RMS Titanic — Full Speed Into an Ice Field, ~1,500 Dead

Summary

On the night of 14 April 1912, the White Star liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic about 375 miles south of Newfoundland and sank in the early hours of 15 April, taking roughly 1,500 of the approximately 2,208 people aboard to their deaths. She was four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, running at close to her full service speed of about 22 knots through a region for which she had received repeated wireless warnings of ice. The collision opened her starboard hull below the waterline; she foundered two hours and forty minutes later, and her lifeboats — total capacity 1,178 — carried away barely 700 survivors, many in boats that left less than full.

Two official inquiries followed within weeks. The United States Senate convened a subcommittee under Senator William Alden Smith, which began evidence on 19 April 1912 and reported on 28 May. The British Board of Trade appointed a Wreck Commissioner, Lord Mersey, whose inquiry sat from 2 May to 3 July and reported on 30 July. Both reached the same broad diagnosis: the ship had been driven too fast through known ice, the lookout was inadequate, and there were nowhere near enough lifeboats. Mersey's formal finding was that "the loss of the said ship was due to collision with an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed at which the ship was being navigated."

The verdict was, in its bare structure, a finding against the master and his navigation — a vessel under a master's command, proceeding at speed into a hazard he had been warned of. Yet both inquiries declined to brand Captain Edward John Smith, who went down with the ship, as personally reckless. Mersey concluded that Smith had done "only that which other skilled men would have done in the same position," following a practice of maintaining speed and trusting the lookout that long experience had, until that night, appeared to justify. The American report was sharper, judging Smith's "indifference to danger" to be "one of the direct and contributing causes of this unnecessary tragedy," while reserving its heaviest censure for the British Board of Trade, whose lifeboat regulations it blamed for "laxity of regulation and hasty inspection."

The legend that grew around the Titanic — the unsinkable ship, the band playing on — has long obscured the soberer documented record. What the inquiries established was a chain of ordinary decisions made under a flawed regulatory regime: a captain following industry custom, a lifeboat allowance set by a Board of Trade rule a decade out of date, a near-by ship that did not respond, and a wireless service run as a passenger amenity rather than a safety system. There were no prosecutions and no individual was held legally culpable; the lasting consequences were regulatory.

Timeline

The Ship and the Voyage

RMS Titanic was the second of the White Star Line's three Olympic-class liners, built at Harland and Wolff in Belfast to win passengers not by speed but by size and luxury. At about 46,000 gross tons she was the largest moving man-made object then in existence. Her hull was divided into sixteen watertight compartments, and she was designed to float with any two adjacent compartments — or the first four — flooded. That margin fed the over-confident description of her as practically unsinkable, a phrase the owners did not formally endorse but did little to dispel.

The fatal limitation lay not only in the ship but in the rules governing her. Her twenty lifeboats had a combined capacity of 1,178, more than the Board of Trade minimum then required for her tonnage but barely half the roughly 2,208 aboard. That scale had been set in 1894 and graded by tonnage to a ceiling of 10,000 tons, and had never been revised as ships grew to four times that size. Titanic thus carried a legal but grossly insufficient number of boats — in part because more boats were thought to clutter a luxury liner's promenade decks.

She sailed from Southampton on 10 April 1912 and ran at around 21 to 22 knots. Crossing into the North Atlantic ice region on 14 April, her wireless operators — employed by Marconi, not the line, and busy relaying passengers' personal telegrams — received a series of ice warnings. Several reached the bridge; at least one, from the steamer Mesaba, appears never to have been delivered. The practice of the day, which Mersey found Smith had merely followed, was to hold speed in clear weather and rely on the lookout to sight ice in time to turn.

The Collision and the Sinking

At 23:40 on 14 April the lookouts sighted an iceberg almost dead ahead. The sea was flat calm and moonless, with no breaking surf at the berg's base to betray it at a distance. The bridge ordered the helm over and the engines reversed, but at her speed the liner could neither stop nor turn in time. Rather than strike head-on she swung just enough for the berg to scrape down her starboard side below the waterline, springing the plating and opening at least the first five or six compartments over a length the design had never anticipated.

With more than four compartments flooding, the subdivision was overwhelmed. The bulkheads did not rise high enough to contain water that, once it topped one compartment, spilled forward into the next; the ship settled by the head and drowned her own defences. Andrews and Smith understood within half an hour that the loss was certain, and Titanic began firing rockets and transmitting distress signals by wireless.

The evacuation was the part the inquiries judged most harshly, and the part most distorted in legend. There was no general alarm and no organised mustering; passengers told nothing definite were slow to leave warm cabins for open boats over a sea that still looked calm. Crews uncertain the davits would hold a full boat lowered several only partly filled, and a "women and children first" order was read by some officers as "women and children only." By the time the last boats were gone, capacity for several hundred more had been lowered empty. At 02:20 the ship broke up and sank, and roughly 1,500 people entered near-freezing water, where almost all died of cold within the hour. Around 700 in the boats survived to be picked up by the Carpathia near 04:00. The Californian had lain stopped in ice within sight of the rockets and had not come; both inquiries found she could have reached Titanic and might have saved many of the lost.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Titanic produced no convictions; its lasting force was regulatory. Within two years the maritime nations convened the first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS, 1914), which required lifeboat capacity for every person aboard, mandated lifeboat drills, and required passenger ships to keep a continuous wireless watch — directly answering the boat shortage, the unpractised evacuation, and the silent radio set the inquiries had condemned. The International Ice Patrol was established in the same period to track North Atlantic bergs along the shipping lanes, a service that continues. The Board of Trade's tonnage-based lifeboat scale was abandoned in favour of capacity for all.

For the families of the roughly 1,500 dead there was no criminal reckoning, and liability litigation against the line settled for sums many considered inadequate. The wreck lay undiscovered until 1985, when its position on the seabed confirmed the surviving officers' accounts that the ship had broken in two before sinking. More than a century on, the record of the two inquiries remains the corrective to the legend: a ship lost not to a single villain or a curse, but to a customary speed, an out-of-date rule, and a chain of unrehearsed responses.

Lessons

References

• Report of the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry into the Loss of the SS Titanic Titanic Inquiry Project (transcript of Lord Mersey's official report)
• United States Senate inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic Wikipedia (synthesis of the Senate subcommittee report and transcripts)
• British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic Wikipedia (synthesis of the Mersey report and proceedings)
• Senate Committee on Commerce, Subcommittee on the "Titanic" Disaster United States Senate (official history of the 1912 inquiry)
• Sinking of the Titanic Wikipedia (synthesis of the timeline, tolls, and contemporary accounts)