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Introduction

On Wednesday 10 April 1912, RMS Titanic embarked on her maiden voyage, carrying over 2,000 passengers, as she set sail from the port of Southampton, England, bound for New York City.

RMS Titanic was widely acknowledged to be the jewel in the crown of its owners, the White Star Line. The newly built liner was the product of the very latest advances in nautical engineering and a major achievement for its creators, Belfast shipbuilders, Harland & Wolff. It was the largest floating vessel the world had ever seen and, endowed as it was with every conceivable luxury, it was also the most opulent.

It is hardly surprising then, that the much-publicized launch of this gigantic vessel attracted intense media interest. On both sides of the Atlantic, Titanic was making headlines in national newspapers, while the cream of British and American high society, eager to bask in Titanic’s reflected glory, were lining up to book a passage on her maiden voyage.

Much of the excitement which accompanied Titanic’s unveiling was based on the expectation that it would smash the transatlantic speed record, previously held by the Mauretania, which was owned by White Star’s arch-rivals, the Cunard Line. This quest for speed did indeed see RMS Titanic sailing into the pages of history but, tragically, for all the wrong reasons.

Sadly, for her approximately 2,000 awe-struck passengers and crew, Titanic was not destined to reach its final destination. Four days into the week-long voyage, this triumph of human ingenuity and engineering struck a large iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In just over two hours, she had descended to her watery grave on the ocean floor, with the loss of over 1,500 lives.

This is the story of how, thanks in large part to a calamitous chain of unfortunate events combined with a litany of human errors, the maiden voyage of a supposedly ‘unsinkable’ ship became one of the worst maritime disasters in peacetime history.

This is the story of RMS Titanic.