Sinking of the Titanic (1912): A Belfast liner for the North Atlantic

The disaster is closed as a cause-of-loss case. The wreck was located on 1 September 1985 by a Franco-American team led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel. What remains open is heritage law: who may visit, film or lift objects from a gravesite that now sits under UNESCO and United States protective statutes.

Titanic was not the first liner lost to ice. It was the first whose passenger lists, wireless traffic and two governments’ transcripts made the failure of Edwardian safety rules impossible to bury. Harland & Wolff launched Titanic at Belfast on 31 May 1911. The liner carried twenty lifeboats with a combined capacity of about 1,178 people, a figure that met the British Board of Trade’s 1894 scale based on tonnage rather than headcount. About 2,200 passengers and crew were aboard on the maiden crossing.

Watertight bulkheads rose only as high as E Deck. Naval architect Edward Wilding later told the British inquiry that a long side-grazing tear along plate seams could flood several compartments. The design assumed a head-on or limited-compartment breach, not a running wound along the starboard side.