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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    The RMS Titanic in April 1912

    The sinking of the Titanic was an event which occurred on the night and early morning of the 14th and 15th of April 1912 when the RMS Titanic, at the time the world’s largest ocean liner, sank on its maiden voyage from Britain to New York City. The ship was part of the Olympic-class of ships recently built for the White Star Line shipping company, which were widely considered to be unsinkable, such was their size and the amount of metal used in the construction of their enormous hulls. Consequently, inadequate concern was shown when reports reached the Titanic as it was voyaging along the coast of Newfoundland in eastern Canada on the 14th of April that there were large icebergs in the region. That night it struck one of these at 11.40pm. The impact pierced through several compartments in the hull and the ship began to flood and sink. It took just 160 minutes for the ship to sink, eventually breaking in half around 2.10am and sinking completely ten minutes later. Just over 1,500 of the approximately 2,240 passengers and crew on board drowned. The sinking of the ship made international headlines and dampened confidence in trans-Atlantic migration briefly in the mid-1910s.[1]

    Sinking of the Titanic chronology of events

    Captain Edward Smith

    The RMS Titanic was the largest of the three ships of the Olympic-class of ocean liners built for the White Star Line between 1907 and 1915. They were built by the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding company in the port of Belfast in the north of Ireland. The three were built as the largest ocean liners in the world as White Star sought to capitalize on the voracious demand for transport to the Americas from Europe during a period of pronounced trans-Atlantic migration. The Titanic was the largest of the Olympic-class ships. It was the second completed, after the RSM Olympic that had its maiden voyage in 1911.[2]

    The Titanic left Belfast in early April 1912 after minimal safety tests. It travelled onwards to Liverpool and then to Southampton, where White Star were basing their operations out of since 1907. Its intended route for its maiden commercial voyage was from Southampton to the port of Cherbourg in France and then the port of Queenstown (modern-day Cobh) in southern Ireland, before striking out across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. The ship left Southampton under the command of Captain Edward Smith on the 10th of April 1912.[3] It was intended that the voyage would take one week, though contrary to popular myth White Star were not trying to break the trans-Atlantic voyage record time in a way which caused Smith to navigate the ship in an irresponsible manner.[4]

    On the morning of the 14th of April, as they were cruising along the north-eastern seaboard of Canada, Smith received word of large icebergs in the region, but did not redirect the ship or slow down. That night, at approximately 11.40am, a very large iceberg hove into view approximately half a kilometer ahead. Despite efforts to turn the ship struck the iceberg hard. The Olympic-class ships were built so that several of their lower compartments could flood and the ship would still stay afloat, but five compartments were penetrated by the impact and began to take on water. They may have been made more susceptible to the impact as a coal fire had burned in one of the coal storage pits throughout much of April before finally being extinguished on the 12th of April. By midnight it was clear that the ship was going to sink and Smith ordered his crew to begin preparing the lifeboats and to radio for help.[5]

    A lifeboat from the Titanic

    The ship had only been provided with 20 lifeboats. These could take an average of 60 passengers. Therefore, there was no way that all of the ships passengers and crew could board them. Moreover, many lifeboats were launched between 0.45 am and 2.05 am which only had 35 or 40 first and second class passengers on them. Two lifeboats were not launched at all. A nearby ship, the Californian, also failed to respond to the distress call from the Titanic as its radio operator had gone to bed for the night. Thus, when the ship eventually sank at 2.20 am, ten minutes after it had violently shifted in the water and then snapped in half, just over 1,500 passengers and crew were still on board or in the water around it.[6]

    Anyone still alive in the water would have died within about half an hour as the water was freezing and even with life-jackets people can generally only survive such temperatures for 25 to 30 minutes. Just over 700 passengers and crew survived in the lifeboats. They were rescued by the Lusitania ocean liner after 4.00am and taken to New York City. A handful of individuals were plucked alive from the water, including the ship’s baker, who somehow survived for two hours in the open water.[7] News of the sinking of the ship that supposedly couldn’t be sunk went around the world and generated enormous press attention. In its aftermath new naval laws were introduced to ensure that adequate lifeboats were provided on large ocean liners going forward.[8]

    Impact of the Titanic disaster on trans-Atlantic migration

    There is a theory that the sinking of the Titanic had a substantial impact on the scale of trans-Atlantic migration in the early twentieth century. The ship had been built as part of the Olympic-class of ocean liners that the White Star Line commissioned in 1907, the busiest year in the history of the immigration center on Ellis Island in New York. On the 17th of April 1907, the busiest day in the center’s long history, over 11,700 people came through Ellis Island. They were mostly coming from Europe. The figure clearly experienced a fall in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster and the trans-Atlantic migration levels of the 1900s were never seen again thereafter. How much of this was owing to the sinking of the Titanic is open to debate.[9]

    Ellis Island pictured in 1905

    Clearly some people who had been considering migrating to the United States or Canada to start a new life there would have thought twice about their decision in light of the disaster. But eventually the anxiety would have faded. In reality the reasons for the decline in trans-Atlantic passenger numbers in the first half of the twentieth century are to be found elsewhere. Just over two years after the Titanic disaster the First World War broke out in Europe and hugely curtailed international travel. The death caused by the war and the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, revolutions and civil wars that followed it eased the demographic pressure which Europe had been under that was causing the trans-Atlantic migration in the first place. Moreover, the population explosion of the nineteenth century that occurred as an absence of family planning combined with improving medical standards in Europe was also after stabilizing. After the First World War European migration to the Americas continued to decline year on year and had become negligible by the 1950s. The sinking of the Titanic only played a very minor role in this, perhaps dissuading some people from travelling in the mid-1910s.[10]

    MyHeritage has many resources for researching the tales of the millions of people who migrated across the Atlantic during this period, but who, unlike the passengers on the Titanic, made it to Ellis Island and started a new life in America.

    Research ancestors who migrated to the Americas on MyHeritage

    Research your ancestors on MyHeritage


    See also

    Explore more about the sinking of the Titanic

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/spring/titanic.html
    2. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/titanic
    3. ↑ https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/rms-titanic-facts
    4. ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/RMS-Titanic-the-unsinkable-ship/
    5. ↑ Tim Foecke, ‘What Really Sank the Titanic’, in Materials Today, Vol. 11, No. 10 (September, 2008).
    6. ↑ Denis Smith, ‘Exploring the myth: The sinking of the Titanic’, in Industrial & Environmental Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1994), pp. 275–288.
    7. ↑ https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-did-you-know/head-baker-titanic-spent-two-hours-frigid-water-and-emerged-only-swollen-feet
    8. ↑ Formal Investigations into the Loss of the SS Titanic: Evidence, Appendices and Index (London, 1912).
    9. ↑ https://www.history.com/news/ellis-island-immigrants-compare-today-study
    10. ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/second-generation-last-great-wave-immigration-setting-record-straight


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