The Sinking of the Titanic: The Iceberg Cometh

“Experts built the Titanic. Amateurs built the Ark.” – Anonymous

It was the ship “that God himself couldn’t sink,” as one so-called expert described the magnificent ocean liner, the Titanic.  But it sank anyway, this week (April 15) in 1912, and approximately 1,500 of the 2,300 people on board subsequently died in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, making the Titanic disaster one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history.   And, of course, one of the most often told and embellished stories.

Yet one of the stories with respect to the Titanic that perhaps has not gotten enough attention is the unusual weather conditions leading up to the disaster.  The winter of 1911-1912 had been unseasonably warm, meaning that the glaciers of Greenland had calved huge blocks of floating ice into the North Atlantic, including an unusually large number of icebergs, some of which were the size of mountains.  Or perhaps “islands” might be a better word to describe them, for much of the mass was submerged.  In any case, they were very large, rock hard and capable of significantly damaging if not destroying anything with which they collided.

This made them different from the icebergs of the past decade, which had collided with a number of ships crossing the Atlantic but had resulted in no casualties or significant damage.  Thus there was no reason for the Titanic’s captain, E.J. Smith, to think that icebergs posed any more of a threat than usual.

Still, only two days into its voyage the Titanic received at least seven warnings about icebergs from other ships in the Atlantic, which should have given Smith pause.  At the very least he should have considered reducing the Titanic’s speed from its very fast twenty-one-and-a-half knots, but other than responding to those other ships’ warnings with a polite “Thanks for the heads-up,” Smith did nothing and the Titanic proceeded apace.  As Smith said in dismissing the potential hazard icebergs might pose, “Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.”

As we all know, he was wrong.  Some three hours after the Titanic’s starboard side struck an iceberg, the ship sank.

Speaking of experts.  Although the Titanic had the capability to carry 64 lifeboats, which would have accommodated everyone on board, it was decided to scale back the number to just 20, in part so as not to clutter up the open-air promenades that made walking the deck so delightful for the ship’s first- and second-class passengers.  After all, the ship’s owners noted, 20 lifeboats still exceeded the British Board of Trade’s “Life Saving Appliance Rules,” which stipulated that any ship weighing more than 10,000 tons — the Titanic weighed 46,000 tons — was only required to have 16 lifeboats.