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Fifteen Hundred Dead: The Decisions That Made the Titanic a Tomb
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 11:40 PM on April 14, 1912, an iceberg scraped along Titanic's starboard hull and sealed the fate of 1,500 people — but the dying had started long before the collision. This episode traces every decision, assumption, and failure that turned the world's most celebrated ship into history's most famous shipwreck.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At two-twenty in the morning on April fifteenth, nineteen twelve, the largest moving object ever built by human hands slipped beneath the North Atlantic. It took two hours and forty minutes to die.
Titanic left Belfast after her sea trials, stopped at Southampton to board the majority of her passengers and crew, then called at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown, on the southern Irish coast, before turning west toward New York. She was four days into that crossing when the iceberg found her.
Ship's designer Thomas Andrews was aboard. He was brought down to assess the damage within the first half hour.
The evacuation started slowly. Many passengers didn't believe the ship was sinking.
The situation was worst for the passengers least able to navigate it. The third-class steerage decks were deep in the ship's lower sections.
Eight musicians were aboard. They weren't required to play during the emergency.
Here's the part that's never easy to absorb. There was another ship nearby.
The ship that did come was the RMS Carpathia, under Captain Arthur Rostron. She was fifty-eight miles away when the distress signal reached her wireless operator at twelve-twenty AM.
The inquiries in Britain and the United States reached broadly similar conclusions. Too few lifeboats.
The Titanic didn't sink because of bad luck. It sank because of layered, compounding failures, each one made possible by the one before it.
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