It was grand when it left Belfast! What exactly sank the Titanic?

They said she was unsinkable, they said that she was the greatest ship to have ever sailed. Yet, she never even completed her maiden voyage, floundering in the icy waters of the Atlantic, four hundred miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. She was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland for the White Star Line, she was the largest passenger ship in the world and as the famous Belfast wits maintain, she was grand when she left Belfast. And grand she was, she had it all - a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a Turkish bath, two libraries and a squash court. The first class compartments were works of art and did not come cheap, the most expensive retailing at eighty thousand dollars in today’s money! And that was only for one way! A whole lot of wedge! She first set sail from Southampton, England on 10 April 1912 bound for New York City. Five nights later she was to meet her Waterloo with the tragic loss of 1,517 lives. Theories abound as to the cause of the sinking, investigations into the disaster still take place; from which countless analyses have being derived.

At 13:45 on the day of the sinking, a message was received by one of the Marconi wireless operators aboard the Titanic from the steamer Amerika, warning of large icebergs in the Titanic’s path. However, the Marconi operators were employed solely to transmit messages to and from passengers and the vital warning ridiculously never made it to the bridge. Indeed, another ship, the Mesaba sent similar warnings later that evening but these too failed to be passed on to the captain. At 23:40, the ship struck an iceberg and seawater began flooding into the forward compartments, by the time the watertight doors were shut, five of the forward compartments were already filling with water, one too many, the ship could stay afloat with four flooded but not with five. The five water-filled compartments weighed down the ship so that the tops of the forward watertight bulkheads fell below the ship’s waterline, allowing water to begin pouring into the additional compartments. It was inevitable, the unthinkable was going to occur, the unsinkable Titanic was sinking.



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