Length: 882.5 feet Gross tonnage: 46,329 tons Service speed: 21 knots Top speed: 24 knots Complement: 2208 (maiden voyage) First-class: 324 Second-class: 285 Third-class: 708 Crew: 891 Survived: 705 (estimate) Died: 1523
Titanic began her maiden voyage to New York from Southampton on April 10, 1912. At 11:39 p.m. (ship’s time) on the night of 14 April, while travelling at a speed of 22.5 knots, her lookouts saw an iceberg dead ahead less than half a mile away, and alerted the bridge. The First Officer’s instinctive reaction – to reverse engines and turn towards port – proved fatal as the ship’s rudder became ineffective when the irreversible central propeller ceased to turn. Titanic hit the iceberg a glancing blow on her starboard bow, after turning a mere 2 points (about 22 degrees). Rivets popped, plates buckled and five compartments were flooded determining her inevitable fate. At 2:20 a.m. on April 15 Titanic sank (at 41.44 N. 49.57 W. as Dr. Ballard discovered in 1985, not the famous 41.46 N. 50.14 W. she radioed which was 13 nautical miles to the west, and a little north). Inadequate loading of lifeboats added to the death toll. The survivors in the ship’s twenty lifeboats were rescued by Cunard’s Carpathia, the nearer Californian having failed to respond to Titanic’s rocket distress signals, or her frantic SOS calls (Californian’s one radio operator was asleep). The loss of this majestic and ‘practically unsinkable’ ship shocked a world grown complacent – ‘Never glad confident morning again!’ The Titanic and its destruction came to symbolise the end of optimism among nations that were soon to experience the catastrophe of the Great War. John Thayer, a Titanic survivor, wrote of the sinking: ‘The event which not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start…the world of today awoke April 15, 1912.’ Osbert Sitwell called it ‘a symbol of the approaching fate of Western Civilization’.
There was dignity in death. Mrs. Isidor Straus refused to leave her husband, co-owner of Macy’s in New York – ‘We lived together, so we shall die together’. A witness recalled that as Titanic ‘disappeared beneath the water Mr. and Mrs. Straus were standing arm in arm.’ Benjamin Guggenheim and his manservant changed for death, as Mr. Guggenheim would change for dinner – ‘We’ve dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.’ In the trenches such Edwardian nobility would seem an age away.
