from a ship's hull along its waterline on one side.
On 14 April 1912, Titanic's radio
operators[c] received six messages from other
ships warning of drifting ice, which passengers on Titanic had begun to
notice during the afternoon. The ice conditions in the North Atlantic were the
worst for any April in the previous 50 years (which was the reason why the
lookouts were unaware that they were about to steam into a line of drifting ice
several miles wide and many miles long).[21] Not all of these messages were
relayed by the radio operators. At the time, all wireless operators on ocean
liners were employees of the Marconi's Wireless
Telegraph Company
and not members of their ship's crew; their primary responsibility was to send
messages for the passengers, with weather reports as a secondary concern.
The first warning came at
09:00 from RMS Caronia reporting "bergs, growlers[d] and field ice".[22] Captain Smith acknowledged receipt
of the message. At 13:42, RMS Baltic relayed a report from the Greek
ship Athenia that she had been "passing icebergs and large
quantities of field ice".[22] This too was acknowledged by Smith,
who showed the report to J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star
Line, aboard Titanic for her maiden voyage.[22] Smith ordered a new course to be
set, to take the ship farther south.[23]
At 13:45, the German ship SS Amerika, which was a short distance to the
south, reported she had "passed two large icebergs".[24] This message never reached Captain
Smith or the other officers on Titanic's bridge. The reason is unclear, but it may
have been forgotten because the radio operators had to fix faulty equipment.[24]
SS Californian reported "three large
bergs" at 19:30, and at 21:40, the steamer Mesaba reported:
"Saw much heavy pack
ice and great
number large icebergs. Also field ice."[25] This message, too, never left the Titanic's radio room. The radio operator, Jack Phillips, may have failed to grasp its significance
because he was preoccupied with transmitting messages for passengers via the
relay station at Cape
Race, Newfoundland;
the radio set had broken down the day before, resulting in a backlog of
messages that the two operators were trying to clear.[24] A final warning was received at
22:30 from operator Cyril Evans of Californian, which had halted for the
night in an ice field some miles away, but Phillips cut it off and signalled
back: "Shut up! Shut up! I'm working Cape Race."[25]
Although the crew was aware
of ice in the vicinity, they did not reduce the ship's speed, and continued to
steam at 22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph), only 2 knots (3.7 km/h;
2.3 mph) short of her maximum speed.[24][e] Titanic's high speed in
waters where ice had been reported was later criticised as reckless, but it
reflected standard maritime practice at the time. According to Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, the custom was "to go ahead
and depend upon the lookouts in the crow's nest and the watch on the bridge to pick
up the ice in time to avoid hitting it".[27]
The North Atlantic liners
prioritised time-keeping above all other considerations, sticking rigidly to a
schedule that would guarantee their arrival at an advertised time. They were
frequently driven at close to their full speed, treating hazard warnings as
advisories rather than calls to action. It was widely believed that ice posed
little risk; close calls were not uncommon, and even head-on collisions had not
been disastrous. In 1907, SS Kronprinz Wilhelm, a German liner, had rammed an
iceberg and suffered a crushed bow, but was still able to complete her voyage.
That same year, Titanic's future captain,
Edward Smith, declared in an interview that he could not "imagine any
condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone
beyond that."[28]
"Iceberg right ahead!"
Titanic enters Iceberg Alley
As Titanic
approached her fatal collision, most passengers had gone to bed, and command of
the bridge had passed from Second Officer Charles Lightoller to First Officer William Murdoch. Lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee were in the crow's nest, 29 metres
(95 ft) above the deck. The air temperature had fallen to near freezing,
and the ocean was completely calm. Colonel Archibald Gracie, one of the survivors of the disaster, later
wrote that "the sea was like glass, so smooth that the stars were clearly
reflected."[29] It is now known that such
exceptionally calm water is a sign of nearby pack ice.[30]
Although the air was clear,
there was no moon, and with the sea so calm, there
was nothing to give away the position of the nearby icebergs; had the sea been
rougher, waves breaking against the icebergs would have made them more visible.[31] Because of a mix-up at Southampton,
the lookouts had no binoculars; however, binoculars reportedly would not have
been effective in the darkness, which was total except for starlight and the
ship's own lights.[32] The lookouts were nonetheless well
aware of the ice hazard, as Lightoller had ordered them and other crew members
to "keep a sharp look-out for ice, particularly small ice and
growlers".[d][33]
At 23:30, Fleet and Lee
noticed a slight haze on the horizon ahead of them, but did not make anything
of it. Some experts now believe that this haze was actually a mirage caused by
cold waters meeting warm air – similar to a water mirage in the
desert – when Titanic entered Iceberg Alley. This would have resulted in a raised horizon,
blinding the lookouts from spotting anything far away.[34][35]
Collision
Drawing of the iceberg collision.
Titanic's course during her attempted
"port around"
Course travelled by the bow
Course travelled by the stern
Drawing of
the iceberg collision.
Nine minutes later, at
23:39, Fleet spotted an iceberg in Titanic's
path. He rang the lookout bell three times and telephoned the bridge to inform
Sixth Officer James
Moody. Fleet asked,
"Is there anyone there?" Moody replied, "Yes, what do you
see?" Fleet replied, "Iceberg, right ahead!"[36] After thanking Fleet, Moody relayed
the message to Murdoch, who ordered Quartermaster Robert Hichens to change the ship's course.[37] Murdoch is generally believed to
have given the order "hard a-starboard", which would result in the
ship's tiller being moved all the way to starboard in an attempt to turn the ship to port.[32] This reversal of directions, when
compared to modern practice, was common in British ships of the era. He also
rang "full astern" on the ship's telegraphs.[23]
According to Fourth Officer
Joseph
Boxhall, Murdoch told
Captain Smith that he was attempting to "hard-a-port around [the
iceberg]", suggesting that he was attempting a "port around"
manoeuvre – to first swing the bow around the obstacle, then swing the
stern so that both ends of the ship would avoid a collision. There was a delay
before either order went into effect; the steam-powered steering mechanism took
up to 30 seconds to turn the ship's tiller,[23] and the complex task of setting the
engines into reverse would also have taken some time to accomplish.[38] Because the centre turbine could
not be reversed, both it and the centre propeller, positioned directly in front
of the ship's rudder, were stopped. This reduced the rudder's effectiveness,
therefore impairing the turning ability of the ship. Had Murdoch turned the
ship while maintaining her forward speed, Titanic might have missed the
iceberg with feet to spare.[39] There is evidence that Murdoch
simply signalled the engine room to stop, not reverse. Lead Fireman Frederick
Barrett testified that the stop light came on, but that even that order was not
executed before the collision.[40]
In the event, Titanic's heading changed just in time to avoid a head-on
collision, but the change in direction caused the ship to strike the iceberg
with a glancing blow. An underwater spur of ice scraped along the starboard
side of the ship for about seven seconds; chunks of ice dislodged from upper
parts of the berg fell onto her forward decks.[41] About five minutes after the
collision, all of Titanic's engines were stopped,
leaving the bow of the ship facing north and slowly drifting south in the Labrador Current.[42]
Effects of the
collision
The iceberg
buckled the plates, popped rivets and damaged a sequence of compartments. (Side
view.)
The impact with the iceberg
was long thought to have produced a huge opening in Titanic's hull, "not less than 300 feet (91 m) in
length, 10 feet (3 m) above the level of the keel", as one writer
later put it.[43] At the British inquiry following
the accident, Edward Wilding (chief naval architect for Harland and Wolff),
calculating on the basis of the observed flooding of forward compartments forty
minutes after the collision, testified that the area of the hull opened to the
sea was "somewhere about 12 square feet (1.1 m2)".[44] He also stated that "I believe
it must have been in places, not a continuous rip", but that the different
openings must have extended along an area of around 300 feet, to account for
the flooding in several compartments.[44] The findings of the inquiry state
that the damage extended over a length of about 300 feet, and hence many
subsequent writers followed this more vague statement. Modern ultrasound surveys of the wreck have found that the actual damage to the hull was very similar to
Wilding's statement, consisting of six narrow openings covering a total area of
only about 12 to 13 square feet (1.1 to 1.2 m2). According to Paul
K. Matthias, who made the measurements, the damage consisted of a "series
of deformations in the starboard side that start and stop along the
hull ... about 10 feet (3 m) above the bottom of the ship".[45]
The gaps, the longest of
which measures about 39 feet (12 m) long, appear to have followed the line
of the hull plates. This suggests that the iron rivets along the plate seams
snapped off or popped open to create narrow gaps through which water flooded.
Wilding suggested this scenario at the British Wreck
Commissioner's inquiry following the disaster, but his view was discounted.[45] Titanic's discoverer, Robert Ballard, has commented that the assumption
that the ship had suffered a major breach was "a by-product of the
mystique of the Titanic. No one could believe that the great ship was
sunk by a little sliver."[46] Faults in the ship's hull may have
been a contributing factor. Recovered pieces of Titanic's hull plates appear to have shattered on impact with the
iceberg without bending.[47]
The plates in the central
part of Titanic's hull (covering approximately
60 percent of the total) were held together with triple rows of mild steel rivets, but the plates in the bow
and stern were held together with double rows of wrought iron rivets which may have been near
their stress limits even before the collision.[48][49] These "Best" or
No. 3 iron rivets had a high level of slag inclusions, making them more
brittle than the more usual "Best-Best" No. 4 iron rivets, and
more prone to snapping when put under stress, particularly in extreme cold.[50][51] Tom McCluskie, a retired archivist
of Harland & Wolff, pointed out that Olympic, Titanic's
sister ship, was riveted with the same iron and served without incident for
nearly 25 years, surviving several major collisions, including being
rammed by a British cruiser.[52] When Olympic rammed and sank
the U-boat U-103 with her bow, the stem was twisted
and hull plates on the starboard side were buckled without impairing the hull's
integrity.[52][53]
Above the waterline, there
was little evidence of the collision. The stewards in the first class dining
room noticed a shudder, which they thought might have been caused by the ship
shedding a propeller blade. Many of the passengers felt a bump or
shudder – "just as though we went over about a thousand
marbles",[54] as one survivor put it – but
did not know what had happened.[55] Those on the lowest decks, nearest
the site of the collision, felt it much more directly. Engine Oiler Walter
Hurst recalled being "awakened by a grinding crash along the starboard
side. No one was very much alarmed but knew we had struck something."[56] Fireman George Kemish heard a "heavy thud and grinding tearing sound"
from the starboard hull.[57]
Bulkhead
arrangement with damaged areas shown in green
The ship began to flood
immediately, with water pouring in at an estimated rate of 7 long tons (7.1 t) per second, fifteen times faster
than it could be pumped out.[58] Second engineer J. H. Hesketh and
leading stoker Frederick Barrett were both struck by a jet of icy water in
No. 6 boiler room and escaped just before the room's watertight door
closed.[59] This was an extremely dangerous
situation for the engineering staff; the boilers were still full of hot
high-pressure steam and there was a substantial risk that they would explode if
they came into contact with the cold seawater flooding the boiler rooms. The
stokers and firemen were ordered to reduce the fires and vent the boilers,
sending great quantities of steam up the funnel venting pipes. They were
waist-deep in freezing water by the time they finished their work.[60]
Titanic's lower decks were divided into
sixteen compartments. Each compartment was separated from its
neighbour by a bulkhead running the width of the ship; there were fifteen
bulkheads in all. Each bulkhead extended at least to the underside of
E Deck, nominally one deck, or about 11 feet (3.4 m), above the
waterline. The two nearest the bow and the six nearest the stern went one deck
further up.[61]
Each bulkhead could be
sealed by watertight doors. The engine rooms and boiler rooms on the tank top
deck had vertically closing doors that could be controlled remotely from the
bridge, lowered automatically by a float if water was present, or closed
manually by the crew. These took about 30 seconds to close; warning bells
and alternative escape routes were provided so that the crew would not be
trapped by the doors. Above the tank top level, on the Orlop Deck, F Deck and E
Deck, the doors closed horizontally and were manually operated. They could be
closed at the door itself or from the deck above.[61]
Although the watertight
bulkheads extended well above the water line, they were not sealed at the top.
If too many compartments were flooded, the ship's bow would settle deeper in
the water, and water would spill from one compartment to the next in sequence,
rather like water spilling across the top of an ice cube tray. This is what
happened to Titanic, which had suffered damage to the forepeak tank, the
three forward holds and No. 6 boiler room, a total of five compartments. Titanic
was only designed to float with any two compartments flooded, but she could
remain afloat with certain combinations of three or even four
compartments – the first four – open to the ocean. With five
compartments, the tops of the bulkheads would be submerged and the ship would
continue to flood.[61][62]
Titanic sank in two and a half hours.
Captain Smith felt the
collision in his cabin and immediately came to the bridge. Informed of the
situation, he summoned Thomas Andrews, Titanic's
builder, who was among a party of engineers from Harland and Wolff observing
the ship's first passenger voyage.[63] The ship was listing five degrees
to starboard and was two degrees down by the head within a few minutes of the
collision.[64] Smith and Andrews went below and
found that the forward cargo holds, the mail room and the squash court were
flooded, while No. 6 boiler room was already filled to a depth of 14 feet
(4.3 m). Water was spilling over into No. 5 boiler room,[64] and crewmen there were battling to
pump it out.[65]
Within 45 minutes of the
collision, at least 13,500 long tons (13,700 t) of water had entered the
ship. This was far too much for Titanic's
ballast and bilge pumps to handle; the total pumping capacity of all the pumps
combined was only 1,700 long tons (1,700 t) per hour.[66] Andrews informed the captain that
the first five compartments were flooded, and therefore Titanic was
doomed. Andrews accurately predicted that she could remain afloat for no longer
than roughly two hours.[67]
From the time of the
collision to the moment of her sinking, at least 35,000 long tons
(36,000 t) of water flooded into Titanic, causing her displacement to nearly double from 48,300 long tons (49,100 t)
to over 83,000 long tons (84,000 t).[68] The flooding did not proceed at a
constant pace, nor was it distributed evenly throughout the ship, due to the
configuration of the flooded compartments. Her initial list to starboard was
caused by asymmetrical flooding of the starboard side as water poured down a
passageway at the bottom of the ship.[69] When the passageway was fully
flooded, the list corrected itself but the ship later began to list to port by
up to ten degrees as that side also flooded asymmetrically.[70]
Titanic's down angle altered fairly rapidly
from zero degrees to about four and a half degrees during the first hour after
the collision, but the rate at which the ship went down slowed greatly for the
second hour, worsening only to about five degrees.[71] This gave many of those aboard a
false sense of hope that the ship might stay afloat long enough for them to be
rescued. By 1:30, the sinking rate of the front section increased until Titanic
reached a down angle of about ten degrees.[70] At about 02:15, Titanic's angle in the water began to increase rapidly as water
poured into previously unflooded parts of the ship through deck hatches,
disappearing from view at 02:20.[72]
15 April 1912
Preparing to abandon
ship
Captain Edward Smith in 1911
At 00:05 on 15 April,
Captain Smith ordered the ship's lifeboats uncovered and the passengers mustered.[62] He also ordered the radio operators
to begin sending distress calls, which wrongly placed the ship on the west side
of the ice belt and directed rescuers to a position that turned out to be
inaccurate by about 13.5 nautical miles (15.5 mi; 25.0 km).[21][73] Below decks, water was pouring into
the lowest levels of the ship. As the mail room flooded, the mail sorters made
an ultimately futile attempt to save the 400,000 items of mail being
carried aboard Titanic. Elsewhere, air could be heard being forced out
by inrushing water.[74] Above them, stewards went door to
door, rousing sleeping passengers and crew – Titanic did not have a
public address system – and told them to go to the Boat Deck.[75]
The thoroughness of the
muster was heavily dependent on the class of the passengers; the first-class
stewards were in charge of only a few cabins, while those responsible for the
second- and third-class passengers had to manage large numbers of people. The
first-class stewards provided hands-on assistance, helping their charges to get
dressed and bringing them out onto the deck. With far more people to deal with,
the second- and third-class stewards mostly confined their efforts to throwing
open doors and telling passengers to put on lifebelts and come up top. In third
class, passengers were largely left to their own devices after being informed
of the need to come on deck.[76] Many passengers and crew were
reluctant to comply, either refusing to believe that there was a problem or
preferring the warmth of the ship's interior to the bitterly cold night air.
The passengers were not told that the ship was sinking, though a few noticed
that she was listing.[75]
Around 00:15, the stewards
began ordering the passengers to put on their lifebelts,[77] though again, many passengers took
the order as a joke.[75] Some set about playing an impromptu
game of association football with the ice chunks that were now strewn
across the foredeck.[78] On the boat deck, as the crew began
preparing the lifeboats, it was difficult to hear anything over the noise of
high-pressure steam being vented from the boilers and escaping via the valves
on the funnels above. Lawrence Beesley described the sound as "a
harsh, deafening boom that made conversation difficult; if one imagines
20 locomotives blowing off steam in a low key it would give some idea of
the unpleasant sound that met us as we climbed out on the top deck."[79] The noise was so loud that the crew
had to use hand signals to communicate.[80]
Titanic had a total of 20 lifeboats,
comprising 16 wooden boats on davits, eight on either side of the ship, and four
collapsible boats with wooden bottoms and canvas sides.[75] The collapsibles were stored upside
down with the sides folded in, and would have to be erected and moved to the
davits for launching.[81] Two were stored under the wooden
boats and the other two were lashed atop the officers' quarters.[82] The position of the latter would
make them extremely difficult to launch, as they weighed several tons each and
had to be manhandled down to the boat deck.[83] On average, the lifeboats could
take up to 68 people each, and collectively they could accommodate
1,178 – barely half the number of people on board and a third of the
number the ship was licensed to carry. The shortage of lifeboats was not
because of a lack of space nor because of cost. Titanic had been
designed to accommodate up to 68 lifeboats[84] – enough for everyone on
board – and the price of an extra 32 lifeboats would only have been
some US$16,000 (equivalent to $449,000 in 2021),[5] a tiny fraction of the
$7.5 million that the company had spent on Titanic.
In an emergency, lifeboats
at the time were intended to be used to transfer passengers off the distressed
ship and onto a nearby vessel.[85][f] It was therefore commonplace for
liners to have far fewer lifeboats than needed to accommodate all their
passengers and crew, and of the 39 British liners of the time of over
10,000 long tons (10,000 t), 33 had too few lifeboat places to accommodate
everyone on board.[87] The White Star Line desired the
ship to have a wide promenade deck with uninterrupted views of the sea, which
would have been obstructed by a continuous row of lifeboats.[88]
Captain Smith was an
experienced seaman who had served for 40 years at sea, including 27 years
in command. This was the first crisis of his career, and he would have known
that even if all the boats were fully occupied, more than a thousand people
would remain on the ship as she went down with little or no chance of survival.[62] Popular belief says that, upon
grasping the enormity of what was about to happen, Smith became paralysed by
indecision, had a mental breakdown or nervous collapse, and became lost in a
trance-like daze, rendering him ineffective and inactive in attempting to
mitigate the loss of life.[89][90] However, according to survivors,
Smith took charge and behaved coolly and calmly during the crisis. After the
collision, Smith immediately began an investigation into the nature and extent
of the damage, personally making two inspection trips below deck to look for
damage, and preparing the wireless men for the possibility of having to call
for help. He erred on the side of caution by ordering his crew to begin
preparing the lifeboats for loading, and to get the passengers into their
lifebelts before he was told by Andrews that the ship was sinking. Smith was
observed all around the decks, personally overseeing and helping to load the
lifeboats, interacting with passengers, and striking a delicate balance between
trying to instil urgency to follow evacuation orders while simultaneously
attempting to dissuade panic.[91]
Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall was told by Smith at around 00:25
that the ship would sink,[92] while Quartermaster George Rowe was
so unaware of the emergency that after the evacuation had started, he phoned
the bridge from his watch station to ask why he had just seen a lifeboat go
past.[93] The crew was unprepared for the
emergency, as lifeboat training had been minimal. Only one lifeboat drill had been conducted while the ship
was docked at Southampton. It was a cursory effort, consisting of two boats
being lowered, each manned by one officer and four men who merely rowed around
the dock for a few minutes before returning to the ship. The boats were
supposed to be stocked with emergency supplies, but Titanic's passengers later found that they had only been partially
provisioned despite the efforts of the ship's chief baker, Charles Joughin, and his staff to do so.[94] No lifeboat or fire drills had been
conducted since Titanic left Southampton.[94] A lifeboat drill had been scheduled
for the Sunday morning before the ship sank, but was cancelled for unknown
reasons by Captain Smith.[95]
Lists had been posted on
the ship assigning crew members to specific lifeboat stations, but few appeared
to have read them or to have known what they were supposed to do. Most of the
crew were not seamen, and even some of those had no prior experience of rowing
a boat. They were now faced with the complex task of coordinating the lowering
of 20 boats carrying a possible total of 1,100 people 70 feet
(21 m) down the sides of the ship.[83] Thomas E. Bonsall, a historian of
the disaster, has commented that the evacuation was so badly organised that
"even if they had the number [of] lifeboats they needed, it is impossible
to see how they could have launched them" given the lack of time and poor
leadership.[96] Indeed, not all of the lifeboats on
board Titanic were launched before the ship sank.
By about 00:20,
40 minutes after the collision, the loading of the lifeboats was under
way. Second Officer Lightoller recalled afterwards that he had to cup both
hands over Smith's ears to communicate over the racket of escaping steam, and
said, "I yelled at the top of my voice, 'Hadn't we better get the women
and children into the boats, sir?' He heard me and nodded reply."[97] Smith then ordered Lightoller and
Murdoch to "put the women and children in and lower away".[98] Lightoller took charge of the boats
on the port side and Murdoch took charge of those on the starboard side. The
two officers interpreted the "women and children" evacuation order
differently; Murdoch took it to mean women and children first, while Lightoller took it to mean women and
children only. Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no
women and children waiting to board, while Murdoch allowed a limited number of
men to board if all the nearby women and children had embarked.[82]
Neither officer knew how
many people could safely be carried in the boats as they were lowered and they
both erred on the side of caution by not filling them. They could have been
lowered quite safely with their full complement of 68 people, especially
with the highly favourable weather and sea conditions.[82] Had this been done, an additional
500 people could have been saved; instead, hundreds of people,
predominantly men, were left on board as lifeboats were launched with many
seats vacant.[80][96]
Few passengers at first
were willing to board the lifeboats and the officers in charge of the
evacuation found it difficult to persuade them. Millionaire John Jacob Astor declared: "We are safer here than in that
little boat."[99] Some passengers refused flatly to
embark. J. Bruce Ismay, realising the urgency of the situation, roamed the
starboard boat deck urging passengers and crew to board the boats. A trickle of
women, couples and single men were persuaded to board starboard lifeboat
No. 7, which became the first lifeboat to be lowered.[99]
Departure of the
lifeboats
Lifeboat 6
under capacity
At 00:45, lifeboat No. 7
was rowed away from Titanic with an estimated 28 passengers on
board, despite a capacity of 65. Lifeboat No. 6, on the port side, was the next
to be lowered at 00:55. It also had 28 people on board, among them the
"unsinkable" Margaret
"Molly" Brown. Lightoller realised there was only one seaman on board (Quartermaster
Robert Hichens) and called for volunteers. Major Arthur Godfrey Peuchen of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club stepped forward and climbed down a rope into
the lifeboat; he was the only adult male passenger whom Lightoller allowed to
board during the port side evacuation.[100] Peuchen's role highlighted a key
problem during the evacuation: there were hardly any seamen to man the boats.
Some had been sent below to open gangway doors to allow more passengers to be
evacuated, but they never returned. They were presumably trapped and drowned by
the rising water below decks.[101]
The Sad
Parting,
illustration of 1912
Meanwhile, other crewmen
fought to maintain vital services as water continued to pour into the ship
below decks. The engineers and firemen worked to vent steam from the boilers to
prevent them from exploding on contact with the cold water. They re-opened
watertight doors in order to set up extra portable pumps in the forward
compartments in a futile bid to reduce the torrent, and kept the electrical
generators running to maintain lights and power throughout the ship. Steward Frederick Dent Ray narrowly avoided being swept away
when a wooden wall between his quarters and the third-class accommodation on E
deck collapsed, leaving him waist-deep in water.[102] Two engineers, Herbert Harvey and
Jonathan Shepherd (who had just broken his left leg after falling into a
manhole minutes earlier), died in boiler room No. 5 when, at around 00:45,
the bunker door separating it from the flooded No. 6 boiler room collapsed
and they were swept away by "a wave of green foam" according to
leading fireman Frederick
Barrett, who barely
escaped from the boiler room.[103]
In boiler room No. 4,
at around 01:20 according to survivor Trimmer George Cavell, water began
flooding in from the metal floor plates below, possibly indicating that the
bottom of the ship had also been holed by the iceberg. The flow of water soon
overwhelmed the pumps and forced the firemen and trimmers to evacuate the
forward boiler rooms.[104] Further aft, Chief Engineer Bell, his engineering
colleagues, and a handful of volunteer firemen and greasers stayed behind in
the unflooded No. 1, 2 and 3 boiler rooms and in the turbine and
reciprocating engine rooms. They continued working on the boilers and the
electrical generators in order to keep the ship's lights and pumps operable and
to power the radio so that distress signals could be sent.[46] According to popular belief, they
remained at their posts until the very end, thus ensuring that Titanic's electrics functioned until the final minutes of the
sinking, and died in the bowels of the ship. According to Greaser Frederick
Scott at the British inquiry, at around 02:05 when it became obvious that
nothing more could be done, and the flooding was too severe for the pumps to
cope, the engineers and crew came up onto Titanic's
open well deck, but by this time all the lifeboats had left. Scott testified to
seeing the engineers gathered at the aft end of the starboard Boat Deck.[105] None of the ship's 35 engineers and
electricians survived.[106] Neither did any of the Titanic's five postal clerks, who were last seen struggling to
save the mail bags they had rescued from the flooded mail room. They were
caught by the rising water somewhere on D deck.[107]
Many of the third-class
passengers were also confronted with the sight of water pouring into their
quarters on E, F and G decks. Carl Jansson, one of the relatively small number
of third-class survivors, later recalled:
Then I run down to my cabin
to bring my other clothes, watch and bag but only had time to take the watch
and coat when water with enormous force came into the cabin and I had to rush
up to the deck again where I found my friends standing with lifebelts on and
with terror painted on their faces. What should I do now, with no lifebelt and
no shoes and no cap?[108]
The lifeboats were lowered
every few minutes on each side, but most of the boats were greatly
under-filled. No. 5 left with 41 aboard, No. 3 had 32 aboard,
No. 8 left with 39[109] and No. 1 left with just 12
out of a capacity of 40.[109] The evacuation did not go smoothly
and passengers suffered accidents and injuries as it progressed. One woman fell
between lifeboat No. 10 and the side of the ship but someone caught her by
the ankle and hauled her back onto the promenade deck, where she made a
successful second attempt at boarding.[110] First-class passenger Annie Stengel
broke several ribs when an overweight German-American doctor and his brother
jumped into No. 5, squashing her and knocking her unconscious.[111][112] The lifeboats' descent was likewise
risky. No. 6 was nearly flooded during the descent by water discharging
out of the ship's side, but successfully made it away from the ship.[109][113] No. 3 came close to disaster
when, for a time, one of the davits jammed, threatening to pitch the passengers
out of the lifeboat and into the sea.[114]
Distress
signal (0:33) Simulated RMS Titanic distress signal, in Morse code. "SOS
SOS CQD CQD – MGY WE ARE SINKING FAST PASSENGERS BEING PUT INTO BOATS MGY"
Problems playing this file? See media help.
By 01:20, the seriousness
of the situation was now apparent to the passengers above decks, who began
saying their goodbyes, with husbands escorting their wives and children to the
lifeboats. Distress
flares were fired
every few minutes to attract the attention of any ships nearby and the radio
operators repeatedly sent the distress signal CQD. Radio operator Harold Bride suggested to his colleague Jack
Phillips that he should use the new SOS signal, as it "may be your last chance to
send it". The two radio operators contacted other ships to ask for
assistance. Several responded, of which RMS Carpathia was the closest, at 58 miles
(93 km) away.[115] She was a much slower vessel than Titanic
and, even driven at her maximum speed of 17 kn (20 mph; 31 km/h), would
have taken four hours to reach the sinking ship.[116] Another to respond was SS Mount
Temple, which set a course and headed for Titanic's
position but was stopped en route by pack ice.[117]
Much nearer was SS Californian, which had warned Titanic of
ice a few hours earlier. Apprehensive at his ship being caught in a large field
of drift ice, Californian's captain, Stanley Lord, had decided at about 22:00 to halt
for the night and wait for daylight to find a way through the ice field.[118] At 23:30, 10 minutes before Titanic
hit the iceberg, Californian's sole radio
operator, Cyril Evans, shut his set down for the night and went to
bed.[119] On the bridge her Third Officer,
Charles Groves, saw a large vessel to starboard around 10 to 12 mi (16 to
19 km) away. It made a sudden turn to port and stopped. If the radio
operator of Californian had stayed at his post fifteen minutes longer,
hundreds of lives might have been saved.[120] A little over an hour later, Second
Officer Herbert Stone saw five white rockets exploding above the stopped ship.
Unsure what the rockets meant, he called Captain Lord, who was resting in the
chartroom, and reported the sighting.[121] Lord did not act on the report, but
Stone was perturbed: "A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for
nothing," he told a colleague.[122]
Distress
signal sent at about 01:40 by Titanic's radio
operator, Jack Phillips, to the Russian American Line ship SS Birma. This was one of Titanic's last intelligible radio messages.
By this time, it was clear
to those on Titanic that the ship was indeed sinking and there would not
be enough lifeboat places for everyone. Some still clung to the hope that the
worst would not happen: Lucien Smith told his wife Eloise, "It is only a
matter of form to have women and children first. The ship is thoroughly equipped
and everyone on her will be saved."[123] Charlotte Collyer's husband Harvey
called to his wife as she was put in a lifeboat, "Go, Lottie! For God's sake,
be brave and go! I'll get a seat in another boat!"[123]
Other couples refused to be
separated. Ida
Straus, the wife of
Macy's department store co-owner and former member of the United States House of
Representatives Isidor Straus, told her husband: "We have
been living together for many years. Where you go, I go."[123] They sat down in a pair of deck
chairs and waited for the end.[124] The industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim changed out of his life vest and sweater into
top hat and evening dress and declared his wish to go down with the ship like a
gentleman.[46]
At this point, the vast
majority of passengers who had boarded lifeboats were from first- and
second-class. Few third-class (steerage) passengers had made it up onto the
deck, and most were still lost in the maze of corridors or trapped behind gates
and partitions that segregated the accommodation for the steerage passengers
from the first- and second-class areas.[125] This segregation was not simply for
social reasons, but was a requirement of United States immigration laws, which
mandated that third-class passengers be segregated to control immigration and
to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. First- and second-class
passengers on transatlantic liners disembarked at the main piers on Manhattan Island, but steerage passengers had to go
through health checks and processing at Ellis Island.[126] In at least some places, Titanic's crew appear to have actively hindered the steerage
passengers' escape. Some of the gates were locked and guarded by crew members,
apparently to prevent the steerage passengers from rushing the lifeboats.[125] Irish survivor Margaret Murphy
wrote in May 1912:
Before all the steerage
passengers had even a chance of their lives, the Titanic's sailors fastened the doors and companionways leading up
from the third-class section ... A crowd of men was trying to get up to a
higher deck and were fighting the sailors; all striking and scuffling and
swearing. Women and some children were there praying and crying. Then the
sailors fastened down the hatchways leading to the third-class section. They
said they wanted to keep the air down there so the vessel could stay up longer.
It meant all hope was gone for those still down there.[125]
A long and winding route
had to be taken to reach topside; the steerage-class accommodation, located on
C through G decks, was at the extreme ends of the decks, and so was the
farthest away from the lifeboats. By contrast, the first-class accommodation
was located on the upper decks and so was nearest. Proximity to the lifeboats
thus became a key factor in determining who got into them. To add to the
difficulty, many of the steerage passengers did not understand or speak
English. It was perhaps no coincidence that English-speaking Irish immigrants
were disproportionately represented among the steerage passengers who survived.[14] Many of those who did survive owed
their lives to third-class steward John Edward Hart, who organised three trips
into the ship's interior to escort groups of third-class passengers up to the
boat deck. Others made their way through open gates or climbed emergency
ladders.[127]
Some, perhaps overwhelmed
by it all, made no attempt to escape and stayed in their cabins or congregated
in prayer in the third-class dining room.[128] Leading Fireman Charles Hendrickson
saw crowds of third-class passengers below decks with their trunks and
possessions, as if waiting for someone to direct them.[129] Psychologist Wynn Craig Wade
attributes this to "stoic passivity" produced by generations of being
told what to do by social superiors.[107] August Wennerström, one of the male
steerage passengers to survive, commented later that many of his companions had
made no effort to save themselves. He wrote:
Hundreds were in a circle
[in the third-class dining saloon] with a preacher in the middle, praying,
crying, asking God and Mary to help them. They lay there and yelled, never
lifting a hand to help themselves. They had lost their own will power and
expected God to do all the work for them.[130]
Launching of the
last lifeboats
Lifeboat
No. 15 was nearly lowered onto lifeboat No. 13 (depicted by Charles Dixon).
By 01:30, Titanic's downward angle in the water was increasing and the ship
was now listing slightly more to port, but not more than 5 degrees. The
deteriorating situation was reflected in the tone of the messages sent from the
ship: "We are putting the women off in the boats" at 01:25,
"Engine room getting flooded" at 01:35, and at 01:45, "Engine
room full up to boilers."[131] This was Titanic's last intelligible signal, sent as the ship's electrical
system began to fail; subsequent messages were jumbled and unintelligible. The
two radio operators nonetheless continued sending out distress messages almost
to the very end.[132]
The remaining boats were
filled much closer to capacity and in an increasing rush. No. 11 was
filled with five people more than its rated capacity. As it was lowered, it was
nearly flooded by water being pumped out of the ship. No. 13 narrowly
avoided the same problem but those aboard were unable to release the ropes from
which the boat had been lowered. It drifted astern, directly under No. 15
as it was being lowered. The ropes were cut in time and both boats made it away
safely.[133]
Sinking
of the Titanic by Henry Reuterdahl
The first signs of panic
were seen when a group of male passengers attempted to rush port-side lifeboat
No. 14 as it was being lowered with 40 people aboard. Fifth Officer Lowe, who was in charge of the boat,
fired three warning shots in the air to control the crowd without causing
injuries.[134] No. 16 was lowered five
minutes later. Among those aboard was stewardess Violet Jessop, who would repeat the experience
four years later when she survived the sinking of one of Titanic's sister ships, Britannic, in the First World War.[135] Collapsible boat C was launched at
01:40 from a now largely deserted starboard area of the deck, as most of those
on deck had moved to the stern of the ship. It was aboard this
boat that White Star chairman and managing director J. Bruce Ismay, Titanic's
most controversial survivor, made his escape from the ship, an act later
condemned as cowardice.[131]
At 01:45, lifeboat
No. 2 was lowered.[136] While it was still at deck level,
Lightoller had found the boat occupied by men who, he wrote later,
"weren't British, nor of the English-speaking race ... [but of] the
broad category known to sailors as 'dagoes'."[137] After he evicted them by
threatening them with his revolver, he was unable to find enough women and
children to fill the boat[137] and lowered it with only 25 people
on board out of a possible capacity of 40.[136] John Jacob Astor saw his wife off
to safety in No. 4 boat at 01:55 but was refused entry by Lightoller, even
though 20 of the 60 seats aboard were unoccupied.[136]
The last boat to be
launched was collapsible D, which left at 02:05 with 25 people aboard;[138] two more men jumped on the boat as
it was being lowered.[139] The sea had reached the boat deck
and the forecastle was deep underwater. First-class passenger Edith Evans gave
up her place in the boat, and ultimately died in the disaster. She was one of
only four women in first class to perish in the sinking. Several eyewitnesses,
including Third Class Passenger Eugene Daly and First Class passenger George
Rheims, claimed to have seen an officer shoot one or two men during a rush for
a lifeboat, then shoot himself. It became widely rumoured that
Murdoch was the officer.[140] Captain Smith carried out a final
tour of the deck, telling the radio operators and other crew members: "Now
it's every man for himself."[141] He then told men attempting to
launch Collapsible Lifeboat A, "Well boys, do your best for the women and
children, and look out for yourselves", and returned to the bridge just
before the ship began its final plunge.[142] It is thought that he may have
chosen to go down with his ship and died on the bridge when it was engulfed by
the sea.[143][144] Alternatively, Smith may have
jumped overboard from the bridge as the ship went down. When working to free
Collapsible B, Harold Bride said he saw Captain Smith dive from the bridge into
the sea just before the bridge was submerged.[145] The ship's designer, Thomas
Andrews, was reportedly last seen in the first-class smoking room after
approximately 2:05 a.m., apparently making no attempt to escape.[135][146] However, there is circumstantial
evidence to suggest that Andrews was sighted in the smoking room prior to
01:40, as well as other sightings that indicate that Andrews then continued
assisting with the evacuation.[147][148] Andrews was reportedly seen
throwing deck chairs into the ocean for passengers to cling to in the water.[147] Andrews was also reportedly seen
heading to the bridge, perhaps in search of Captain Smith.[148] Mess steward Cecil Fitzpatrick
claimed to have seen Andrews jump overboard from the bridge with Smith.[147]
As most of the passengers
and crew headed to the stern, where Second Class Passenger Father Thomas Byles was hearing confessions and giving
absolutions, Titanic's band played outside the
gymnasium.[149] Titanic had two separate bands of musicians. One was a quintet led by Wallace Hartley that played after dinner and at
religious services while the other was a trio who played in the reception area
and outside the café and restaurant. The two bands had separate music libraries
and arrangements and had not played together before the sinking. Around 30
minutes after colliding with the iceberg, the two bands were called by Captain
Smith who ordered them to play in the first class lounge. Passengers present
remember them playing lively tunes such as "Alexander's Ragtime Band". It is unknown if the two piano players
were with the band at this time. The exact time is unknown, but the musicians
later moved to the boat deck level where they played before moving outside onto
the deck itself.[150]
Nearer,
My God, To Thee –
cartoon of 1912
Part of the enduring
folklore of the Titanic sinking is that the musicians played the hymn
"Nearer, My God, to Thee" as the ship sank, but this appears to be
dubious.[151] The claim surfaced among the
earliest reports of the sinking,[152] and the hymn became so closely
associated with the Titanic disaster that its opening bars were carved
on the grave monument of Titanic's bandmaster,
Wallace Hartley, one of those who perished.[153] In contrast, Archibald Gracie
emphatically denied it in his own account, written soon after the sinking, and
Radio Operator Harold Bride said that he had heard the band playing ragtime,
then "Autumn",[154] by which he may have meant Archibald Joyce's then-popular waltz "Songe
d'Automne" (Autumn Dream). George Orrell, the bandmaster of the rescue
ship, Carpathia, who spoke with survivors, related: "The ship's
band in any emergency is expected to play to calm the passengers. After Titanic
struck the iceberg the band began to play bright music, dance music, comic
songs – anything that would prevent the passengers from becoming
panic-stricken ... various awe-stricken passengers began to think of the
death that faced them and asked the bandmaster to play hymns. The one which
appealed to all was 'Nearer My God to Thee'."[155] According to Gracie, who was near
the band until that section of deck went under, the tunes played by the band
were "cheerful" but he did not recognise any of them, claiming that
if they had played 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' as claimed in the newspaper
"I assuredly should have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning
of immediate death to us all and one likely to create panic."[156] Several survivors who were among
the last to leave the ship claimed that the band continued playing until the
slope of the deck became too steep for them to stand, Gracie claimed that the
band stopped playing at least 30 minutes before the vessel sank. Several
witnesses support this account, including A. H. Barkworth, a first-class
passenger, who testified: "I do not wish to detract from the bravery of
anybody, but I might mention that when I first came on deck the band was
playing a waltz. The next time I passed where the band was stationed, the
members had thrown down their instruments and were not to be seen."[150]
Bride heard the band
playing as he left the radio cabin, which was by now awash, in the company of
the other radio operator, Jack Phillips. He and Phillips had just got into a
fistfight a minute earlier with a crewman who Bride thought was "a stoker,
or someone from below decks", who had sneaked into the radio cabin and
attempted to steal Phillips's lifebelt. Bride wrote later: "I did my duty.
I hope I finished [the man]. I don't know. We left him on the cabin floor of
the radio room, and he was not moving."[157] The two radio operators went in
opposite directions, Phillips aft and Bride forward towards collapsible
lifeboat B.[157]
Archibald Gracie was also
heading aft, but as he made his way towards the stern he found his path blocked
by "a mass of humanity several lines deep, covering the boat deck, facing
us"[158] – hundreds of steerage
passengers, who had finally made it to the deck just as the last lifeboats
departed. He gave up on the idea of going aft and jumped into the water to get
away from the crowd.[158]
Illustration
of the sinking of the Titanic
Last minutes of sinking
At about 02:15, Titanic's angle in the water began to increase rapidly as water
poured into previously unflooded parts of the ship through deck hatches.[72] Her suddenly increasing angle
caused what one survivor called a "giant wave" to wash along the ship
from the forward end of the boat deck, sweeping many people into the sea.[159] The parties who were trying to
lower collapsible boats A and B, including Sixth Officer Moody[160] and Colonel Archibald Gracie, were
swept away along with the two boats (boat B floated away upside-down with
Harold Bride trapped underneath it, and boat A ended up partly flooded and with
its canvas not raised). Bride and Gracie made it onto boat B, but Moody
perished.[161][162]
Lightoller, who had
attempted to launch Collapsible B, opted to abandon his post as he realised it
would be a futile move to head aft, and dived into the water from the roof of
the officers' quarters. He was sucked into the mouth of a ventilation shaft but
was blown clear by "a terrific blast of hot air" and emerged next to
the capsized lifeboat.[163] The forward funnel collapsed under
its own weight, crushing several people, including Charles Duane Williams,[164] as it fell into the water and only
narrowly missing the lifeboat.[165] It closely missed Lightoller and
created a wave that washed the boat 50 yards clear of the sinking ship.[163] Those still on Titanic felt
her structure shuddering as it underwent immense stresses. As first-class
passenger Jack Thayer[166] described it:
Occasionally there had been
a muffled thud or deadened explosion within the ship. Now, without warning she
seemed to start forward, moving forward and into the water at an angle of about
fifteen degrees. This movement with the water rushing up toward us was
accompanied by a rumbling roar, mixed with more muffled explosions. It was like
standing under a steel railway bridge while an express train passes overhead
mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of
china.[167]
Eyewitnesses saw Titanic's stern rising high into the air as the ship tilted down
in the water. It was said to have reached an angle of 30–45 degrees,[168] "revolving apparently around a
centre of gravity just astern of midships", as Lawrence Beesley later put
it.[169] Many survivors described a great
noise, which some attributed to the boilers exploding.[170] Beesley described it as "partly
a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a smash, and it was not a sudden roar as
an explosion would be: it went on successively for some seconds, possibly
fifteen to twenty". He attributed it to "the engines and machinery
coming loose from their bolts and bearings, and falling through the
compartments, smashing everything in their way".[169]
After another minute, the
ship's lights flickered once and then permanently went out, plunging Titanic
into darkness. Jack Thayer recalled seeing "groups of the fifteen hundred
people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only
to fall in masses, pairs or singly as the great afterpart of the ship, two
hundred fifty feet of it, rose into the sky."[165]
Titanic's final moments
Imagined
view of Titanic's final plunge
Titanic was subjected to extreme opposing
forces – the flooded bow pulling her down while the air in the stern kept
her to the surface – which were concentrated at one of the weakest points
in the structure, the area of the engine room hatch. Shortly after the lights
went out, the ship split apart. The submerged bow may have remained attached to
the stern by the keel for a short time, pulling the stern to a high angle
before separating and leaving the stern to float for a few moments longer. The
forward part of the stern would have flooded very rapidly, causing it to tilt
and then settle briefly until sinking.[171][172][173] The ship disappeared from view at
02:20, 2 hours and 40 minutes after striking the iceberg. Thayer reported that
it rotated on the surface, "gradually [turning] her deck away from us, as
though to hide from our sight the awful spectacle ... Then, with the
deadened noise of the bursting of her last few gallant bulkheads, she slid
quietly away from us into the sea."[174]
Titanic's surviving officers and some
prominent survivors testified that the ship had sunk in one piece, a belief
that was affirmed by the British and American inquiries into the disaster.
Archibald Gracie, who was on the promenade deck with the band (by the second
funnel), stated that "Titanic's decks
were intact at the time she sank, and when I sank with her, there was over
seven-sixteenths of the ship already underwater, and there was no indication
then of any impending break of the deck or ship".[175] Ballard argued that many other
survivors' accounts indicated that the ship had broken in two as she was
sinking.[176] As the engines are now known to
have stayed in place along with most of the boilers, the "great
noise" heard by witnesses and the momentary settling of the stern were
presumably caused by the break-up of the ship rather than the loosening of her
fittings or boiler explosions.[177]
Simplistic
visualization of the top-down and Mengot break-up models
There are two main theories
on how the ship broke in two – the "top-down" theory and the Mengot
theory, so named for its creator, Roy Mengot.[178] The more popular top-down theory
states that the breakup was centralized on the structural weak-point at the
entrance to the first boiler room, and that the breakup formed first at the
upper decks before shooting down to the keel. The breakup totally separated the
ship up to the double bottom, which acted as a hinge connecting bow and stern.
From this point, the bow was able to pull down the stern, until the double
bottom failed and both segments of the ship finally separated.[178] The Mengot theory postulates that
the ship broke due to compression forces and not fracture tension, which
resulted in a bottom-to-top break. The double-bottom would have failed first
and been forced to buckle upwards into the lower decks, as the breakup shot up
to the upper decks. In this model, the ship was held together by the B-Deck,
which featured 6 large doubler plates – trapezoidal steel segments meant to
prevent cracks from forming in the smokestack uptake while at sea – which acted
as a buffer and pushed the fractures away. As the hull's contents spilled out of
the ship, B-Deck failed and caused the aft tower and forward tower
superstructures to detach from the stern as the bow was freed and sank.[178]
After they went under, the
bow and stern took only about 5–6 minutes to sink 3,795 metres
(12,451 ft), spilling a trail of heavy machinery, tons of coal and large
quantities of debris from Titanic's interior.
The two parts of the ship landed about 600 metres (2,000 ft) apart on a
gently undulating area of the seabed.[179] The streamlined bow section
continued to descend at about the angle it had taken on the surface, striking
the seabed prow-first at a shallow angle[180] at an estimated speed of
25–30 mph (40–48 km/h). Its momentum caused it to dig a deep gouge
into the seabed and buried the section up to 20 metres (66 ft) deep in
sediment before it came to an abrupt halt. The sudden deceleration caused the
bow's structure to buckle downwards by several degrees just forward of the
bridge. The decks at the rear end of the bow section, which had already been
weakened during the break-up, collapsed one atop another.[181]
The stern section seems to
have descended almost vertically, probably rotating as it fell.[180] Empty tanks and cofferdams imploded as it descended, tearing
open the structure and folding back the steel ribbing of the poop deck.[182] The section landed with such force
that it buried itself about 15 metres (49 ft) deep at the rudder. The
decks pancaked down on top of each other and the hull plating splayed out to
the sides. Debris continued to rain down across the seabed for several hours
after the sinking.[181]
Passengers and crew
in the water
Pocket
watch retrieved from the wreck site, stopped showing a time of 2:28
In the immediate aftermath
of the sinking, hundreds of passengers and crew were left dying in the icy sea,
surrounded by debris from the ship. Titanic's
disintegration during her descent to the seabed caused buoyant chunks of
debris – timber beams, wooden doors, furniture, panelling and chunks of
cork from the bulkheads – to rocket to the surface. These injured and
possibly killed some of the swimmers; others used the debris to try to keep
themselves afloat.[183]
With a temperature of
−2 °C (28 °F), the water was lethally cold. Second Officer Lightoller
described the feeling of "a thousand knives" being driven into his
body as he entered the sea.[182] Sudden immersion into freezing
water typically causes death within minutes, either from cardiac arrest, uncontrollable breathing of water,
or cold incapacitation (not, as commonly believed, from hypothermia);[184] almost all of those in the water
died of cardiac arrest or other bodily reactions to freezing water within 15–30
minutes.[185] Only 13 of them were helped into
the lifeboats, even though these had room for almost 500 more people.[186]
Those in the lifeboats were
horrified to hear the sound of what Lawrence Beesley called "every
possible emotion of human fear, despair, agony, fierce resentment and blind
anger mingled – I am certain of those – with notes of infinite surprise,
as though each one were saying, 'How is it possible that this awful thing is
happening to me? That I should be caught in this death trap?'"[187] Jack Thayer compared it to the sound of
"locusts on a summer night", while George Rheims, who jumped moments
before Titanic sank, described it as "a dismal moaning sound which
I won't ever forget; it came from those poor people who were floating around,
calling for help. It was horrifying, mysterious, supernatural."[188]
The noise of the people in
the water screaming, yelling, and crying was a tremendous shock to the
occupants of the lifeboats, many of whom had up to that moment believed that
everyone had escaped before the ship sank. As Beesley later wrote, the cries
"came as a thunderbolt, unexpected, inconceivable, incredible. No one in
any of the boats standing off a few hundred yards away can have escaped the
paralysing shock of knowing that so short a distance away a tragedy,
unbelievable in its magnitude, was being enacted, which we, helpless, could in
no way avert or diminish."[187]
Colonel Archibald Gracie, one of the survivors who made it to
collapsible lifeboat B. He never recovered from his ordeal and died eight
months after the sinking.
Only a few of those in the
water survived. Among them were Archibald Gracie, Jack Thayer, and Charles
Lightoller, who made it to the capsized collapsible boat B. Around 12 crew
members climbed on board Collapsible B, and they rescued those they could until
some 35 men were clinging precariously to the upturned hull. Realising the risk
to the boat of being swamped by the mass of swimmers around them, they paddled
slowly away, ignoring the pleas of dozens of swimmers to be allowed on board.
In his account, Gracie wrote of the admiration he had for those in the water;
"In no instance, I am happy to say, did I hear any word of rebuke from a
swimmer because of a refusal to grant assistance... [one refusal] was met with
the manly voice of a powerful man... 'All right boys, good luck and God bless
you'."[189] Gracie said he heard men onboard
Collapsible B saying that Captain Smith had briefly made it to the boat, and
stoker Harry Senior and Entree cook Isaac Maynard said that Smith was at the
boat.[190] Fireman Walter Hurst, said he
thought the swimmer who cried out, "All right boys. Good luck and God
bless you", was Smith. Hurst said the man cheered the occupants on saying
"Good boys! Good lads!" with "the voice of authority".
Hurst, deeply moved by the swimmer's valor, reached out to him with an oar, but
the man was dead by then.[191] Several other swimmers (probably 20
or more) reached Collapsible boat A, which was upright but partly flooded, as
its sides had not been properly raised. Its occupants had to sit for hours in a
foot of freezing water,[143] and many died of hypothermia during
the night.
Farther out, the other
eighteen lifeboats – most of which had empty seats – drifted as the
occupants debated what, if anything, they should do to rescue the swimmers.
Boat No. 4, having remained near the sinking ship, seems to have been
closest to the site of the sinking at around 50 metres (160 ft) away; this
had enabled two people to drop into the boat and another to be picked up from
the water before the ship sank.[192] After the sinking, seven more men
were pulled from the water, although two later died. Collapsible D rescued one
male passenger who jumped in the water and swam over to the boat immediately
after it had been lowered. In all the other boats, the occupants eventually
decided against returning, probably out of fear that they would be capsized in
the attempt. Some put their objections bluntly; Quartermaster Hichens,
commanding lifeboat No. 6, told the women aboard his boat that there was
no point returning as there were "only a lot of stiffs there".[193]
After about twenty minutes,
the cries began to fade as the swimmers lapsed into unconsciousness and death.[194] Fifth Officer Lowe, in charge of
lifeboat No. 14, "waited until the yells and shrieks had subsided for
the people to thin out" before mounting an attempt to rescue those in the
water.[195] He gathered together five of the
lifeboats and transferred the occupants between them to free up space in
No. 14. Lowe then took a crew of seven crewmen and one male passenger who
volunteered to help, and then rowed back to the site of the sinking. The whole
operation took about three-quarters of an hour. By the time No. 14 headed
back to the site of the sinking, almost all of those in the water were dead and
only a few voices could still be heard.[196]
Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, recalled after the disaster that "the
very last cry was that of a man who had been calling loudly: 'My God! My God!'
He cried monotonously, in a dull, hopeless way. For an entire hour, there had
been an awful chorus of shrieks, gradually dying into a hopeless moan, until
this last cry that I speak of. Then all was silent."[197] Lowe and his crew found four men
still alive, one of whom died shortly afterwards. Otherwise, all they could see
were "hundreds of bodies and lifebelts"; the dead "seemed as if
they had perished with the cold as their limbs were all cramped up".[195]
In the other boats, there
was nothing the survivors could do but await the arrival of rescue ships. The
air was bitterly cold and several of the boats had taken on water. The
survivors could not find any food or drinkable water in the boats, and most had no
lights.[198] The situation was particularly bad
aboard collapsible B, which was only kept afloat by a diminishing air pocket in
the upturned hull. As dawn approached, the wind rose and the sea became
increasingly choppy, forcing those on the collapsible boat to stand up to
balance it. Some, exhausted by the ordeal, fell off into the sea and were
drowned.[199] It became steadily more difficult
for the rest to keep their balance on the hull, with waves washing across it.[200] Archibald Gracie later wrote of how
he and the other survivors sitting on the upturned hull were struck by
"the utter helplessness of our position".[201]
Rescue and departure
Collapsible
lifeboat D photographed from the deck of Carpathia on the morning of 15
April 1912.
Titanic's survivors were rescued around
04:00 on 15 April by the RMS Carpathia, which had steamed through the
night at high speed and at considerable risk, as the ship had to dodge numerous
icebergs en route.[200] Carpathia's lights were
first spotted around 03:30,[200] which greatly cheered the
survivors, though it took several more hours for everyone to be brought aboard.
The 30 or more men on collapsible B finally managed to board two other
lifeboats, but one survivor died just before the transfer was made.[202] Collapsible A was also in trouble
and was now nearly awash; many of those aboard (maybe more than half) had died
overnight.[182] The remaining survivors – an
unknown number of men, estimated to be between 10–11 and more than 20, and one
woman – were transferred from A into another lifeboat, leaving behind
three bodies in the boat, which was left to drift away. It was recovered a
month later by the White Star liner RMS Oceanic with the bodies still aboard.[202]
Those on Carpathia
were startled by the scene that greeted them as the sun rose: "fields of
ice on which, like points on the landscape, rested innumerable pyramids of
ice."[203] Captain Arthur Rostron of Carpathia saw ice all
around, including 20 large bergs measuring up to 200 feet (61 m) high
and numerous smaller bergs, as well as ice floes and debris from Titanic.[203] It appeared to Carpathia's passengers that their ship was in the middle of a vast
white plain of ice, studded with icebergs appearing like hills in the distance.[204]
As the lifeboats were
brought alongside Carpathia, the survivors came aboard the ship by
various means. Some were strong enough to climb up rope ladders; others were
hoisted up in slings, and the children were hoisted in mail sacks.[205] The last lifeboat to reach the ship
was Lightoller's boat No. 12, with 74 people aboard a boat designed
to carry 65. They were all on Carpathia by 09:00.[206] There were some scenes of joy as
families and friends were reunited, but in most cases hopes died as loved ones
failed to reappear.[207]
At 09:15, two more ships
appeared on the scene – Mount Temple and Californian, which had finally learned of the
disaster when her radio operator returned to duty – but by then there were
no more survivors to rescue. Carpathia had been bound for Fiume, Austria-Hungary (now Rijeka, Croatia), but as she had neither the stores
nor the medical facilities to cater for the survivors, Rostron ordered that a
course be calculated to return the ship to New York, where the survivors could
be properly looked after.[206] Carpathia departed the area, leaving the other ships to carry out a final,
fruitless, two-hour search.[208][209]
Aftermath
Grief and outrage
Arrival of
the "ship of sorrow" at New York by L.F. Grant, 1912
London
paperboy Ned Parfett outside the White Star Line offices
When Carpathia
arrived at Pier 54 in New York on the evening of 18
April after a difficult voyage through pack ice, fog, thunderstorms and rough
seas,[210][211] some 40,000 people were
standing on the wharves, alerted to the disaster by a stream of radio messages
from Carpathia and other ships. It was only after Carpathia
docked – three days after Titanic's
sinking – that the full scope of the disaster became public knowledge.[211]
Even before Carpathia
arrived in New York, efforts were getting underway to retrieve the dead. Four
ships chartered by the White Star Line succeeded in retrieving 328 bodies;
119 were buried
at sea, while the
remaining 209 were brought ashore to the Canadian port of Halifax, Nova Scotia,[210] where 150 of them were buried.[212] Memorials were raised in various
places – New York, Washington, Southampton, Liverpool, Belfast and
Lichfield, among others[213] – and ceremonies were held on
both sides of the Atlantic to commemorate the dead and raise funds to aid the
survivors.[214] The bodies of most of Titanic's victims were never recovered, and the only evidence of
their deaths was found 73 years later among the debris on the seabed:
pairs of shoes lying side by side, where bodies had once lain before eventually
decomposing.[46]
The prevailing public
reaction to the disaster was one of shock and outrage, directed against several
issues and people: why were there so few lifeboats? Why had Ismay saved his own
life when so many others died? Why did Titanic proceed into the ice
field at full speed?[215] The outrage was driven not least by
the survivors themselves; even while they were aboard Carpathia on their
way to New York, Beesley and other survivors determined to "awaken public
opinion to safeguard ocean travel in the future" and wrote a public letter
to The Times urging changes to maritime safety
laws.[216]
In places closely
associated with Titanic, the sense of grief was deep. The heaviest
losses were in Southampton, home port to 699 crew members and also home to
many of the passengers.[217] Crowds of weeping women – the
wives, sisters and mothers of crew – gathered outside the White Star
offices in Southampton for news of their loved ones.[218] Most of them were among the
549 Southampton residents who perished.[219] In Belfast, churches were packed,
and shipyard workers wept in the streets. The ship had been a symbol of
Belfast's industrial achievements, and there was not only a sense of grief but
also one of guilt, as those who had built Titanic came to feel they had
been responsible in some way for her loss.[220]
With affection,
Ruben
_page_125%20iceberg.jpg)
.svg%20danos.png)
