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Titanic Sinking

   "There was peace, when the world hadn't even tenored to its way. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but awoke it with a start. To my mind, the world of today awoke on April 15, 1912"

-Jack Thayer, Titanic Survivor


-Titanic recieved seven different iceberg warnings on the day of her sinking. Six of which were disregarded by the captain (Cpt. E. J. Smith). The seventh warning never made it to the bridge.

-At 11:00 PM, the Boston-bound cargo liner Californian's wireless operator, Cyril Evans, broke into Titanic's transmission with the message "I say old man, we're stopped and surrounded by ice." Jack Philips, exhausted after a long day of being backlogged with hundreds of personal messages replied "Keep out! Shut up! I'm working Cape Race." The rebuke was effective. At 11:35 Evans hung his headset up and turned in for the night.

-The water was incredibly smooth making it difficult to see icebergs ahead because of the lack of white caps at the base of the icebergs.

-The lookouts had no binoculars. There was no moon that night making it even more difficult to see.

-The iceberg was what you would call a black berg, or a blue berg. This is an iceberg where the center of gravity, because of melting and so forth, has shifted and has slowly turned turtle in the water, and now you have clear ice above the water. Not the white snowy thing you would imagine polar bears romping around on. At night virtually invisible. With all these things going against the lookouts, they didn't spot the iceberg until it was to late. It was spotted at 11:40 PM. There was a 37 second interval between the sighting, and the collision.

    Titanic's fatal glancing blow...The iceberg scraping Titanic

-Most passengers came out because of curiousity more than anything else.

-Passengers outside on that extremely cold night played with the large chunks of ice to warm up.

-5 of the 16 compartments were flooded, making it impossible for the ship to stay afloat. One problem was, the watertight compartments, although they were divided with horizontal transverse bulkheads, were not capped off with watertight tops. The bow went down to such and extent, that the water flowed over the top of one bulkhead and down into the next compartment.

Watertight compartments filled

-First class passengers refused to go outside because of the extreme cold after the ship had collided with the iceberg.

-15 minutes after the collision the mail room was already flooded.

-The first lifeboat, No. 7,  was lowered at 12:45 AM with 28 people on board. It had a capacity of 65

Lifeboats being lowered (From the movie Titanic)

-Most of the survivors remember seeing a "mystery ship" not far away. It was the Californian. It could have saved many more lives, had it's wireless operator not gone to sleep and turned his radio off.

-The band played until the end. The last song played has always been at a center of controversy. Many believe it to be the hymn "Nearer My God To Thee", but others insist it was "Songe d'Automne". To this day, the answer is not certain.

-Titanic fired white rockets into the night sky to notify other ships nearby. The rockets were a shock of reality to Titanic's passengers. "With a gasping sigh, one word escaped the lips of the crowd; rockets. Anyone knows what rockets at sea mean..." -Lawrence Beesley

Rocket being launched

-Most of the other lifeboats left half full: Boat No. 1 left with 12 but had a capacity of 40; No. 3 left with 32 and No. 5 with 41, both had a capacity of 65.

-One boat, collapsible A, was overturned in the water.

-Manager of the Macy's department store, Isadore Straus pleaded with his wife to get in a boat, but she replied "I have been with you for 40 years. Where you go, I go."

-The unwritten law of the sea "women and children first" was followed faithfully by the officers.

-1st officer Murdoch said he would shoot any man who tried to get into a lifeboat, and although shots were fired, he never had to.

-Magnate smelter Benjamin Guggenhiem and his manservant, dressed  in tuxedos said "We have dressed in our best and are prepared to go down as gentlemen."

-No one really knows what happened to Captain Smith. Some say he commited suicide by placing a gun to his head. Others remember him bringing a small child over to the overturned Collapsible B before swimming away.

-The last reported position of Titanic was Latitude 41º46' N, Longitude 50º14' W

Where Titanic sank

-As the stern rose higher and higher, an increasing cacophony of noise came from the ship. Everything that wasn't bolted down: grand-pianos, china, cargo, everything, even people, bodies falling, and crashing into things.

-At 2:18 AM, Titanic separated between the 3rd and 4th funnels. The stern rose into the air, completely vertical for a few minutes then settled back and slid into the black Atlantic, never to be seen again for another 73 years. At 2:20 AM it was over.

Grand Staircase             The stern rising into the air

-It took 2 hours and 40 minutes for Titanic to founder.

-Chief Baker Charles Joughin survived because of the tremendous amount of alcohol he drank before the final moments. He rode Titanic down to the water like an elevator, he swam around for a bit, before finding the overturned Collapsible B lifeboat and hung on to it for four hours with 3/4 of his body still in the below freezing water. The alcohol acted as a human antifreeze.

-After Titanic sank, the people in the lifeboats heard the heartwrenching cries for help as over 1,000 people floated in the below freezing water (32ºF or -2ºC). Many survivors carried these sounds to their graves. "It's a dreadful sound to hear the people thrashing around in the water, freezing. Then there's a dreadful silence that follows..." -Eva Hart

-The rescue ship, Carpathia, was spotted at 3:30 AM.

-Of her 2,227 passengers and crew, 705 survived.

Carpathia


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