The Titanic

The Titanic - History of a Disaster

On April 14,1912 a great ship called the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage. That night there were many warnings of icebergs from other ships. There seems to be a conflict on whether or not the warnings reached the bridge. We may never know the answer to this question. The greatest tragedy of all may be that there were not enough lifeboats for everyone on board. According to Walter Lord, author of The Night Lives On, the Titanic could have been saved in the very beginning of the crisis when the iceberg was first reported to the bridge. If First Officer Murdoch had steamed right at the iceberg instead of trying to avoid it, he might have saved the ship. The author feels there would have been a loud crash and anyone within the first one hundred feet would have been killed, but the ship would have remained afloat (82). This view was entirely speculation and we will never really know if this would have happened. In contrast, Geoffrey Marcus, author of The Maiden Voyage, suggests that the bridge did not receive warning of the ice from the very beginning. One of the messages received was from the Masaba warning the Titanic of a mass of ice lying straight ahead. According to Marcus, the message never reached the bridge, but instead was shoved under a paperweight (126). At 10:30 p.m. that evening, a ship going the opposite direction of the
Titanic was sighted. This ship, the Rappahannock, had emerged from an ice field and had sustained damage to its rudder. The vessel signaled the Titanic about the ice and the Titanic replied that the message was received (Marcus 127). At 11 p.m. another ice report was received. This one was from the Californian. This liner had passed through the same ice field that the Rappahannock had reported to the Titanic. Like all the other warnings, this warning never reached the bridge though it was known to both of the Titanic's wireless operators (Marcus 128). By the time the bridge realized the ship was about to hit an iceberg, it was too late. Quartermaster Hitchens tried to turn the wheel hard to the starboard. Twenty seconds later, he had an order for full speed astern but the iceberg was too close. The starboard side hit the iceberg, bringing a block of ice onto the deck (Pellegrino 21). After the collision occurred, there was only one thing open for Captain Smith to do. It was almost midnight a...

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...ion, thereby opening up the ship to the sea. Another major discovery was that the stern of the Titanic had wrenched itself away from the rest of the ship in its descent to the bottom. (Ward 186) The last survivor of the Titanic recently died in her home in Massachusetts. With her death, many of the unanswered questions of the Titanic may have also died. Hopefully, a tragedy like this will never have to happen again.
As stated before, ships are now expected to have enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Ships also route their lanes farther to the south during iceberg season. Hopefully, in some small, way this will make a difference if such an accident at sea should ever occur again.

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Work Cited

Eaton, John P., and Charles A. Haas. Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986. PP 152-184.

Pellegrino, Charles. Her Name Titanic. New York: McGraw-Hill
Publishing Company, 1988. PP 20-21.

Marcus, Geoffrey. The Maiden Voyage. New York: The Viking Press, 1969.
PP 35-128.

Lord, Walter. A Night To Remember. Mattituck: American House, 1955. PP
152-170.

Ward, Kaari, ed. Great Disasters. Pleasantville: The Reader's Digest
Association, Inc., 1989. PP 180-87.