A Night to Remember

The shocking disillusionment that befell the Titanic’s passengers following such confidence, triviality, and arrogance stunned her survivors, investors, the nautical community, and the world. The Edwardian period, during which the Titanic was designed, built, and sailed, was defined by a self-congratulatory attitude among the most privileged members of Western society, who were enjoying the fruits of their prowess. They’d transformed steam into power, incorporated electricity, begun a production line of automobiles, and defied gravity in their growing industrial and architectural accomplishments. A sense of mastery over nature and the elements at whose mercy their ancestors had once lived pervaded Western society. Their confidence in their creations—and in the infallibility of those creations—engendered a kind of “blindness.” At the height of that arrogance were the aristocrats and tycoons who made up the Titanic’s elite first-class passenger roster.

The Titanic’s owners believed that they’d addressed all the possible concerns and engineered around any possible obstacles—and that they could control all potential emergencies on board. A built-in contingency was presumed for every single possible negative scenario. The number of people who refused to get into the lifeboats, either because they didn’t wish to be inconvenienced or because they couldn’t appreciate the gravity of what was happening around them is a testament to how aggressively the myth of the Titanic’s invincibility had permeated the lore surrounding her even before her first voyage. Four days into the Titanic’s maiden excursion across the Atlantic, a lifeboat drill was scheduled, and though the crew members were unfamiliar with the ship and inexperienced with the new arm-and-davit mechanisms for lowering the lifeboats, Captain Smith canceled it. In 1906, Captain Smith was quoted as saying, “I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. […] Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that” (31).

The belief that the Titanic could never sink was so ingrained in the minds of the people aboard and around the world that the assumption was that the worst-case scenario at sea would entail the Titanic remaining afloat but incapacitated while her passengers were offloaded onto other ships and she awaited boats to assist her with towing and repairs. The lifeboats, in the Titanic’s case, were meant shuttle back and forth to ferry passengers from the Titanic to another ship; it never occurred to the crew—or to the officials at the White Star Line—that the lifeboats would be required to save passengers from going down with the ship or drifting in the open water waiting for help to arrive. One of the most impactful discoveries in recent decades was an analysis of the Titanic’s hull, which determined that the 300-foot gash cited by Lord and other Titanic historians was an inaccurate assessment. National Geographic researchers have learned that the damage to the Titanic’s hull was confined to an approximately 30-foot area adding up to approximately 11 square feet, allowing 370 gallons of seawater to enter the ship’s hull every second. Several relatively small holes in a leviathan iron hull became the catalyst for catastrophe. No matter how fast they could travel, how smoothly they could glide across the water, and how many elegant courses they could consume in a single sitting, the Titanic’s passengers were no match for the falling temperature of the air and the ocean and the icy water.