Seven ice warnings, too few boats, fifteen hundred lost
Four days out from Southampton toward New York, RMS Titanic—the largest liner then in service—grazed an iceberg at 23:40 on 14 April 1912. She sank in two hours and forty minutes on 15 April. Roughly 1,500 people died in the North Atlantic; Carpathia later lifted about 710 survivors.
Wireless operators had logged seven ice warnings that day, yet the ship still made about 22 knots when lookouts spotted the berg. A glancing starboard blow buckled plates and opened six compartments. Lifeboat rules assumed boats would ferry passengers to nearby rescuers, not hold everyone at once; with help hours away, hundreds had no safe refuge as cold shock and hypothermia killed almost everyone who entered the water—only about forty were pulled into boats.
Entered service on 2 April 1912 as the second Olympic-class giant, Titanic dwarfed earlier Cunard record-holders. Her maiden voyage left Southampton near noon on 10 April, called at Cherbourg, then Queenstown (Cobh), and headed west with 892 crew and 1,320 passengers—about half capacity in a low season disrupted by a coal strike. First-class parlour suites with private promenades cost over $4,350 one way, showcasing Edwardian luxury aboard a vessel sold as practically unsinkable in popular imagination.
Captain Edward Smith brought decades of experience from Olympic. Most crew were engineers, firemen, stewards—not boat-drill sailors. A coal-bunker fire that began about ten days before departure burned into the voyage before being extinguished on 13 April. April ice that year was the worst in fifty years, stretching in a miles-wide field the lookouts could not see until too late.
Blame spread well beyond the bridge. The liner carried just twenty lifeboats, four of them collapsibles, and many rowed away before they were full, while two never left their davits and simply floated clear as the hull went down. Around 22:07 the nearby Californian had radioed that it was stopped amid ice, but Jack Phillips, busy clearing a backlog of passenger telegrams through Cape Race, told its operator to stop transmitting. With a single wireless man aboard, Californian then missed the distress calls despite being the closest vessel. Public fury fed inquiries that led to the 1914 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which still governs shipping.
Source: Sinking of the Titanic
