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Titanic's 100th Anniversary: 6 Survivor Stories - Biography.com

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Titanic's 100th Anniversary: 6 Survivor Stories - Biography.com

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Encyclopedia Titanica: Titanic Facts, History and Biography

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Encyclopedia Titanica: Titanic Facts, History and Biography

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Titanic facts, true stories, passenger and crew biographies, victim and survivor lists - Complete deckplans and detailed information about the disaster.

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This story appears in the April 2012 issue ofNational Geographic magazine.

The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts. From time to time, beginning with the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, a robot or a manned submersible has swept over Titanic 's gloomy facets, pinged a sonar beam in its direction, taken some images-and left.

In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we've mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible's lights. Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what's down there.

Until now. In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of the Titanic site-a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.

On closer inspection, though, the site appears to be littered with man-made detritus-a Jackson Pollock-like scattering of lines and spheres, scraps and shards. Lange turns to his computer and points to a portion of the map that has been brought to life by layering optical data onto the sonar image. He zooms in, and in, and in again. Now we can see the Titanic 's bow in gritty clarity, a gaping black hole where its forward funnel once sprouted, an ejected hatch cover resting in the mud a few hundred feet to the north. The image is rich in detail: In one frame we can even make out a white crab clawing at a railing.

Here, in the sweep of a computer mouse, is the entire wreck of the Titanic -every bollard, every davit, every boiler. What was once a largely indecipherable mess has become a high-resolution crash scene photograph, with clear patterns emerging from the murk. "Now we know where everything is," Lange says. "After a hundred years, the lights are finally on."

Bill Lange is the head of WHOI's Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, a kind of high-tech photographic studio of the deep. A few blocks from Woods Hole's picturesque harbor, on the southwestern elbow of Cape Cod, the laboratory is an acoustic-tiled cave crammed with high-definition television monitors and banks of humming computers. Lange was part of the original Ballard expedition that found the wreck, and he's been training ever more sophisticated cameras on the site ever since.

This imagery, the result of an ambitious multi-million-dollar expedition undertaken in August-September 2010, was captured by three state-of-the-art robotic vehicles that flew at various altitudes above the abyssal plain in long, preprogrammed swaths. Bristling with side-scan and multibeam sonar as well as high-definition optical cameras snapping hundreds of images a second, the robots systematically "mowed the lawn," as the technique is called, working back and forth across a three-by-five-mile target area of the ocean floor. These ribbons of data have now been digitally stitched together to assemble a massive high-definition picture in which everything has been precisely gridded and geo-referenced.

"This is a game-changer," says National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archaeologist James Delgado, the expedition's chief scientist. "In the past, trying to understand Titanic was like trying to understand Manhattan at midnight in a rainstorm-with a flashlight. Now we have a site that can be understood and measured, with definite things to tell us. In years to come this historic map may give voice to those people who were silenced, seemingly forever, when the cold water closed over them."

What is it about the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic? Why, a century later, do people still lavish so much brainpower and technological ingenuity upon this graveyard of metal more than two miles beneath the ocean surface? Why, like Pearl Harbor, ground zero, and only a few other hallowed disaster zones, does it exert such a magnetic pull on our imagination?

For some the sheer extravagance of Titanic's demise lies at the heart of its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so deep. For others the Titanic's fascination begins and ends with the people on board. It took two hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink, just long enough for 2,208 tragic-epic performances to unfold, with the ship's lights blazing. One coward is said to have made for the lifeboats dressed in women's clothing, but most people were honorable, many heroic. The captain stayed at the bridge, the band played on, the Marconi wireless radio operators continued sending their distress signals until the very end. The passengers, for the most part, kept to their Edwardian stations. How they lived their final moments is the stuff of universal interest, a danse macabre that never ends.

The mother of all shipwrecks has many homes-literal, legal, and metaphorical-but none more surreal than the Las Vegas Strip. At the Luxor Hotel, in an upstairs entertainment court situated next to a striptease show and a production of Menopause the Musical, is a semipermanent exhibition of Titanic artifacts brought up from the ocean depths by RMS Titanic, Inc., the wreck's legal salvager since 1994. More than 25 million people have seen this exhibit and similar RMST shows that have been staged in 20 countries around the world.

I spent a day at the Luxor in mid-October, wandering among the Titanic relics: A chef's toque, a razor, lumps of coal, a set of perfectly preserved serving dishes, innumerable pairs of shoes, bottles of perfume, a leather gladstone bag, a champagne bottle with the cork still in it. They are mostly ordinary objects made extraordinary for the long, terrible journey that brought them to these clean Plexiglas cases.

The RMST exhibit is well-done, but over the years many marine archaeologists have had harsh words for the company and its executives, calling them grave robbers, treasure hunters, carnival barkers-and worse. Robert Ballard, who has long argued that the wreck and all its contents should be preserved in situ, has been particularly caustic in his criticism of RMST's methodologies. "You don't go to the Louvre and stick your finger on the Mona Lisa, " Ballard told me. "You don't visit Gettysburg with a shovel. These guys are driven by greed-just look at their sordid history."

I met RMST's president, Chris Davino, at the company's artifacts warehouse, tucked next to a dog grooming parlor in a nondescript block on the edge of Atlanta's Buckhead district. Deep inside the climate-controlled brick building, a forklift trundled down the long aisles of industrial shelving stacked with meticulously labeled crates containing relics-dishes, clothing, letters, bottles, plumbing pieces, portholes-that were retrieved from the site over the past three decades. Here Davino, a dapper, Jersey shore-raised "turnaround professional" who has led RMST since 2009, explained the company's new tack. "For years, the only thing that all the voices in the Titanic community could agree on was their disdain of us," he said. "So it was time to reassess everything. We had to do something beyond artifact recovery. We had to stop fighting with the experts and start collaborating with them."

Which is exactly what's happened. Government agencies such as NOAA that were formerly embroiled in lawsuits against RMST and its parent company, Premier Exhibitions, Inc., are now working directly with RMST on various long-range scientific projects as part of a new consortium dedicated to protecting the wreck site. "It's not easy to thread the needle between preservation and profit," says Dave Conlin, chief marine archaeologist at the National Park Service, another agency that had been vehemently critical of the company. "RMST deserved the flak they got in years past, but they also deserve credit for taking this new leap of faith."

In essence Sauder was hunting for anything recognizable, any pattern amid the chaos around the stern. "We like to picture shipwrecks as Greek temples on a hill-you know, very picturesque," he told me. "But they're not. They're ruined industrial sites: piles of plates and rivets and stiffeners. If you're going to interpret this stuff, you gotta love Picasso."

Sauder zoomed in on the image at hand, and within a few minutes had solved at least a small part of the mystery near the stern: Lying atop the wreckage was the crumpled brass frame of a revolving door, probably from a first-class lounge. It is the kind of painstaking work that only someone who knows every inch of the ship could perform-a tiny part of an enormous Where's Waldo? sleuthing project that could keep Bill Sauder busy for years.

In late October I found myself in Manhattan Beach, California, inside a hangar-size film studio where James Cameron, surrounded by dazzling props and models from his 1997 movie, Titanic, had assembled a roundtable of some of the world's foremost nautical authorities-quite possibly the most illustrious conclave of Titanic experts ever gathered. Along with Cameron, Bill Sauder, and RMST explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the roundtable boasted Titanic historian Don Lynch and famed Titanic artist Ken Marschall, along with a naval engineer, a Woods Hole oceanographer, and two U.S. Navy architects.

Cameron could more than hold his own in this select company. A self-described "rivet-counting Titanic geek," the filmmaker has led three expeditions to the site. He developed and piloted a new class of nimble, fiber-spooling robots that brought back never before seen images of the ship's interior, including tantalizing glimpses of the Turkish bath and some of the opulent staterooms.

Cameron has white hair and a close-clipped white goatee, and when he's wound up on Titanic matters, a certain Melvillean intensity weighs on his brow. Cameron has also filmed the wreck of the Bismarck and is now building a submarine to take him and his cameras to the Mariana Trench. But the Titanic still holds him; he keeps swearing off the subject, only to return. "There's this very strange mixture of biology and architecture down there-this sort of biomechanoid quality," he told me at his Malibu compound. "I think it's gorgeous and otherworldly. You really feel like this is something that's gone to Tartarus-to the underworld."

At Cameron's request, the two-day roundtable would concentrate entirely on forensics: Why did the Titanic break up the way she did? Precisely where did the hull fail? At what angle did the myriad components smash into the seabed? It was to be a kind of inquest, in other words, nearly a hundred years after the fact.

"What you're looking at is a crime scene," Cameron said. "Once you understand that, you really get sucked into the minutiae. You want to know: How'd it get like that? How'd the knife wind up over here and the gun over there?"

The ship sideswiped the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward watertight compartments to the sea. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty. The demise may have been hastened, however, when crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the port side in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats from a lower level. Since the ship had begun listing to port, they could not reclose the massive door against gravity, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow had settled enough to allow seawater to rush in through the gangway.

By 2:18, with the last lifeboat having departed 13 minutes earlier, the bow had filled with water and the stern had risen high enough into the air to expose the propellers and create catastrophic stresses on the middle of the ship. Then the Titanic cracked in half.

Cameron stood up and demonstrated how it happened. He grabbed a banana and began to wrench it in his hands: "Watch how it flexes and pooches in the middle before it breaks-see that?" The banana skin at the bottom, which was supposed to represent the doubly reinforced bottom of the hull, was the last part to snap.

Once released from the stern section, the bow shot for the bottom at a fairly steep angle. Gaining velocity as it dropped, parts began to shear away: Funnels snapped. The wheelhouse crumbled. Finally, after five minutes of relentless descent, the bow nosed into the mud with such massive force that its ejecta patterns are still visible on the seafloor today.

The stern, lacking a hydrodynamic leading edge like the bow, descended even more traumatically, tumbling and corkscrewing as it fell. A large forward section, already weakened by the fracture at the surface, completely disintegrated, spitting its contents into the abyss. Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Hull plates ripped out. The poop deck twisted back over itself. Heavier pieces such as the boilers dropped straight down, while other pieces were flung off "like Frisbees." For more than two miles, the stern made its tortured descent-rupturing, buckling, warping, compressing, and gradually disintegrating. By the time it hit the ocean floor, it was unrecognizable.

Sitting back down, Cameron popped a pinched piece of banana in his mouth and ate it. "We didn't want the Titanic to have broken up like this," he said. "We wanted her to have gone down in some kind of ghostly perfection."

Listening to this learned disquisition on the Titanic 's death, I kept wondering: What happened to the people still on board as she sank? Most of the 1,496 victims died of hypothermia at the surface, bobbing in a patch of cork life preservers. But hundreds of people may still have been alive inside, most of them immigrant families in steerage class, looking forward to a new life in America. How did they, during their last moments, experience these colossal wrenchings and shudderings of metal? What would they have heard and felt? It was, even a hundred years later, too awful to contemplate.

St. John's, Newfoundland, is another of Titanic's homes. On June 8, 1912, a rescue ship returned to St. John's bearing the last recovered Titanic corpse. For months, deck chairs, pieces of wood paneling, and other relics were reported to have washed up on the Newfoundland coast.

I had hoped to pay my respects to the people who literally went down with the ship by flying to the wreck site from St. John's with the International Ice Patrol, the agency created in the disaster's aftermath to keep watch for icebergs in the North Atlantic sea lanes. When a nor'easter canceled all flights, I found my way instead to a tavern in the George Street district, where I was treated to a locally made vodka distilled with iceberg water. To complete the effect, the bartender plopped into my glass an angular nub of ice chipped from an iceberg, supposedly calved from the same Greenlandic glacier that birthed the berg that sank Titanic. The ice ticked and fizzed in my glass-the exhalations, I was told, of ancient atmospheres trapped inside.

I could still get a little closer, physically and figuratively, to those who rest forever with the ship. A few years before the disaster, Guglielmo Marconi built a permanent wireless station on a desolate, wind-battered spit south of St. John's, called Cape Race. Locals claim that the first person to receive the distress signal from the sinking ship was Jim Myrick, a 14-year-old wireless apprentice at the station who went on to a career with the Marconi Company. Initially, the transmission came in as a standard emergency code, CQD. But then Cape Race received a new signal, seldom used before: SOS.

One morning at Cape Race, amid the carcasses of old Marconi machines and crystal receivers, I met David Myrick, Jim's great-nephew, a marine radio operator and the last of a proud line of antique communicators. David said his uncle never spoke about the night the Titanic sank until he was a frail old man. By that point, Jim had lost his hearing so completely that the only way the family could converse with him was through Morse code-manipulating a smoke detector to produce high-pitched dots and dashes. "A Marconi man to the end," David said. "He thought in Morse code-hell, he dreamed in it."

We went out by the lighthouse and looked over the cold sea, which crashed into the cliffs below. An oil tanker cruised in the distance. Farther out, on the Grand Banks, new icebergs had been reported. Farther out still, somewhere beyond the bulge of the horizon, lay the most famous shipwreck in the world. My mind raced with thoughts of signals bouncing in the ionosphere-the propagation of radio waves, the cry of ages submerged in time. And I imagined I could hear the voice of the Titanic herself: A vessel with too much pride in her name, sprinting smartly toward a new world, only to be mortally nicked by something as old and slow as ice.

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This story appears in the April 2012 issue ofNational Geographic magazine. The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts.

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Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us | History | Smithsonian

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Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us | History | Smithsonian

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Dorothy Gibson-the 22-year-old silent film star- huddled in a lifeboat, dressed in only a short coat and sweater over an evening gown. She was beginning to shiver.

Ever since it had been launched, at 12:45 a.m., Lifeboat 7 had remained stationed only 20 yards away from the Titanic in case it could be used in a rescue operation. Dorothy and her mother, Pauline, who had been traveling with her, had watched as lifeboat after lifeboat left the vessel, but by just after 2 o'clock it was obvious that the vast majority of its passengers would not be able to escape from the liner. Realizing that the ship's sinking was imminent, lookout George Hogg ordered that Lifeboat 7 be rowed away from the Titanic. The risk of being sucked down was high, he thought, and so the passengers and crew manning the oars rowed as hard as they could across the pitch-black sea. Dorothy could not take her eyes off the ship, its bow now underwater, its stern rising up into the sky.

"Suddenly there was a wild coming together of voices from the ship and we noticed an unusual commotion among the people about the railing," she said. "Then the awful thing happened, the thing that will remain in my memory until the day I die."

Dorothy listened as 1,500 people cried out to be saved, a noise she described as a horrific mixture of yells, shrieks and moans. This was counterpointed by a deeper sound emanating from under the water, the noise of explosions that she likened to the terrific power of Niagara Falls. "No one can describe the frightful sounds," she remembered later.

Before stepping onto the Titanic, Dorothy Gibson had already transformed herself from an ordinary New Jersey girl into a model for the famous illustrator Harrison Fisher-whose lush images of idealized American beauty graced the covers of popular magazines-and then into a star of the silent screen.

By the spring of 1912, Dorothy was feeling so overworked that she pleaded with her employers at the Éclair studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to grant her a holiday. The days were long, and she realized that, in effect, there was "very little of the glamour connected with movie stars." She may have been earning $175 a week-the equivalent of nearly $4,000 today-but she was exhausted; she even went so far as to consider quitting the studio. "I was feeling very run down and everyone insisted I go away for a while," she recalled later. "So Mr. Brulatour made arrangements for me to have a wondrous holiday abroad. It seemed the ideal solution." (Her married 42-year-old lover, Éclair's Jules Brulatour, was one of the most powerful producers in the film industry.)

Dorothy and her mother sailed for Europe on March 17, 1912, with an itinerary that was to include not only the capitals of the Continent, but also Algiers and Egypt. However, when they arrived in Genoa from Venice on April 8, they received a telegram at their hotel requesting that Dorothy return to America. An emergency had arisen at the studio; she was needed to start work at once on a series of films. Although she had been away for only three weeks, she had benefited from the change of scene-she said she felt "like a new woman"-and cabled back to tell the studio of her plans. After a brief stopover in Paris, she would sail back to New York from Cherbourg on April 10.

There was silence in the lifeboat. "No one said a word," recalled Dorothy. "There was nothing to say and nothing we could do." Faced with the bitter cold and increasingly choppy seas, Dorothy had to acknowledge the possibility that she might not last the night. Had the wireless operators managed to send out a distress signal and call for the help of any nearby ships? The possibility that they could drift for miles in the middle of the harsh Atlantic for days on end was suddenly very real.

As dawn broke on April 15, the passengers in Lifeboat 7 saw a row of lights and a dark cloud of smoke in the distance."Warming ourselves as best we could in the cramped quarters of the lifeboat, we watched that streak of black smoke grow larger and larger," recalled Dorothy. "And then we were able to discern the hull of a steamship heading in our direction."

At around 6 o'clock the lifeboat carrying Dorothy Gibson drew up alongside the Carpathia. A few moments later, after she had climbed the rope ladder that had been lowered down from above, she found herself on deck. Still wearing her damp, wind-swept evening gown, Dorothy was approached by Carpathia passengers James Russell Lowell and his wife, and asked whether she would like to share their cabin. After eating breakfast, she retired to their quarters, where she slept for the next 26 hours.

As the Carpathia sailed into New York-on the stormy night of Thursday, April 18-it was surrounded by a mass of tiny vessels, all chartered by news corporations desperate to break what would be one of the biggest stories of modern times. From their tugs, reporters shouted through megaphones offering terrific sums of money for information and exclusives, but Captain Rostron said he would shoot any pressmen who dared venture aboard his ship.

However, one of his original passengers, Carlos F. Hurd, was a veteran journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and over the course of the past four days he had spoken to many survivors, amassing enough information for a 5,000-word story. Hurd's only problem was how to get the report off the ship. He managed to send a wireless message to a friend at the New York Evening World, which, in turn, chartered a tug to sail to the Carpathia. Out of sight of the captain, Hurd stuffed his manuscript into an oilskin bag, which he then threw down to the waiting boat. The final edition of the New York Evening World, published on April 18, carried a digest of Hurd's report, which was published in full the next morning. The story-" Titanic Boilers Blew up, Breaking Her in Two After Striking Berg"-began: "Fifteen hundred lives-the figures will hardly vary in either direction by more than a few dozen-were lost in the sinking of the Titanic, which struck an iceberg at 11:45 p.m., Sunday, and was at the ocean's bottom two hours and thirty-five minutes after."

As Dorothy Gibson stood on the deck of the Carpathia, the night was so black that she could hardly make out the skyline of New York. Unknown to her, thousands of people had come out that rainy night to witness the arrival of the Carpathia. Dorothy "ran crying down the ramp" into the arms of her stepfather, soon followed by her mother. Leonard Gibson ushered his stepdaughter and wife through the crowd and into a taxi and whisked them off to a New York restaurant. But there was only one thing on Dorothy's mind-her lover, Brulatour. She realized that it would have been inappropriate for him to meet her at the pier-this would have given rise to scandal-but she desperately needed to see him. After a couple of hours, she drove to the hotel where she had arranged to meet him.

That night Brulatour presented her with an engagement ring-a cluster of diamonds worth $1,000-and a plan: to make a dramatic one-reel film of her survival. Soon, he said, she would not only be his wife, but she would be more famous than ever before. The loss of the Titanic would make both things possible.

The public's appetite for information and details-accounts of suffering, bravery, self-sacrifice and selfishness-seemed insatiable, and Brulatour at first took advantage of it by employing the relatively new medium of newsreel. His footage of the docking of the Carpathia-which was spliced together with scenes of Capt. Edward J. Smith, who had been lost in the disaster, walking on the bridge of the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic, and shots of icebergs from the area where the liner sank, together with images of the launching of the liner-premiered in East Coast theaters on April 22. Not only was Brulatour's Animated Weekly newsreel "the first on the scene with specially chartered tugboats and an extra relay of cameramen," according to Billboard magazine, but it also showed that "the motion picture may fairly equal the press in bringing out a timely subject and one of startling interest to the public at large."

Within a few days of her arrival in New York, Dorothy had sketched out a rough outline for a story. She would play Miss Dorothy, a young woman traveling in Europe who is due to return to America on the Titanic to marry her sweetheart, Ensign Jack, in service with the U.S. Navy.

Shooting began almost immediately at the Fort Lee studio and on location on board a derelict freighter that lay in New York Harbor. She was clad in the same outfit she had worn the night she had escaped the sinking ship-a white silk evening dress, a sweater, an overcoat and black pumps.The verisimilitude of the experience was overwhelming. This wasn't so much acting, in its conventional form at least, as replaying. Dorothy drew on her memory and shaped it into a reconstruction.

When the film was released, on May 16, 1912, just a month after the sinking, it was celebrated for its technical realism and emotional power. "The startling story of the world's greatest sea disaster is the sensation of the country," stated the Moving Picture News. "Miss Dorothy Gibson, a heroine of the shipwreck and one of the most talked-of survivors, tells in this motion picture masterpiece of the enthralling tragedy among the icebergs." (The actual film no longer survives.)

"The nation and the world had been profoundly grieved by the sinking of the Titanic," she said, "and I had the opportunity to pay tribute to those who gave their lives on that awful night. That is all I tried to do." In truth, the experience had left her feeling hollow, disassociated from her reality. Soon after the release of Saved from the Titanic, Dorothy walked out of her dressing room at the Fort Lee studios and turned her back on the movie business. She was, she stated, "dissatisfied."

At some point during the summer or autumn of 1912-just as Brulatour was forming, with Carl Laemmle, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, later to become Universal Pictures-Brulatour's wife, Clara, finally decided to bring the farce that was her marriage to an end. After scandalous and protracted divorce proceedings, Gibson married Brulatour on July 6, 1917, in New York. It soon became obvious that whatever spark they had between them had been kept alive by the illicit nature of the relationship. The couple divorced in 1923.

Dorothy fled to Europe, where her mother had already settled. Ensconced in Paris, she had enough money from her alimony for everyday luxuries such as cocktails and champagne and entertained a wide range of bohemian friends including the writers Colette, H.G. Wells and James Joyce. "Oh my, what a time I am having!" she told a journalist in 1934. "I never cared much for motion pictures, you see, and I am too glad to be free of that work. I tell you it was an immense burden. I have had my share of troubles, as you know, but since coming to France, I have recovered from that and feel happy at last. Who could not be deliriously happy in this country? I have such fun. But I fear it cannot go on like this always. I have had my dream life, and am sure that someday a dark cloud will come and wash it all away!"

The shadow she feared would destroy her dream life was World War II. In May 1940, Dorothy was in Florence to collect her mother and bring her back to France when Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. It would still have been possible for the two women to return to America. The reason they didn't? Certainly their experience on the Titanic was a factor. "I must say I never wanted to make the Ocean trip to America at this time," said Dorothy later in an affidavit, "as my mother and I were most timid on the ocean-we had been in a shipwreck-but I also never wanted to stay in Italy, but we just waited in Italy always hoping things would be better to travel."

Trying to make sense of Dorothy's life from this point onward is a difficult task. In the spring of 1944, while still in Florence with her mother, she was informed by the questura, the Italian police, that she would be taken to the German-controlled Fossoli internment center. She tried to escape, but on April 16 was arrested and taken to a Nazi concentration camp. After being moved around various camps, she was imprisoned at San Vittore, which she described as a "living death." It's most likely that Gibson would have died in this camp had it not been for the machinations of a double agent, Ugo Luca Osteria, known as Dr. Ugo, who wanted to infiltrate Allied intelligence in Switzerland (something he subsequently failed to do). Gibson was smuggled out of the camp under the pretense that she was a Nazi sympathizer and spy. Although the plan worked-she did escape and crossed into Switzerland-the experience left her understandably drained. After interrogation in Zurich, where she gave an affidavit to James G. Bell, vice consul of the American consulate general, she was judged too stupid to have been a genuine spy. In Bell's words, Dorothy "hardly seems bright enough to be useful in such capacity."

Dorothy tried to resume a normal life after this episode, but the trauma of her survival-first the Titanic, then a concentration camp-took its toll. After the war ended in 1945, she returned to Paris and enjoyed a few months at the Ritz, where, on February 17, 1946, she died in her suite, probably from a heart attack, at age 56.

The sinking of the world's most famous ship generated three waves of Titanic mania. The first, as we have seen, hit popular consciousness immediately after the disaster, resulting in Brulatour's newsreel, Dorothy Gibson's film Saved from the Titanic, a clutch of books written by survivors, poems like Edwin Drew's "The Chief Incidents of the Titanic Wreck" (published in May 1912) and Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" (June 1912), and a flurry of songs (112 different pieces of music inspired by the loss of the Titanic were copyrighted in America in 1912 alone).

The First World War, and then the Second quieted the Titanic storm; the loss of hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefields of Europe, the whole-scale destruction of cities and communities around the world, and Hitler's single-minded plan to wipe out an entire race of people, together with other "undesirables," placed the sinking of the ship, with its death toll of 1,500, toward the bottom end of the league of global tragedies.

The mid-1950s is generally considered to represent the second wave of Titanic fever. In the midst of the cold war-when there was a perceived threat that, at any moment, the world could end in nuclear Armageddon-the Titanic represented a containable, understandable tragedy. A mist of nostalgia hung over the disaster-nostalgia for a society that maintained fixed roles, in which each man and woman knew his or her place; for a certain gentility, or at least an imagined gentility, by which people behaved according to a strict set of rules; for a tragedy that gave its participants time to consider their fates.

The first full-scale movie representation of the disaster in the '50s was a melodrama called simply Titanic, starring one of the ruling queens of the "woman's picture," Barbara Stanwyck. She plays Julia Sturges, a woman in the midst of an emotional crisis. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to a cold but wealthy husband, Richard (Clifton Webb), she boards the Titanic with the intention of stealing their two children away from him.

The film, directed by Jean Negulesco, was not so much about the loss of the liner as the loss, and subsequent rekindling, of love. If the scenario-a broken marriage, a devious plan to separate children from their father, a revelation surrounding true parenthood-wasn't melodramatic enough, the charged emotional setting of the Titanic was used to heighten the sentiment.

It would be easy to assume that the plotline of the abducted children in producer and screenwriter Charles Brackett's Titanic was nothing more than the product of a Hollywood screenwriter's overheated imagination. Yet the story had its roots in real life. Immediately after the Carpathia docked in New York, it came to light that on board the liner were two young French boys-Lolo (Michel) and Momon (Edmond)-who had been kidnapped by their father (traveling on the Titanic under the assumed name Louis Hoffman). Fellow second-class passenger Madeleine Mellenger, who was 13 at the time, remembered the two dark-haired boys, one aged nearly 4, the other 2. "They sat at our table . . . and we wondered where their mamma was," she said. "It turned out that he [the father] was taking them away from 'mamma' to America." In an interview later in his life, Michel recalled the majesty of the Titanic. "A magnificent ship!" he said. "I remember looking down the length of the hull-the ship looked splendid. My brother and I played on the forward deck and were thrilled to be there. One morning, my father, my brother, and I were eating eggs in the second-class dining room. The sea was stunning. My feeling was one of total and utter well-being." On the night of the sinking, he remembered his father entering their cabin and gently awakening the two boys. "He dressed me very warmly and took me in his arms," he said. "A stranger did the same for my brother. When I think of it now, I am very moved. They knew they were going to die."

Despite this, the man calling himself Louis Hoffman-real name Michel Navratil-did everything in his power to help fellow passengers safely into the boats. "The last kindness . . . [he] did was to put my new shoes on and tie them for me," recalled Madeleine. She escaped to safety with her mother in Lifeboat 14, leaving the sinking ship at 1:30 a.m., but Michel Navratil had to wait until 2:05 a.m. to place his sons in Collapsible D, the last boat to be lowered. Witnesses recall seeing the man they knew as Hoffman crouching on his knees, ensuring that each of his boys was wrapped up warmly.

As he handed his elder son over to Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, who was responsible for loading the boat, Michel stepped back, raised his hand in a salute and disappeared into the crowd on the port side of the ship. His son Michel later recalled the feel of the lifeboat hitting the water. "I remember the sound of the splash, and the sensation of shock, as the little boat shivered in its attempt to right itself after its irregular descent," he said.

After the Carpathia docked in New York, the two boys became instantly famous. Journalists dubbed the boys the "Orphans of the Deep" or the "Waifs of the Titanic " and within days their pictures were featured in every newspaper in America. Back in Nice, Marcelle Navratil, desperate to know about the fate of her children, appealed to the British and French consulates. She showed the envoys a photograph of Michel, and when it was learned that Thomas Cook and Sons in Monte Carlo had sold a second-class ticket to a Louis Hoffman-a name Navratil had borrowed from one of their neighbors in Nice-she began to understand what her estranged husband had done.

The White Star Line promptly offered their mother a complimentary passage to New York on the Oceanic, leaving Cherbourg on May 8. Only a matter of weeks later, Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York. A taxi took her to the Children's Aid Society, which had been besieged by photographers and reporters. According to a New York Times account, "The windows of the building opposite were lined with interested groups of shopworkers who had got wind of what was happening across the way and who were craning their necks and gesticulating wildly toward a window on the fifth floor where the children were believed to be." The young mother was allowed to greet her boys alone. She found Michel sitting in a corner of the room, in the window seat, turning the pages of an illustrated alphabet book. Edmond was on the floor, playing with the pieces of a puzzle.

When she entered, the boys looked anxious, but then, as they recognized their mother, a "growing wonder spread over the face of the bigger boy, while the smaller one stared in amazement at the figure in the doorway. He let out one long-drawn and lusty wail and ran blubbering into the outstretched arms of his mother. The mother was trembling with sobs and her eyes were dim with tears as she ran forward and seized both youngsters."

Although he passed away on January 30, 2001, at the age of 92, the last male survivor of the Titanic disaster, Michel always said, "I died at 4. Since then I have been a fare-dodger of life. A gleaner of time."

One of the most forthright and determined of the real Titanic voices belonged to Edith Russell, the then 32-year-old first-class passenger who had managed to get aboard one of the lifeboats, still clutching a possession she regarded as her lucky talisman-a toy musical pig that played the pop tune "La Maxixe."

Edith, a fashion buyer, journalist and stylist, had contacted producer Charles Brackett when she had first learned that the Barbara Stanwyck film was going to be made, outlining her experiences and offering her services. The letter elicited no response, as Brackett had decided not to speak to any individual survivors. The filmmakers were more interested in constructing their own story, one that would meet all the criteria of melodrama without getting bogged down by the real-life experiences of people like Edith.

The production team did, however, invite her-and a number of other survivors-to a preview of Titanic in New York in April 1953. It was an emotional experience for many of them, not least third-class passengers Leah Aks, who had been 18 at the time of the disaster, and her son, Philip, who had been only 10 months old. Edith recalled how, in the panic, the baby Philip had been torn out of his mother's arms and thrown into her lifeboat. Leah tried to push her way into this vessel, but was directed into the next lifeboat to leave the ship. Edith had done her best to comfort the baby during that long, cold night in the middle of the Atlantic-repeatedly playing the tune of "La Maxixe" by twisting the tail of her toy pig-before they were rescued.

The reunion brought all these memories back. "The baby, amongst other babies, for whom I played my little pig music box to the tune of 'Maxixe' was there," said Edith of the screening. "He [Philip] is forty-one years old, is a rich steel magnate from Norfolk, Virginia."

Edith enjoyed the event, she said, and had the opportunity of showing off the little musical pig, together with the dress she had worn on the night of the disaster. Edith congratulated Brackett on the film, yet, as a survivor, she said she had noticed some obvious errors. "There was a rather glaring inadequacy letting people take seats in the lifeboat as most of them had to get up on the rail and jump into the boat which swung clear of the side of the boat," she said. "The boat also went down with the most awful rapidity. It fairly shot into the water whereas yours gracefully slid into the water." Despite these points, she thought the film was "splendid"-she conceded he had done a "good job"-and, above all, it brought the night alive once more. "It gave me a heartache and I could still see the sailors changing the watches, crunching over the ice and going down to stoke those engines from where they never returned," she said.

After the melodrama of the Titanic film-the movie won an Academy Award in 1953 for its screenplay-the public wanted to know more about the doomed liner. The demand was satisfied by Walter Lord, a bespectacled advertising copywriter who worked for J. Walter Thompson in New York. As a boy, Lord, the son of a Baltimore lawyer, had sailed on the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic. With an almost military precision-Lord had worked as both a code clerk in Washington and as an intelligence analyst in London during World War II-he amassed a mountain of material about the ship, and, most important, managed to locate, and interview, more than 60 survivors. The resulting book, A Night to Remember, is a masterpiece of restraint and concision, a work of narrative nonfiction that captures the full drama of the sinking. On its publication in the winter of 1955, the book was an immediate success-entering the New York Times best-seller list at Number 12 in the week of December 11-and since then has never been out of print. "In the creation of the Titanic myth there were two defining moments," wrote one commentator, "1912, of course, and 1955."

Madeleine Mellenger wrote to Lord himself, telling him of her emotions when the Carpathia pulled into New York. "The noise, commotion and searchlights terrified me," she said. "I stood on the deck directly under the rigging on which Captain Arthur Rostron climbed to yell orders thru' a megaphone....I live it all over again and shall walk around in a daze for a few days." Memories of the experience came back in flashes-the generosity of an American couple, honeymooners on board the Carpathia, who gave her mother, who was shoeless, a pair of beautiful French bedroom slippers, which were knitted and topped with big pink satin bows; and the horror of being forced to spend what seemed like an eternity in a cabin with a woman, Jane Laver Herman, who had lost her husband in the sinking.

Walter Lord became a receptacle into which survivors could spill their memories and fears. He, in turn, collected survivors' tales, and memorabilia such as buttons, menus, tickets and silver spoons, with a near-obsessive passion, hoarding information about the Titanic 's passengers long after he had sent his book off to the publishers.

There was a rush to transfer Lord's book to the screen, first in an American TV drama made by Kraft Television Theatre, which had an audience of 28 million when it aired in March 1956, and then in a big-budget British movie, which would be released in 1958. The rights to the book were bought by William MacQuitty, an Irish-born producer who, like Walter Lord, had been fascinated by the Titanic since he was a boy. As a child, growing up in Belfast, he remembered teams of 20 draft horses pulling the liner's enormous anchors through the cobbled streets of the city, from the foundry to the Harland and Wolff shipyard.

MacQuitty chose Roy Baker as director, Eric Ambler as scriptwriter and Walter Lord as a consultant on the project. The overall effect MacQuitty wanted to achieve was one of near-documentary realism. Art director Alex Vetchinsky employed his obsessive eye for detail to recreate the Titanic itself. Working from original blueprints of the ship, Vetchinsky built the center third of the liner, including two funnels and four lifeboats, an undertaking that required 4,000 tons of steel. This was constructed above a concrete platform, which had to be strong enough to support the "ship" and the surging mass of hundreds of passengers who were shown clinging to the rails to the very last.

Survivor Edith Russell still felt possessive of the Titanic story-she believed it was hers alone to tell-and she wanted to exploit it for all it was worth. She and Lord met in March 1957 at a lunch given by MacQuitty at a Hungarian restaurant in London. The gentleman writer and the grand lady of fashion hit it off immediately, drawn together by a shared passion for the Titanic and a sense of nostalgia, a longing for an era that had died somewhere between the sinking of the majestic liner and the beginning of World War I. Driven by an equally obsessive interest in the subject, Lord fueled Edith's compulsion, and over the course of the next few years he sent her a regular supply of information, articles and gossip regarding the ship and its passengers.

Edith made regular visits to Pinewood, the film studio near London, to check on the production's progress. Even though Edith was not employed on the project, MacQuitty was wise enough to realize there was little point in making an enemy of her.

In the years after A Night to Remember, the storm that had gathered around the Titanic seemed to abate, despite the best efforts of the Titanic Enthusiasts of America, the organization formed in 1963 with the purpose of "investigating and perpetuating the history and memory of the White Star liners, Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic." The group, which later renamed itself the Titanic Historical Society, produced a quarterly newsletter, the Titanic Commutator, which over the years was transformed into a glossy journal. Yet, at this time, the membership comprised a relatively small group of specialists, maritime history buffs and a clutch of survivors. By September 1973, when the group held its tenth anniversary meeting, the society had a membership of only 250. The celebration, held in Greenwich, Connecticut, was attended by 88-year-old Edwina Mackenzie, who had sailed on the Titanic as 27-year-old second-class passenger Edwina Troutt. After more than 60 years she still remembered seeing the liner sink, "one row of lighted portholes after another, gently like a lady," she said.

Many people assumed that, after 50 years, the liner, and the myths surrounding it, would finally be allowed to rest in peace. But in the early hours of September 1, 1985, oceanographer and underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution-together with French explorer Jean-Louis Michel from the French organization Ifremer-discovered the wreck of the Titanic lying at a depth of roughly two and half miles, and around 370 miles southeast of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. "The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping Alpine-looking countryside overlooking a small canyon below," said Ballard, on returning to America a number of days later. "Its bow faces north. The ship sits upright on its bottom with its mighty stacks pointed upward. There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found. It is a quiet and peaceful place-and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls."

The world went Titanic-crazy once more, a frenzy that was even more intense than the previous bouts of fever. There was something almost supernatural about the resulting pictures and films, as if a photographer had managed to capture images of a ghost for the first time.

Within a couple of years of Ballard's discovery, wealthy tourists could pay thousands of dollars to descend to the site of the wreck and see the Titanic for themselves, an experience that many likened to stepping into another world. Journalist William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the first observers outside the French and American exploratory teams to witness the ship at close quarters. "We descend slowly to what looks like a yellow-white sandy beach, sprinkled with black rocklike objects," he wrote in the New York Times. "These, it transpires, are pieces of coal. There must be 100,000 of them in the area we survey, between the bow of the ship and the stern, a half-mile back. On my left is a man's outdoor shoe. Left shoe. Made, I would say, of suede of some sort. I cannot quite tell whether it is laced up. And then, just off to the right a few feet, a snow-white teacup. Just sitting there...on the sand. I liken the sheer neatness of the tableau to a display that might have been prepared for a painting by Salvador Dali."

Over the course of the next few years, around 6,000 artifacts were recovered from the wreck, sent to a specialist laboratory in France and subsequently exhibited. The shows-the first of which was held at the National Maritime Museum in London in 1994- proved to be enormous crowd-pleasers. Touring exhibitions such as "Titanic Honour and Glory" and "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" have been seen by millions of people all around the world. Items on display include a silver pocket watch, its hands stopped at 2:28 a.m., the time the Titanic was sinking into the ice-cold waters of the Atlantic; the Steiff teddy bear belonging to senior engineer William Moyes, who went down with the ship; the perfume vials belonging to Adolphe Saalfeld, a Manchester perfumer, who survived the disaster and who would have been astonished to learn that it was still possible to smell the scent of orange blossom and lavender nearly 100 years later. There were cut-crystal decanters etched with the swallowtail flag of the White Star Line; the white jacket of Athol Broome, a 30-year-old steward who did not survive; children's marbles scooped up from the seafloor; brass buttons bearing the White Star insignia; a selection of silver serving plates and gratin dishes; a pair of spectacles; and a gentleman's shaving kit. These objects of everyday life brought the great ship-and its passengers-back to life as never before.

After returning to Britain, Millvina grew up to lead what, at first sight, seems to be an uneventful life. Then, Ballard made his discovery. "Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either," she said. "But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me."

This was followed in 1997 by the release of James Cameron's blockbuster film, Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as two lovers from vastly different backgrounds who meet on board the doomed ship. Suddenly, in old age, Millvina was famous once more. "The telephone rang all day long," she told me. "I think I spoke to every radio station in England. Everybody wanted interviews. Then I wished I had never been on the Titanic, it became too much at times."

In the same way, Millvina was often asked to repeat her story of that night, but her account was secondhand, most of it pieced together from what her mother had told her, along with fragments from newspapers and magazines.

The Titanic came to represent a ship of dreams for Millvina, a vessel that would take her on a surreal journey. She transformed herself not only into a celebrity but also, as she freely admitted, into a piece of "living history." "For many people I somehow represent the Titanic," she said.

After a short illness, Millvina died on May 31, 2009; at 97, she had been the last survivor of the Titanic.

A few weeks after the Titanic disaster, Thomas Hardy wrote "The Convergence of the Twain," his famous poem about the conjunction between the sublime iceberg and the majestic liner. First published in Fortnightly Review in June 1912, it articulates the "intimate wedding" between a natural phenomenon and a symbol of the machine age. The marriage of the "shape of ice" and the "smart ship" is described as a "consummation," a grotesque union that "jars two hemispheres." One hundred years after the sinking we are still feeling the aftershocks of the wreck as the "twin halves" of this "august event" continue to fascinate and disturb us in equal measure.

Indeed, the disaster has become so invested with mythical status-it's been said that the name Titanic is the third most widely recognized word in the world, after "God" and "Coca-Cola"-that it almost seems to be a constant, an event that repeats itself on a never-ending loop.

Andrew Wilson, based in London, drew on unpublished sources and archival research for his new book on the Titanic saga.

Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Wilson. From the forthcoming book Shadow of the Titanic by Andrew Wilson to be published by Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

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Dorothy Gibson-the 22-year-old silent film star- huddled in a lifeboat, dressed in only a short coat and sweater over an evening gown. She was beginning to shiver. Ever since it had been launched, at 12:45 a.m., Lifeboat 7 had remained stationed only 20 yards away from the Titanic in case it could be used in a rescue operation.

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Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic

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Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 14-15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, killing about 1,500 ( see Researcher's Note: Titanic) passengers and ship personnel. One of the most famous tragedies in modern history, it inspired numerous stories, several films, and a musical and has been the subject of much scholarship and scientific speculation.

Origins and construction

In the early 1900s the transatlantic passenger trade was highly profitable and competitive, with ship lines vying to transport wealthy travelers and immigrants. Two of the chief lines were White Star and Cunard. By the summer of 1907, Cunard seemed poised to increase its share of the market with the debut of two new ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, which were scheduled to enter service later that year. The two passenger liners were garnering much attention for their expected speed; both would later set speed records crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Looking to answer his rival, White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay reportedly met with William Pirrie, who controlled the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff, which constructed most of White Star's vessels. The two men devised a plan to build a class of large liners that would be known for their comfort instead of their speed. It was eventually decided that three vessels would be constructed: the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic.

On March 31, 1909, some three months after work began on the Olympic, the keel was laid for the Titanic. The two ships were built side by side in a specially constructed gantry that could accommodate their unprecedented size. The sister ships were largely designed by Thomas Andrews of Harland and Wolff. In addition to ornate decorations, the Titanic featured an immense first-class dining saloon, four elevators, and a swimming pool. Its second-class accommodations were comparable to first-class features on other ships, and its third-class offerings, although modest, were still noted for their relative comfort.

Understanding the Titanic Disaster

As to safety elements, the Titanic had 16 compartments that included doors which could be closed from the bridge, so that water could be contained in the event the hull was breached. Although they were presumed to be watertight, the bulkheads were not capped at the top. The ship's builders claimed that four of the compartments could be flooded without endangering the liner's buoyancy. The system led many to claim that the Titanic was unsinkable.

Following completion of the hull and main superstructure, the Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911. It then began the fitting-out phase, as machinery was loaded into the ship and interior work began. After the Olympic's maiden voyage in June 1911, slight changes were made to the Titanic's design. In early April 1912 the Titanic underwent its sea trials, after which the ship was declared seaworthy.

As it prepared to embark on its maiden voyage, the Titanic was one of the largest and most opulent ships in the world. It had a gross registered tonnage (i.e., carrying capacity) of 46,328 tons, and when fully laden the ship displaced (weighed) more than 52,000 tons. The Titanic was approximately 882.5 feet (269 metres) long and about 92.5 feet (28.2 metres) wide at its widest point.

Maiden voyage

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage, traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City. Nicknamed the "Millionaire's Special," the ship was fittingly captained by Edward J. Smith, who was known as the "Millionaire's Captain" because of his popularity with wealthy passengers. Indeed, onboard were a number of prominent people, including American businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, British journalist William Thomas Stead, and Macy's department store co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida. In addition, Ismay and Andrews were also traveling on the Titanic.

The voyage nearly began with a collision, however, when suction from the Titanic caused the docked New York to swing into the giant liner's path. After an hour of maneuverings to prevent the accident, the Titanic was under way. On the evening of April 10 the ship stopped at Cherbourg, France. The city's dock was too small to accommodate the Titanic, so passengers had to be ferried to and from the ship in tenders. Among those boarding were John Jacob Astor and his pregnant second wife, Madeleine, and Molly Brown. After some two hours the Titanic resumed its journey. On the morning of April 11 the liner made its last scheduled stop in Europe, at Queenstown ( Cobh), Ireland. At approximately 1:30 pm the ship set sail for New York City. Onboard were some 2,200 people, approximately 1,300 of whom were passengers.

Final hours

Throughout much of the voyage, the wireless radio operators on the Titanic, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, had been receiving iceberg warnings, most of which were passed along to the bridge. The two men worked for the Marconi Company, and much of their job was relaying passengers' messages. On the evening of April 14 the Titanic began to approach an area known to have icebergs. Smith slightly altered the ship's course to head farther south. However, he maintained the ship's speed of some 22 knots. At approximately 9:40 pm the Mesaba sent a warning of an ice field. The message was never relayed to the Titanic's bridge. At 10:55 pm the nearby Leyland liner Californian sent word that it had stopped after becoming surrounded by ice. Phillips, who was handling passenger messages, scolded the Californian for interrupting him.

Two lookouts, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, were stationed in the crow's nest of the Titanic. Their task was made difficult by the fact that the ocean was unusually calm that night: because there would be little water breaking at its base, an iceberg would be more difficult to spot. In addition, the crow's nest's binoculars were missing. At approximately 11:40 pm, about 400 nautical miles (740 km) south of Newfoundland, Canada, an iceberg was sighted, and the bridge was notified. First Officer William Murdoch ordered both the ship "hard-a-starboard"-a maneuver that under the order system then in place would turn the ship to port (left)-and the engines reversed. The Titanic began to turn, but it was too close to avoid a collision. The ship's starboard side scraped along the iceberg. At least five of its supposedly watertight compartments toward the bow were ruptured. After assessing the damage, Andrews determined that, as the ship's forward compartments filled with water, its bow would drop deeper into the ocean, causing water from the ruptured compartments to spill over into each succeeding compartment, thereby sealing the ship's fate. The Titanic would founder. (By reversing the engines, Murdoch actually caused the Titanic to turn slower than if it had been moving at its original speed. Most experts believe the ship would have survived if it had hit the iceberg head-on.)

Smith ordered Phillips to begin sending distress signals, one of which reached the Carpathia at approximately 12:20 am on April 15, and the Cunard ship immediately headed toward the stricken liner. However, the Carpathia was some 58 nautical miles (107 km) away when it received the signal, and it would take more than three hours to reach the Titanic. Other ships also responded, including the Olympic, but all were too far away. A vessel was spotted nearby, but the Titanic was unable to contact it. The Californian was also in the vicinity, but its wireless had been turned off for the night.

As attempts were made to contact nearby vessels, the lifeboats began to be launched, with orders of women and children first. Although the Titanic's number of lifeboats exceeded that required by the British Board of Trade, its 20 boats could carry only 1,178 people, far short of the total number of passengers. This problem was exacerbated by lifeboats being launched well below capacity, because crewmen worried that the davits would not be able to support the weight of a fully loaded boat. (The Titanic had canceled its scheduled lifeboat drill earlier in the day, and the crew was unaware that the davits had been tested in Belfast.) Lifeboat number 7, which was the first to leave the Titanic, held only about 27 people, though it had space for 65. In the end, only 705 people would be rescued in lifeboats.

As passengers waited to enter lifeboats, they were entertained by the Titanic's musicians, who initially played in the first-class lounge before eventually moving to the ship's deck. Sources differ on how long they performed, some reporting that it was until shortly before the ship sank. Speculation also surrounded the last song they performed-likely either Autumn or Nearer My God to Thee. None of the musicians survived the sinking.

By 1:00 am water was seen at the base (E deck) of the Grand Staircase. Amid the growing panic, several male passengers tried to board lifeboat number 14, causing Fifth Officer Harold Lowe to fire his gun three times. Around this time, Phillips's distress calls reflected a growing desperation as one noted that the ship "cannot last much longer."

As the Titanic's bow continued to sink, the stern began to rise out of the water, placing incredible strain on the midsection. At about 2:00 am the stern's propellers were clearly visible above the water, and the only lifeboats that remained on the ship were three collapsible boats. Smith released the crew, saying that "it's every man for himself." (He was reportedly last seen in the bridge, and his body was never found.) At approximately 2:18 am the lights on the Titanic went out. It then broke in two, with the bow going underwater. Reports later speculated that it took some six minutes for that section, likely traveling at approximately 30 miles (48 km) per hour, to reach the ocean bottom. The stern momentarily settled back in the water before rising again, eventually becoming vertical. It briefly remained in that position before beginning its final plunge. At 2:20 am the ship foundered as the stern also disappeared beneath the Atlantic. Water pressure allegedly caused that section, which still had air inside, to implode as it sank.

Hundreds of passengers and crew went into the icy water. Fearful of being swamped, those in the lifeboats delayed returning to pick up survivors. By the time they rowed back, almost all the people in the water had died from exposure. In the end, more than 1,500 perished. Aside from the crew, which had about 700 fatalities, third class suffered the greatest loss: of approximately 710, only some 174 survived. (Subsequent claims that passengers in steerage were prevented from boarding boats, however, were largely dispelled. Given Smith's failure to sound a general alarm, some third-class passengers did not realize the direness of the situation until it was too late. Many women also refused to leave their husbands and sons, while the difficulty of simply navigating the complex Titanic from the lower levels caused some to reach the top deck after most of the lifeboats had been launched.)
Read our timeline of the Titanic's final hours.

Rescue

The Carpathia arrived in the area at approximately 3:30 am, more than an hour after the Titanic sank. Lifeboat number 2 was the first to reach the liner. Over the next several hours the Carpathia picked up all survivors. White Star chairman Ismay wrote a message to be sent to the White Star Line's offices: "Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning fifteenth after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life; further particulars later." At approximately 8:30 am the Californian arrived, having heard the news some three hours earlier. Shortly before 9:00 am the Carpathia headed for New York City, where it arrived to massive crowds on April 18.

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Titanic | History, Sinking, Rescue, Survivors, Movies, & Facts

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Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 14-15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, killing about 1,500 people. One of the most famous tragedies in modern history, it inspired numerous works of art and has been the subject of much scholarship.

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Everyone knows the Titanic was big, and we have the hard numbers to prove it. Discover what made it a supersized ship.