Sinking of the Titanic (1912): Ice warnings on a clear night

Two public inquiries sat within weeks. A United States Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator William Alden Smith heard witnesses from 19 April. In London, Lord Mersey’s court sat from 2 May to 30 July 1912, examined 97 witnesses and answered 26 Board of Trade questions. Both found that high speed in an ice field, thin lookout practice and too few lifeboats turned a collision into a mass-casualty wreck.

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.