The Titanic
Titanic never completed a single Atlantic crossing, yet the ship built in Belfast has been talked about for more than a century. Here's the story behind the legend.
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Quick Facts
- What happened
- RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on 14 April 1912 and sank in the early hours of 15 April, on her maiden voyage
- Built
- Harland and Wolff, Belfast; launched 31 May 1911
- Route
- Southampton to New York, with stops at Cherbourg and Queenstown (now Cobh)
- Length
- About 269 metres (882 ft)
- People on board
- Roughly 2,200
- Lives lost
- Around 1,500
- Rescue ship
- Carpathia, under Captain Arthur Rostron, picked up about 710 survivors
- Wreck discovered
- 1 September 1985, by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, about 3,800 metres down
The ship that ran out of lifeboats, not luck
On the night of 14 April 1912 the largest moving object ever built struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Within about two and a half hours she had gone to the bottom, taking around 1,500 people with her. The ship was a marvel. Titanic was built at Harland and Wolff in Belfast, was nearly 270 metres long, and carried everything from a swimming pool to a lavish first-class staircase. She left Southampton on 10 April, called at Cherbourg and Queenstown, then pointed her bow at New York. She carried 20 lifeboats with space for 1,178 people, in line with outdated regulations that linked lifeboat numbers to a ship's tonnage rather than to the number of passengers. There were about 2,200 people on board. That arithmetic decided who lived.
Forty minutes to midnight
Lookouts Fred Fleet and Reginald Lee spotted the berg ahead at about 11:40pm. The ship turned, but not enough. The ice did not tear a single gash. It buckled the hull plates along the starboard side and let the sea into several forward compartments, too many for the ship to survive. Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, who was travelling aboard, worked out quickly how little time there was. Captain Edward Smith ordered the boats to be uncovered, and wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride sent out distress calls, among them the then-new SOS. Some boats left half empty. Third-class passengers faced longer routes up through the ship, and the proportion of men lost was far higher than that of women and children. Titanic broke apart as she sank and went down at about 2:20am.
The ship that came the long way round
Cunard liner Carpathia, about 58 miles away, turned towards the distress calls. Captain Arthur Rostron pushed her hard through ice-strewn water and reached the lifeboats at about 4am. She took on roughly 710 survivors and carried them to New York. Another ship, Californian, was close by but her wireless was off for the night. The inquiries that followed were sharp about it. A few lives show how strange the whole story was. Stewardess Violet Jessop survived the sinking, and had already been aboard Titanic's sister ship Olympic when she collided with a warship. She later served on a third sister, Britannic, when it sank in 1916. The last Titanic survivor, Millvina Dean, was only two months old in 1912 and died in 2009 at the age of 97.
Myths versus the real story
Was she called unsinkable? Not quite. A trade journal described the ship as practically unsinkable and the idea took hold, but it was never the White Star Line's grand slogan. It became the later hook that made the tragedy feel like hubris. Did the band play on? Survivors said musicians did play as the ship went down, and bandleader Wallace Hartley died with his colleagues. The details of what they played are less certain than legend would like. Was Jack Dawson aboard? No. He and Rose are inventions of the 1997 film. But other characters existed: J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, survived and was criticised for it ever after. And the nickname Unsinkable Molly Brown for survivor Margaret Brown was only popularised years later.
Why it changed the sea for good
Inquiries in Britain, under Lord Mersey, and in the United States, led by Senator William Alden Smith, produced some of the biggest reforms in maritime history. The 1914 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea required lifeboat space for everyone on board and round-the-clock radio watches. The International Ice Patrol was set up to track bergs in the Atlantic. The wreck itself was not found until 1 September 1985, when Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel located it about 3,800 metres below the surface. The bow and stern lie roughly 600 metres apart, surrounded by a debris field. Titanic still matters because she combines human ambition, class divisions, bad decisions, and bravery in a single night.
What you can still see today
The wreck is far out of reach for most people, but the places around the story are not. In Belfast, the Titanic Quarter stands on the shipyard site, with the huge slipways where the ship took shape, the former Harland and Wolff drawing offices, and the Titanic Belfast museum, which opened in 2012. Nearby lies SS Nomadic, the little tender that ferried Titanic's passengers at Cherbourg. Southampton, from where she sailed, remembers the crew who came from its streets, and its SeaCity Museum tells their stories. Cobh in County Cork, once Queenstown, was her last port of call and has its own Titanic exhibition.
Notable people
- Edward Smith
- Thomas Andrews
- J. Bruce Ismay
- Arthur Rostron
- Violet Jessop
- Jack Phillips
- Harold Bride
- Wallace Hartley
- Millvina Dean
- Robert Ballard
- Lord Mersey
- William Alden Smith
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