The lifeboats, forsooth! Twenty of them in all with a maximum accommodation, if everyone were loaded to its total capacity, of something over one thousand, for a ship's company numbered 2,223 in all.įour Boat-Loads of the Titanic’s Passengers at the Carpathia’s Side.

Andrews, informed the captain that the ship was doomed was the order given to man the lifeboats. So confident were its officers of never using such equipment that no one even took the trouble to drill the crew in lowering the boats to the water. The Titanic, therefore, sailed with its life-saving equipment up to all legal requirements. A Boatload of the Titanic's Survivors Just Before They Were Succored by the 'Carpathia.' Harper's Weekly (27 April 1912) p. And the British board of trade, which exercises government authority over all British shipping, was too officially indolent to revise according to current conditions lifeboat regulations adopted when the largest ocean ships afloat were only a fifth the size of the Titanic. It was, without doubt, an honest illusion on the part of everybody connected with the firm that built the Titanic and the company that sailed it that the boat was unsinkable.

The subsidiary cause, which was owing to the tremendous loss of life-the lack of sufficient boats to carry all passengers and the whole of the crew-is more easily accounted for. The fundamental mystery of the Titanic disaster is likely, therefore, always to remain an inexplicable puzzle.

Legend For Survivor or Lost Passengers and Crew Members.

Titanic lifeboat 14