She was built as the greatest ship of
this or any age. Bigger, mightier,
stronger, she was named Titanic and
she was unsinkable. The RMS Titanic
went down on her maiden voyage in
1912, with the loss of over 1500
lives. So arrogant were the builders
and operators of the gigantic vessel
that they proclaimed "God himself
could not sink this ship". God didn't
have to - all it took was a mammoth
iceberg that buckled and ripped the
double-steel, compartmented hull,
causing the ice cold waters of the
North Atlantic to flood in and sink
her in just a matter of hours. But the simple, inescapable fact of
the Titanic tragedy is that it need
never have happened if the White Star
Line, her owners, had equipped her
with enough lifeboats. They were left
off in the utter belief that she could
not sink. The Titanic began life as the largest
moving object on earth in the drawing
offices of the great Harland and Wolff
shipyards in Belfast, Northern Ireland;
she was conceived at a time when
trans-Atlantic liner traffic was at
its peak between Britain and Europe
and the New World. It was to be built
for luxury and speed, but not safety. Nevertheless, the engineers had come
up with a "revolutionary" design which
would keep the ship afloat no matter
what maritime accident befell it. The
design was a series of watertight
compartments, sixteen in all, running
the length of the hull. The bulkheads
separating them were also supposedly
stronger and more efficient than those
in use on any other ship, naval or
merchant. The makers boasted that up to two
compartments could be flooded without
the ship listing seriously. Not only
the finest engineers, but the finest
shipwrights, carpenters, tradesmen and
designers were employed to make her
the most luxurious vessel afloat.
Everything about her was breathtaking
and superlative. She was 900 feet
long with four funnels, each 22 feet
in diameter. From top to bottom she
was the height of an eleven-storey
building and she weighed 46, 000 tons.
The rudder was as tall as a large
mansion; the engines could produce 50,
000 horsepower to move the ship at 23
knots; and there was enough
electricity to power a small town. For the first-class passengers there
was unparalleled luxury. There was
the first swimming pool aboard a ship
- a great novelty - and a special
crane which loaded and unloaded cars
so the mobile millionaire could take
his luxury limousine with him on a
voyage. They could avail themselves
of Arabian-style Turkish baths, a gym,
a squash court, a lounge modelled
after a room at Versailles, a Parisian
cafe and a palm court. There were sumptuous suites and cabins
for 735 first-class passengers and
cabins for a further 1650 passengers
in second and third classes. The White Star Line was proud to hype
the Titanic as the greatest ship ever.
Her passenger list for the maiden
voyage from Southampton to New York
read like a veritable "who's who" of
the rich and famous of the day: there
was the financier Benjamin Guggenheim,
for whom the famous art museum was
named in New York in a gesture to his
Philanthropy; Isador Straus, part
owner of Macys department store, the
American painter Francis Millet and
the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. The Titanic had cost 4 million to
construct - equivalent today to 100
million - and she steamed under
British and American flags from
Southampton on her maiden voyage on
10th April 1912. On her decks were
twenty lifeboats - four more than
required under British Board of Trade
regulations, but still woefully few
for the passengers on board. Sixteen
lifeboats, it was later calculated,
would hold just one quarter of the
passengers and crew aboard. Five days out at sea, the crew of the
Titanic reported nothing extraordinary
in the bitterly cold weather as the
ship ploughed on towards the Grand
Banks of Newfoundland. At night on
the 14th the sea was glassy calm, but
there had been sightings of icebergs
in the area. They did not perturb
Captain Smith, whose ship sliced
through the starry night at 21.5 knots
per hour. Then, in the crows nest, a lookout
suddenly shouted at 11.40pm "Iceberg,
right ahead!" and accompanied his
shout with a warning bell that rang
three times. Thirty seconds later the
liner and the iceberg met in a
collision that jolted the great ship,
hurling ice on to the teak decks to
the delight of first-class passengers
who emerged moments later enthralled
by the sight of the chunks of icecap
littering them. They did not know that the collision
was, for the majority of them, their
death knell. One of the survivors
said later "So the crash came and it
sounded like this to me, like tearing
a strip off a piece of calico, nothing
more. Later it grew in intensity, as
though someone had drawn a giant
finger along the side of the ship." The iceberg had risen some 90 feet out
of the water and its massive submerged
bulk had ripped a huge rent in the
starboard section of the vessel,
rupturing the watertight compartments
in which so much faith had been
placed. The behemoth was now taking
on water at a phenomenal rate - 16,000
cubic feet of slate grey, cold
Atlantic in the first forty minutes
alone. The first five compartments were
completely flooded, With water
slopping over into compartment 6, then
compartment 7 and so on, filling them
up one by one until the ship
eventually sank. On the bridge the unthinkable was
slowly beginning to come home to
Captain Smith, who at first could not
believe his ears when his officers
told him of the catastrophe taking
place below. At almost exactly mid-
night he ordered the passengers to
take to the boats while a message was
flashed out that she was sinking. Many human dramas occurred that have
gone into legend; Ida Straus refused
the offer of a place in a lifeboat and
died in her beloved husbands arms as
the liner sank beneath the waves. The
chairman of the White Star Line showed
no such courage and jumped into a
lifeboat, thereafter forever condemned
to live a life of disgrace. Mining tycoon Guggenheim and his valet
Victor Giglio dressed in evening
clothes and prepared to meet their
Maker like gentlemen. Ten
millionaires died and valuables,
including diamonds valued at 4
million, were consigned to the deep
along with their owners. Confusion reigned on the boat deck,
not aided by the fact that the crew-
men had never performed a proper boat
drill during her sea trials. There
were collapsible rafts as well as
lifeboats but these were not assembled
in time, or were stored in
inaccessible places. As the ship began to list dramatically
distress rockets were fired into the
darkness, the last faint hopes of a
captain grasping for any salvation for
his doomed passengers and crew. He
didn't think anyone would see them -
but people did - the crewman aboard
the passenger liner California, which
was only nineteen miles away. But due to incredible blunders the
crew misread the distress flares as
belonging to another vessel and sat in
blissful ignorance in the icefield
until way after five the next morning,
long after the Titanic had slipped to
her icy grave. It was later learned
that the California's skipper assumed
that the rockets had been a false
alarm. The greatest tragedy on board
that night befell the 670 immigrants
in third class, or steerage, who were
trapped below decks in doors kept
locked by order of the US Immigration
Department. By the time they had
battered their way to the outside most
of the lifeboats had slipped from
their davits. In two hours and thirty-five minutes
the Titanic was almost at a 90 degree
angle in the water, her lights
twinkling and refracting on the water,
casting an eerie, phosphorescent glow
across the smooth sea. Five minutes later she went under,
creating a huge vortex on the surface
that dragged down people and debris
with it in a giant whirlpool. There
was an agonizing hissing and massive
air bubbles as the boilers exploded on
the ships slow decent through 13, 000
feet of water. The Carpathia was steaming now towards
the wreck site and arrived an hour
later to pick up the pitifully few
survivors. Two thousand two hundred
and twenty-seven people were on board
the ship when it left Southampton:
just 705 survived. For seventy-three years she lay
undisturbed in her watery grave, a
testimony to mans folly. The Titanic
became a byword for doomed ventures of
heroism, cowardice, excitement and
adventure. Historical societies were
formed, as were survivors associations
and salvage merchants dreamed of
raising her and her spoils within. It was widely assumed that she would
still be in one piece on the ocean
floor when in July 1986 American
oceanographer Dr Robert Ballard led an
undersea team which found her. But,
in the eerie, cold light, it was seen
that she had broken up into three
pieces - crushed by the water pressure
on her descent. In a 1600-metre debris field Ballard
found the bow section, buckled under
its own weight, embedded 600 metres
from the stern section. In the middle
was the collapsed remains of the
Titanic's middle. In the debris field itself are the
artefacts of a lost age; an entire
kitchen of copper implements, wine
bottles with their corks still in
them, coffee cups with the emblem of
the White Star Line unfaded through
the years, bathtubs, bedsprings,
toilets, doorknobs, chandeliers,
stoves and ceramic dolls heads that
were once owned by little children who
are now pensioners or long since dead. One of the most poignant images his
high-tech cameras captured was of a
broken lifeboat davit, hanging limply
on the edge of the ship, a silent
testimony to a night that we would
never forget. A night, in fact, to
remember.