On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, largest ship afloat, left
Southampton, England on her maiden voyage to New York City. The White Star Line
had spared no expense in assuring her luxury. A legend even before she sailed,
her passengers were a mixture of the world's wealthiest basking in the elegance
of first class accommodations and immigrants packed into steerage.
She was touted as the safest ship ever built, so safe
that she carried only 20 lifeboats - enough to provide accommodation for only
half her 2,200 passengers and crew. This discrepancy rested on the belief that
since the ship's construction made her "unsinkable," her lifeboats
were necessary only to rescue survivors of other sinking ships. Additionally,
lifeboats took up valuable deck space.
Four days into her journey, at 11:40 P.M. on the night of
April 14, she struck an iceberg. Her fireman compared the sound of the impact
to "the tearing of calico, nothing more." However, the collision was
fatal and the icy water soon poured through the ship.
It became obvious that many would not find safety in a
lifeboat. Each passenger was issued a life jacket but life expectancy would be
short when exposed to water four degrees below freezing. As the forward portion
of the ship sank deeper, passengers scrambled to the stern. John Thayer
witnessed the sinking from a lifeboat. "We could see groups of the almost
fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like
swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part
of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose into the sky, till it
reached a sixty-five or seventy degree angle." The great ship slowly slid
beneath the waters two hours and forty minutes after the collision
The next morning, the liner Carpathia rescued
705 survivors. One thousand five hundred twenty-two passengers and crew were
lost. Subsequent inquiries attributed the high loss of life to an insufficient
number of lifeboats and inadequate training in their use.
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