Not until the designer, Mr. Andrews, had made known to the captain that the ship was doomed was the order given to man the lifeboats. The lifeboats, forsooth! Twenty of them in all with a maximum accommodation, if every one were loaded to its full capacity, of something over one thousand, for a ship's company that numbered 2,223 in all. Just here, in this very fatal discrepancy, is to be found proof of the widespread belief that a great ship like the Titanic was practically unsinkable, and therefore in times of dire stress such as this, was well able to act as its own lifeboat until rescuing ships, summoned by wireless, should come to her aid.
The manner of the stricken ship's final plunge to the bottom may be readily gathered from the stories told by the survivors. As compartment after compartment was filled by overflow from the decks above, her bow sank deeper and her stern lifted high in the air, until the ship, buoyed up by her after compartments, swung almost vertically in the water like a gigantic spar buoy. In this unaccustomed position, her engines and boilers, standing out from the floor like brackets from a wall, tore loose from their foundations and crashed down into the forward part of the ship. Probably it was the muffled roar of this falling machinery that caused some of the survivors to imagine that they witnessed the bursting of boilers and the breaking apart of the hull. As a matter of fact, the shell of the Titanic went to the bottom practically intact. One by one the after compartments gave way, until the ship, weighted at her forward end with the wreckage of engine- and boiler-rooms, sank, straight as an arrow, to bury herself deep in the ooze of the Atlantic bottom two miles below. There, for aught we know, with several hundred feet of her hull rising sheer above the ocean floor, she may now be standing, a sublime memorial shaft to the fifteen hundred souls who perished in this unspeakable tragedy!
Photograph by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Smaller rooms would admit of higher bulkheads and better fire-protection.
The Vast Dining-room of the Titanic
CHAPTER VIII
WARSHIP PROTECTION AGAINST RAM, MINE, AND TORPEDO
The most perfect example of protection by subdivision of the hull into separate compartments is to be found in the warship. It is safe to say that there is no feature of the design to which more careful thought is given by the naval constructor than this. Loss of stability in a naval engagement means the end of the fight so far as the damaged ship is concerned. Nay, even a partial loss of stability, causing the ship to take a heavy list, may throw a ship's batteries entirely out of action, the guns on the high side being so greatly elevated and those on the low side so much depressed, that neither can be effectively trained upon the enemy. Furthermore, deep submergence following the entrance of large quantities of water, will cut down the ship's speed; with the result, either that she must fall out of line or the speed of the whole fleet must be reduced.
In the battle of the Sea of Japan it was the bursting of heavy 12-inch shells at or just below the water-line of the leading ship of the Russian line that sent her to the bottom before she had received any serious damage to her main batteries. Later in the fight, several other Russian battleships capsized from the same cause, assisted by the weight of extra supplies of coal which the Russians had stowed on the upper decks above the water-line.