The narrative of the Titanic and the White Star Line is one of the saddest short stories ever.
The globe had been eagerly waiting for its debut and then for its sailing. It had read about how big it was and how complete and luxurious it was.
It had been a wonderful pleasure to know that such a pleasant and, most importantly, safe boat had been developed and built—the “unsinkable lifeboat.” Then, all of a sudden, to learn that it had sunk with fifteen hundred people on board!
What shocked the world was how unlikely it was that such a thing would ever happen.
If you could only write one paragraph on the Titanic’s history, it would be something like this: “Messrs. Harland & Wolf built the R.M.S. Titanic at their famous shipbuilding works on Queen’s Island, Belfast, next to her sister ship, the Olympic.”
The Twin boats were so big that special joiner and boiler shops were built to help build them, and area that was ordinarily used for three building slips was given up to them.
On March 31, 1909, the Titanic’s keel was laid. On May 31, 1911, she was launched. On March 31, 1912, she passed her trials in Belfast with officials from the Board of Trade. She arrived in Southampton on April 5 and set sail for New York on April 10 with 2,208 passengers and crew.
That same day, she stopped in Cherbourg, then Queenstown on Thursday, and then sailed for New York in the afternoon, hoping to be there the next Wednesday morning.
But the trip was never finished. She hit an iceberg on Sunday at 11:45 PM and sank two hours and a half later. 815 of her passengers and 688 of her crew died, although Carpathia saved 705 of them.
Hundreds of passengers and staff died in the freezing water right after the ship sank, surrounded by wreckage from the ship.
As Titanic broke apart on her way down to the ocean below, pieces of wood, doors, furniture, panelling, and cork from the bulkheads shot up to the surface.
The RMS Carpathia rescued the survivors of the Titanic at 4:00 a.m. on April 15. The ship had to dodge a lot of icebergs on the way and travelled at high speed and at great risk.
The survivors were quite happy to see Carpathia’s lights for the first time about 03:30, but it took several more hours for everyone to get on board. There were 705 survivors who boarded Carpathia.
When Carpathia got to Pier 54 in New York City on the night of April 18, 1912, following a long and hard trip through pack ice, fog, thunderstorms, and strong seas, over 40,000 people were waiting on the docks. They had been warned about the calamity by a stream of radio signals from Carpathia and other ships.
It wasn’t until Carpathia docked, three days after the Titanic sank, that the entire extent of the disaster became known to the public.
People were shocked and angry at the disaster, and they were angry about a number of things and people, such as why there weren’t more lifeboats.
Why did Ismay live when so many others died? Why did the Titanic go full speed into the ice field?
The survivors were not the only ones who were angry. Beesley and other survivors wrote a letter to The Times while they were on board Carpathia on their way to New York, calling for changes to maritime safety laws to “awaken public opinion to safeguard ocean travel in the future.”
There was a deep sense of loss in places that were directly linked to the Titanic. Southampton, where 699 crew members lived and many of the passengers lived, had the most deaths.
A lot of crying women—wives, sisters, and mothers of the crew—gathered outside the White Star offices in Southampton to get news on their loved ones.
Most of them were among the 549 people from Southampton who died.
Churches in Belfast were full, and shipyard workers cried in the streets.
Not only did people feel sad at the ship’s loss, but they also felt guilty since those who built Titanic thought they were somehow responsible for her demise.
(Photo credit: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Images / Library of Congress).
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