In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, newspapers cast Smith as a hero, the brave captain who went down with his ship. For a villain, there was J. Bruce Ismay, the White Star chairman, who got off in a lifeboat and was accused of pressuring Smith to maintain a reckless speed.
If a ship is sinking, maritime tradition dictates that the captain ensures the safe evacuation of every passenger before he evacuates himself. He (or she) is responsible for the lives of those onboard, and he can't coordinate their exit unless he's the last person off.
While we cannot know for sure how he spent his final moments, it is known that Captain Edward Smith perished in the North Atlantic along with 1517 others on April 15, 1912. His body was never recovered.
Like Captain Smith, Thomas Andrews, the designer of the Titanic, went down with his ship. It was he who delivered the shocking news to the captain that it was a mathematical certainty that the Titanic would sink, once he had found out that the ship was holed in five of its watertight compartments.
Iceberg warnings went unheeded: The Titanic received multiple warnings about icefields in the North Atlantic over the wireless, but Corfield notes that the last and most specific warning was not passed along by senior radio operator Jack Phillips to Captain Smith, apparently because it didn't carry the prefix "MSG" ( ...
The Titanic sank from human error. According to the granddaughter of the second officer of the Titanic, Louise Patten, a new steering system led to a mistake by the steersman, Robert Hitchins, into going "hard a port" instead of "hard a starboard" and straight into the iceberg instead of away from it.
Captain Smith having done all man could do for the safety of passengers and crew remained at his post on the sinking ship until the end. His last message to the crew was 'Be British. '"
Robert Hichens: How 'man who sank the Titanic' spiralled into depression before being jailed for attempted murder. The man at the wheel of the Titanic when it struck a fateful iceberg in 1912 has not been remembered well throughout history.
It was her sister, Edna Kearney Murray who survived the sinking of the Titanic but it wasn't in an overloaded lifeboat. “My great aunt Edna was in England at the time and had purchased a ticket for return passage to America on the Titanic,” Chris said.
After the disaster, Ismay was savaged by both the American and the British press for deserting the ship while women and children were still on board. Some papers called him the "Coward of the Titanic" or "J. Brute Ismay", and suggested that the White Star flag be changed to a yellow liver.
On today's date in 1912, the body of James McGrady, a saloon steward aboard the RMS Titanic, was interred in Halifax, N.S., where he's buried at Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Recovered in the preceding weeks, McGrady's body was the last body recovered from the tragic sinking that took place about two months prior.
The sea's surface shone like glass, making it hard to spot icebergs, common to the North Atlantic in spring. Nevertheless, Captain Smith kept the ship at full speed. He believed the crew could react in time if any were sighted. (Related: go on the trail of Titanic in the UK.)
As depicted in the 1997 film starring Kate Winslet, Capt Smith later received warnings of icebergs while the liner was en route to New York. But these were not heeded and the ship travelled at speed until it struck an iceberg and sank.
Of the 337 bodies recovered, 119 were buried at sea. 209 were brought back to Halifax. 59 were claimed by relatives and shipped to their home communities. The remaining 150 victims are buried in three cemeteries: Fairview Lawn, Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch.
Due to the size and speed of the Titanic it was not able to avoid the iceberg. Some historians suspect that if the order hadn't been given to stop the engines, the Titanic may have been able to swing around and out of the way of the iceberg.
As the half-filled boats rowed away from the ship, they were too far away for other passengers to reach, and most lifeboats did not return to the wreck due to a fear of being swamped by drowning victims. Only Lifeboats 4 and 14 returned to retrieve survivors from the water, some of whom later died.
The three male corpses were discovered in the collapsable boat 200 miles from the wreck site by the passing British liner RMS Oceanic on May 13, 1912. The small craft was later identified as Collapsible Boat A, the last available lifeboat from the Titanic.
John Borland Thayer III (December 24, 1894 – September 20, 1945) was a first-class passenger on RMS Titanic who survived after the ship struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912. Aged 17 at the time, he was one of only a handful of passengers to survive jumping into the frigid sea.
Cameron has visited the wreck 33 times and said he has seen "zero human remains" during his extensive explorations of the Titanic. "We've seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. But we've never seen any human remains,” said Cameron.
Yet for French chemist René Jacques Lévy, it was to be the last gesture he ever made. Moments after he gave up his seat on one of the Titanic's lifeboats for a fellow female passenger, Lévy bid farewell, stayed on deck and was never seen again.
On the night of 14 April, after Titanic had hit the iceberg, Isidor and Ida were directed to lifeboat eight. However, the ageing Isidor refused to board the lifeboat while there were younger men being prevented from boarding. Ida also refused to get into the lifeboat saying, 'Where you go, I go'.
Out of the 2,240 passengers on the Titanic, the convictions of several dozen – men and a number of women – included the more predictable thievery, drunkenness, assault and deception, but also smuggling, “prevarication”, bigamy, spying, kidnapping, preaching illegal religious ceremonies, and protesting as suffragettes.
Bruce Ismay, chairman of Titanic's owner the White Star Line persuaded the captain to continue sailing, sinking the ship hours faster than would otherwise have happened.
April 15, 1912: 'God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship' | WIRED.
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic tragically struck an iceberg in the cold Atlantic Ocean despite receiving seven warnings throughout the day of the imminent danger.