The ship was certified unsinkable.
No such certificate existed. Publicity and press used the word; the inquiry treated subdivision as a design claim that failed in a side-grazing flood.
Cause of loss is closed. Ethics of the wreck and the exact death list are not.
English folklore still prefers a cursed ship to a Board of Trade table.
Still open
- A complete named death list — Steerage and some crew entries remain disputed. Compilers still differ by tens of names around Mersey’s 1,490.
- How the hull opened — Grazing seams versus a long gash is an engineering argument. It does not reopen the iceberg finding.
- Salvage versus grave — Who may lift objects, and for which museums, is still litigated and diplomatically managed.
- Californian’s distance — Lord’s exact range and what his officers saw remain a side controversy with no change to Titanic’s own navigation.
- Climate of the ice field — Oceanographers revisit 1912 ice as climate history; that research is context, not a new culprit.
Myth vs record
A fire in a coal bunker sank the ship.
A bunker fire was discussed then and later. It is not the 1912 official cause. The courts named ice and speed.
Third class was locked below as policy.
Physical barriers and confusion delayed many steerage passengers. The inquiries did not find a standing order to trap them.
The wreck is one intact ship on the bottom.
The 1985 find showed two main pieces and a wide debris field, matching a break-up as the hull sank.
Local notes
Southampton and Belfast
English and Ulster memory is local as well as global: crew streets in Southampton and yard identity in Belfast still organise centenary rites.
New York landing
American English memory begins at the Cunard pier on 18 April 1912 and at Senator Smith’s hearing room, not at Belfast.
Halifax recovery
Canadian cable ships brought many of the recovered dead to Halifax. English-language cemeteries there are part of the North Atlantic file, not a footnote.
Titanic is a closed navigational disaster whose afterlife is law, lists and a wreck that later cameras made visible.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.