These haunting photos of the RMS Titanic's sinking were taken immediately before and after the historic disaster on April 15, 1912.
On the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic’s lookout Frederick Fleet famously yelled, “Iceberg, right ahead!” Despite this warning, the ship wasn’t able to get out of the way in time and crashed right into the iceberg, leading to the Titanic sinking less than three hours later.
Experts later said that the weather, ice conditions, and time of year increased the iceberg hazard in the North Atlantic on that tragic night. If the winds and temperatures hadn’t caused sea ice to travel further south than usual, perhaps there wouldn’t have been any iceberg for the Titanic to hit.
Now, over a century after the disaster, there may be no tragedy in history more suited to the “what if?” parlor game than the sinking of the Titanic.
What if one nearby ship’s radio warning of icebergs in the area had actually reached the Titanic’s main control center? What if the radio aboard the Titanic hadn’t encountered serious issues shortly before the sinking? What if the crew had been properly equipped with binoculars to help them spot sea ice? And the most tortuous question of all — what if the Titanic had carried its full capacity of 64 lifeboats instead of the mere 20 that it was carrying?
Sadly, we’ll never know — in the early hours of April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” Titanic slipped below the icy waters of the North Atlantic, taking about 1,500 lives with it. In the end, just 706 people survived the disaster.
Look through the gallery below for photos of the Titanic just before and after its infamous sinking. Then, discover the full story of that tragic night.
The man who took this photograph, Rev. F.M. Browne, got off at Queenstown. Both Smith and McElroy died in the Titanic sinking.Ralph White/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Was The Titanic Doomed To Sink?
Construction of the RMS Titanic began in 1909 in Belfast, Ireland. It took 26 months and the work of thousands of laborers to build. But even though the ship attracted attention for its size — at 882 feet long, the Titanic was then the largest ship ever built — some believe it was flawed from the start.
Some have theorized that the Titanic was built with poor-quality rivets, which were too weak to hold the ship together in the event of a disaster. In 2008, The New York Times reported that the vessel's builder, Harland and Wolff, struggled to find enough high-quality rivets and thus purchased ones considered to be lower quality. What's more, rivets later recovered from the wreck were found to have high concentrations of slag, which can make rivets brittle. This could have potentially weakened the Titanic's hull.
Public DomainThe Titanic under construction. Some believe the ship was fatally flawed from the start.
This wasn't the only place where the Titanic's builders cut corners. Initially, White Star Line marketed the ship as "designed to be unsinkable" and the British media described how its watertight bulkheads made the vessel "practically unsinkable." But in the end, the bulkheads rose just 10 feet above the waterline, meaning they weren't nearly as watertight as some believed.
And on May 31, 1911, the ship was officially launched. Its maiden voyage would commence nearly a year later, in April 1912.
The Sinking Of The Titanic
The Titanic left Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. Just days before the Titanic sank, passengers were photographed on the deck strolling by the lifeboats, completely unaware that they'd soon have to be put to use.
Indeed, the first couple of days of the Titanic's voyage were peaceful. It made stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland (present-day Cobh) before starting its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean toward New York.
But disaster struck on April 14th. Then, around 11:40 p.m., the Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The iceberg had a severe impact on the ship's starboard side, causing six watertight compartments to flood. One of the ship's designers, Thomas Andrews, was aboard the vessel, and he grimly reported at midnight that the Titanic would sink in 60 to 90 minutes.
He wasn't far off. Over the next two hours and 40 minutes, the Titanic slowly began to founder into the freezing waters as its radio operators sent desperate cries for help and its confused passengers began to line up on the deck. The ship had just 20 lifeboats aboard, far fewer than it could have carried. But that wasn't immediately clear to many passengers, even as the crew instructed women and children to board the lifeboats first.
"There was no commotion, no panic and no one seemed to be particularly frightened," Titanic survivor Eloise Smith said. "I had not the least suspicion of the scarcity of lifeboats, or I never should have left my husband."
Public DomainA depiction of what the sinking of the Titanic might have looked like.
A nearby ship, the Californian, did not answer the Titanic's distress calls. (Its radio operator had fallen asleep, and though the captain saw the Titanic's distress flares, he dismissed them as part of a "party"). The ship that did respond, the Carpathia, was about 58 miles away.
And thus, the sinking of the Titanic happened at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912.
"As the bow went under, the stern lifted higher and higher into the air, then pivoted and swung slowly over my head," recalled R. Norris Williams, a survivor who was swept into the icy waters before he swam to a lifeboat.
He continued: "Had it come down then I would have been crushed. Looking straight up I saw the three propellers and the rudder distinctly outlined against the clear sky. She slid into the ocean. No suction. No noise."
About 1,500 passengers and crew members perished. But 706 people were rescued by the Carpathia, which arrived at the scene later that morning.
How The Carpathia Rescued Survivors
Upon hearing the Titanic's distress call, the Carpathia had charged to its rescue. The captain, Arthur Henry Rostron, steered the ship through 58 miles of treacherously icy waters and arrived at around 3:30 or 4 a.m.
By then, the Titanic had disappeared into the North Atlantic.
"On all sides we could see lifeboats making laboriously toward us, some dangerously overcrowded, some half empty," James Bisset, the Carpathia's second officer, later recalled. "A mile away was a mass of wreckage, like an island, marking the spot where the Titanic had gone down."
He added: "It should not have happened... but it did happen!"
The Carpathia rescued 706 Titanic survivors, including the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown — who quickly threw herself into the rescue efforts — and Williams, who refused a doctor's suggestion to amputate his frozen legs.
Public DomainMolly Brown presenting Carpathia Captain Arthur Rostron with an award for rescuing survivors after the Titanic sinking.
The addition of the Titanic survivors to the Carpathia nearly doubled the number of people on the ship, and survivors like Brown busied themselves with helping others. She passed out blankets, used her language skills to communicate with survivors, and pressed the first-class survivors to donate money to those who'd lost everything in the Titanic sinking.
She was steadier on her feet than others, including White Star Line chairman J. Bruce Ismay, who was reportedly hysterical. Charles Lightoller, the Titanic's second officer, recalled that Ismay "was obsessed with the idea, and kept repeating, that he ought to have gone down with the ship."
The Carpathia arrived in New York on April 18th, three days after the Titanic's sinking. By then, news of the catastrophic event had spread across the world. Survivors soon began telling their stories, and an inquiry was launched to investigate why exactly the ship had gone down.
The search for answers — and for the Titanic itself — continued for decades.
Questions About The Sinking Of The Titanic
Why did the Titanic sink? Many theories have been suggested over the years.
Some point to the ship itself. In addition to its cheaper rivets and its compartments, one theory suggests that the ship had suffered from a coal fire, which weakened its hull. Another postulates that the ship's navigation system malfunctioned because of interference from the Northern Lights.
But others believe the Titanic's sinking can be chalked up to human error. Some place the blame at the feet of its captain, Edward Smith. He kept the ship at a high speed during the crossing, and it was traveling at 20.5 knots (23.6 miles per hour) when it struck the iceberg. Why? It's possible that Smith was trying to beat a record set by the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic, that he was pressured into the high speed by Ismay, or that he believed the crew would be able to react in time to a disaster.
Public DomainEdward Smith on the Titanic on April 10, 1912, the day it left Southampton, England for New York.
Smith has also been criticized for "ignoring" iceberg warnings. Some historians have noted that if Smith did not "ignore" the warnings, per se, he perhaps did not take them as seriously as he should have.
An American investigation into the sinking concluded that Smith's "indifference to danger was one of the direct and contributing causes of this unnecessary tragedy" and that he should have slowed the ship down. However, a British investigation found that Smith was not at fault.
And in any case, Smith could not have controlled other factors — like the Californian's lack of response to the Titanic's distress calls.
But at least one mystery about the ship was solved in 1985. Then, 73 years after the Titanic's sinking, American oceanographer Robert Ballard and French scientist Jean-Louis Michel discovered the wreck of the ship some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland at a depth of 12,600 feet.
Since then, thousands of impressive Titanic artifacts have been brought up to the surface. These artifacts include instruments from the ship's band, clothing, money, jewelry, and chunks of the ship itself.
Now, more than a century later, the Titanic remains on the ocean floor where it sank in 1912. But it probably won't be there forever. Scientists are concerned about metal-eating bacteria, which has started to consume it.
Regardless, the Titanic holds an important place in history. The optimism of its maiden voyage was matched only by the despair of its sinking.
After viewing this collection of photos from the RMS Titanic's sinking, peruse some other rare Titanic photos that you may not have seen before. Then, discover some fascinating Titanic facts that are sure to surprise you.
