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The disaster occurred between the night of April 14 and the early morning of April 15, 1912.
The RMS Titanic, the largest and most majestic passenger ship ever built, was on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, USA, when it struck an iceberg in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
And its sinking killed 1,500 people.
The newspapers were then filled with stories about heroes, but also villains who would have contributed to the tragedy.
Some time ago, historian Paul Louden-Brown analyzed five of the myths that persist about the famous shipwreck for the BBC.
1. The “unsinkable” vessel
As soon as the waters blanketed the Titanic in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, the myths surrounding its design, construction and voyage of the liner began.
Like all popular stories, our understanding of what really happened has been clouded by the way the disaster has been told over the years.
The builders, Harland & Wolff shipyards in Belfast, and the owner of the Titanic, the shipping company White Star Line, allegedly claimed it was “unsinkable”.
But what they actually said was that the ship was “practically unsinkable”, that is, “almost”. It was certainly an unfortunate statement, which would haunt both the builder and the owner for years to come.
Not only did the designers of the Titanic say it was “unsinkable,” there was still a word.
When it started operating in 1912, the Titanic was neither the best nor the most technically advanced of its time. Being the tallest, which rarely indicates anything is better, was the only record he held.
The massive ship and her brother, the Olympic, were designed to compete with the liners Lusitania and Mauretania, which entered service in 1907 for rival shipping company Cunard Line.
These yeses were designed and built to break records, and both had won at certain points in their careers the Blue Band, an award for the fastest crossing.
Instead, the Titanic and the Olympic should be described as the wide-bodied Boeing 747s of their time.
As giants traveling at moderate speeds and with plenty of room for large cargoes, they posed a great commercial threat to Cunard’s smaller and more expensive ships.
2. Your Achilles heel
Creating ships of this size was a challenge.
Knowing this, Harland & Wolff adopted proven and therefore reliable methods to build the Titanic.
Thus, they did not take any risks when choosing the engines and opted for a larger version of those already used experimentally in 1909 with the Laurentic, another of the ships of the White Star Line shipping company.
The history of the Titanic has fascinated many for more than a century.
The Titanic’s hull and deck were also enlarged versions of designs that had been tweaked for decades. And her stern was an exact copy of that of an 18th century sailboat, forged from steel: a perfect example of the lack of technical development.
Compared to the rudder design of Cunard Line ships, that of the Titanic was considerably smaller.
They disregarded the boat’s scale and little thought was given to how, with its length or length of 260 meters, it could turn in an emergency or avoid hitting an iceberg.
It was the Achilles heel of the Titanic.
3. I was going very fast
By design, the Titanic would never compete in speed or maneuverability with Cunard’s ships, but that didn’t matter. White Star had long ruled out fixing marks along this line.
Yet, we often hear that the Titanic was trying to set a record on its maiden voyage, trying to get to New York City earlier than expected.
But this is not true.
Although the idea of the Titanic traveling at high speed became popular, not all of its boilers were on when it collided.
Not all of the Titanic’s boilers had ignited and, in addition, it was sailing the southern route, the longest across the Atlantic, precisely to avoid the icebergs, which it did not realize.
But even if all the boilers had been fired, the maximum speed the boat could have reached was 21 knots, far from the 26 knots regularly recorded by the Cunard Line.
The Titanic did not attempt to cross at full speed due to the risk of potential engine damage, and its passengers would have been uncomfortable arriving a day before their hotel or train reservations in New York.
4. The cowardice of the boss
J. Bruce Ismay, President and CEO of White Star Line, was a passenger on the ship.
The myths surrounding him are plentiful, but almost all of them aim to mark him as a coward for escaping the sinking ship while other passengers, especially women and children, have been left to fend for themselves. .
But in reality, Ismay helped board and unload several lifeboats, and he performed better than many of the crew and passengers.
He got into one of the boats when there were no other passengers nearby who could be rescued.
Some witnesses said he was ordered to get into the lifeboat. In his inquiry into what happened, Judge John Charles Bigham said: “If he had not come, he would have just added another, his own, to the number of lives lost.”
J. Bruce Ismay, the head of the Titanic Company, was on board the ship.
Ismay’s fault was to have survived and, therefore, to be judged by the moral code of the American press.
He was condemned by public opinion in the United States, but upon his return to the United Kingdom, he received acclaim and applause as he stepped onto the podium in Liverpool. The British press had treated the episode in a much less critical manner.
In a second, more serious indictment, Ismay allegedly ordered Captain Edward J. Smith, the captain of the Titanic, to “take a record trip”, which indirectly caused the collision with the iceberg.
An experienced ship’s captain like Smith, on his last voyage before retirement and the highest paid commander in the merchant navy, is unlikely to yield to Ismay over matters of navigation.
No firm evidence has ever been uncovered in this regard and other than talking to the various department heads on the ship, everything shows that he behaved like many other passengers. However, this is not the image that has remained of him.
Cinema has helped spread many myths about the Titanic.
5. El herosmo del capitn Smith
The popular press told how some died as heroes in the shipwreck. Captain Smith is precisely remembered like that.
And it’s still ironic that the man directly responsible for the Titanic tragedy remembers this way, while Ismay, who has tried to save lives the evidence shows, has gone down in history as a coward.
Captain Smith ignored warnings that there was ice near the ship, Louden-Brown said.
However, Smith let down the passengers and crew of the Titanic.
He ignored the icing warnings, did not slow down when alerted to the danger on the road, and allowed the lifeboats to sail partially full, unnecessarily adding at least 500 names to the dead list.
But who was really responsible for the tragedy?
The UK government’s Board of Trade has cleared the Titanic to sail without enough lifeboats.
The government was simply unaware of the advancements in marine engineering and the regulation it established is that on ships up to 10,000 Gross Registered Tonnes (GRT) there must be 16 lifeboats. .
The Titanic had 46,329 tbr and was designed to accommodate 3,511 passengers, in addition to the crew. But he only had lifeboats for 962 people. In fact, White Star added four more collapsible boxes, increasing the capacity to 1178.
But if Smith hadn’t failed in his duty, these ships would have been completely filled. The first to set sail did so with 12 of the 40 he could carry on board.
The Titanic is thus presented as a monument to overconfidence in technology and a reminder of its weakness in the face of the forces of nature.
But it must also be the memory of a time when millions of emigrants crossed the Atlantic in search of a new life, in a new world, a monument to a unique event in history.
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