The shipwreck of the Titanic

Today marks the anniversary of one of the most dramatic events in the history of maritime navigation: the shipwreck of the Titanic, known as “the ship of dreams”.
The RMS Titanic was a British transatlantic of the Olympic class which, shortly after the start of its voyage, sank on April 15th, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. To this day, the wreck is still being studied.

The beginning of the voyage

In 1908, at the Harland and Woolf shipyards in Belfast, the entrepreneurs J. Bruce Ismay and W. James Pirrie financed a project which involved the construction of massive vessels that could face any type of sea voyage and demonstrate how much naval technology had progressed. The project included the making of three sister ships: the Olympic, the Titanic and the Gigantic.
The Titanic was launched in May 1911 and a year later, its memorable voyage began.
On 11 April 1912, the ship sailed from the port of Southampton, England, with lots of passengers on board, including Irish emigrants looking for a better future in America.

The iceberg

The first days of the trip were peaceful and the Titanic gave the impression of being the ship of dreams.
There was every kind of comfort onboard, and the passengers enjoyed a stunning view, it was like they were living in a fairytale.

However, the ship had some flaws. The transatlantic didn’t have adequate spyglasses while crossing the Atlantic Ocean at high speed, probably due to an excessive sense of human safety which is a frequent mistake during sea voyages.

On April 14th, 1912, at 23:40, the Titanic hit a massive iceberg that heavily damaged its right side.

The end of a dream

Initially, what seemed to be a minor inconvenience was, eventually, the cause of the sinking of the Titanic.
The iceberg had struck a crucial spot of the vessel which began to fill with water, with critical consequences. Within a few hours the first five compartments were flooded: the forepeak, the mail-holder and the boiler.
The ship tilted so much that it broke in two parts; one of the two parts, the bow, sank immediately. Then, the stern initially straightened up but later plummeted. What was meant to be a trip in the ship of dreams turned out to be a nightmare that caused the death of most of the passengers on board.
Some vanished with the ship; others couldn’t face the low temperatures of the Atlantic Ocean; and others died waiting for the rescuers who arrived several hours after the sinking.