Shortly after the turn of the century, the transatlantic shipping corridor between Europe and North America was the most lucrative trade route in the world. Apart from the manufactured goods and raw materials that flowed back and forth between the two continents, the passenger trade flourished as ocean travel was the only possible way to cross the Atlantic in this pre-flight era. The United States and Canada were eager to settle their sparsely populated western territories with European immigrants and we were welcoming them by the millions with open arms. Transatlantic telegraphy was a crude and primitive form of communication and business people hoping to conduct business on the opposite shore needed to travel across the ocean to establish trade contacts. Wealthy North Americans were experiencing European vacations in ever-increasing numbers and the rapidly expanding middle class was beginning to enjoy tourism on an unprecedented scale. The horrendous Transatlantic travel conditions so graphically described by British author Charles Dickens in the middle of the last century had given way to fast and luxurious transit on huge ocean liners built for speed and comfort. By 1900, a transatlantic voyage on the faster liners took a little over a week. Passenger safety had also improved considerably since the days when entire ships were lost at sea and never heard from again. As ships became bigger, an illusion of invulnerability from the hazards of nature had taken hold. While ships were seldom lost in storms, hazards remained, particularly icebergs, large floating chunks of ice that broke off from glaciers in Greenland and slowly floated south into the North Atlantic shipping lanes. A collision with an iceberg would certainly damage even the largest ship.

The British had, for centuries, dominated the sea both militarily and commercially. The most successful of the British shipping companies was the Cunard Line, established by Canadian entrepreneur Samuel Cunard in 1840. In 1906, the company launched two 'superliners,' the Mauretania and Lusitania, that would quickly come to dominate the transatlantic trade corridor. At 31,550 tons each, they were the largest manufactured objects yet put in motion. In 1908, the White Star Line, a British shipping company in fierce competition with Cunard, contracted with the Harland & Wolff Shipbuilding Company in Ireland to construct a trio of ocean liners that would be even greater in scale. While not as fast as the Cunarders, the new liners would be larger and more luxurious and able to cross the Atlantic in a
respectable five days.

The first of the three liners, the Olympic, was launched in 1910. The hull
of the second liner, known until then as #401,was launched in Belfast on
May 31, 1911, the same day that Olympic sailed on its maiden voyage to New York. After almost a year of fitting-out and embellishment, the Royal Mail Ship Titanic was ready for commercial service. It was the largest and most luxurious ocean liner in the world.

One contemporary White Star advertisement showed a drawing of the Titanic standing on its stern compared with other world famous landmarks of the day such as St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Great Pyramid at Cheops, and the tallest structure in the world, the Woolworth Building in New York. Titanic engulfed them all. At 46,328 tons, it was half again the size of the rival Cunarders.

The name Titanic was appropriate, for the liner was staggering in
appearance. The ship was 882 feet long, the length of 2 1/2 football fields.
She was 92 feet wide and her eight decks rose to the equivalent height of
an eleven story building. Titanic was even larger than its sister ship
Olympic since further refinements had added over a thousand tons to its
bulk.

On April 2, 1912, Titanic left Belfast for its trials which lasted a scant
few hours before the liner proceeded to Southampton on the southern coast of England, the debarkation point for those traveling to the United States.
After an additional week of provisioning and last minute alterations, the
Titanic left Southampton for its maiden voyage to New York on April 10. The liner crossed the English Channel to Cherbourg, France to pick up
additional passengers from the Continent. The next day, Titanic made its
second and final stop at Queenstown, Ireland where it boarded mostly Irish
immigrants.

Titanic left for America shortly after noon on April 11, 1912, with 2227
passengers and crew. Among the passengers were J. Bruce Ismay, the
president of White Star, Thomas Andrews, the engineer who had supervised
the construction of Titanic, and at least a dozen millionaires, in an era
before they paid income tax and when the average working man took home six
dollars a week.

The three classes of passengers on board Titanic represented a virtual
microcosm of Edwardian society. At the top, in First Class, were wealthy
and mostly British and American tourists and business travelers, some of
whom paid thousands of dollars for the voyage. In an era before movie
stars, television personalities and overpaid athletes, the rich were the
celebrities of the day.

Second Class consisted mostly of business people, professionals and
tourists who represented the rapidly expanding middle class. They paid
about a hundred dollars for their passage.

Third Class or Steerage was made up almost entirely of European immigrants
seeking a better life in the New World. They paid approximately $30 for
their tickets. For many of the families on board, that represented a
lifetime of savings. Ironically, the White Star Line made most of its
profits from steerage passengers since there were so many of them packed
into a relatively small space. Still, for most of the immigrants on
Titanic, life on the liner was far more comfortable than the hardships that
they were leaving behind.

The first few days of the voyage were mostly uneventful and both passengers
and crew were pleased with the ambiance and performance of the new liner.
The three classes of passengers were rigidly separated and seldom even saw
one another.

All passengers were dazzled by the interior of the new liner. Contemporary
news reports referred to Titanic as a "wonder ship" and "floating palace."
The costliest furniture and decorations were used and the dining room
offered a menu equivalent to that found in the finest restaurants on land.
The whole idea was to create the illusion, at least for First Class
passengers, that they were in a fine hotel rather than on a ship. In this
regard, White Star succeeded all too well.

The captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith was so confident in his new
command that he ignored several iceberg warnings from other ships. These
warnings increased in frequency as the liner continued across the Atlantic.
Because of outdated British shipping regulations, the Titanic only carried
enough lifeboats for about half the people on board. One of the ship's
designers, Alexander Carlisle, had recommended the installation of more
lifeboats, but Ismay himself had vetoed this in a cost-cutting measure.
Nobody, including Smith or Andrews, seemed concerned about this as the
Titanic boasted several safety features including a series of watertight
compartments. White Star publicity flacks had labeled the ship as
"virtually unsinkable." Smith probably knew better but he had allowed
himself to be seduced by the limitless faith in the new technology that
seemed to be changing society on an almost daily basis.

On Sunday, April 14 Titanic received several ice warnings from other ships
but, for some reason, they were ignored. At 11:40 PM, the ship was some 400
miles southeast of the coast of Newfoundland. Titanic was steaming at 221/2
knots, the fastest speed yet on the voyage. Most of the passengers had gone
to bed and the lookouts in the crow's nest of the Titanic reported to the
bridge that they had spotted a large iceberg some 500 yards directly in the
path of the ship. The officer who was then navigating Titanic, W.M.
Murdoch, ordered the helmsman to turn the ship 'hard-a-starboard' and
immediately telegraphed the engine room to reverse the engines. He then
closed the watertight doors.

For a few moments it seemed that they might be able to avoid a collision.
As the Titanic scraped by the iceberg, a ripping sound was heard below the
waterline and a slight shudder was felt throughout the ship. Crew members
who were deep in the hull knew that much damage had been done but
passengers who were still awake had barely noticed that anything was amiss.
Captain Smith, who was in his cabin at the time, immediately reported to
the bridge and, accompanied by Andrews, inspected the damage below. Within
a few minutes, they knew that the unthinkable had happened. The iceberg had
fatally damaged the ship and the Titanic was doomed. The watertight
compartments were useless as too many of them were damaged and the water
would simply flow from one to the other like an ice cube tray being filled
with tap water. Shortly after midnight on April 15, Smith ordered the
passengers into the lifeboats which were then lowered away down the side of
the ship.

At first the passengers didn't know what all the fuss was about and many of
the lifeboats went away half empty. As the bow of the Titanic sank slowly
into the Atlantic, everyone began to realize just how seriously the ship
was damaged.

As complacency gave way to bewilderment and then to terror, the decks of
the doomed liner witnessed a kaleidoscope of human behaviour under extreme
stress. Acts of bravery became legend. Andrews realized his culpability in
the disaster and spent the next couple of hours helping to organize the
evacuation. The ship's orchestra played ragtime to help sooth frayed nerves
and became a large part of the Titanic legend. Some claimed that this only
served to hide the true calamity of the situation.

An elderly man refused to enter a lifeboat while others were still on the
ship. His wife elected to stay with him and they perished together. The
couple, Mr. & Mrs. Isidor Straus, owned Macy's department store in New
York. Elsewhere on Titanic's decks, some of the most influential and
powerful men in the world meekly stood aside while the lifeboats were
lowered with women and children.

Meanwhile, steerage passengers were kept below deck until most of the
lifeboats had gone. After a few perfunctory attempts to organize the
evacuation, Captain Smith faded into the background and White Star Chairman
Ismay stepped into a lifeboat at the last moment.

Another ship, the Californian, had stopped because of the ice conditions
and was apparently between ten and twenty miles away. It ignored the
rockets that Titanic was firing practically every minute. Both the
Californian's captain and its radio operator had gone to bed and the deck
officers on watch didn't think it unusual that the large liner that they
had seen speeding past them earlier had suddenly stopped in the middle of
the ocean.

In the Titanic's radio room, the relatively new technology of wireless
telegraphy was used to broadcast the ship's distress signals. At first, the
young Marconi operators used the Morse distress call, CQD. When that seemed
to get no response, they used the new distress call, SOS. Several other
ships had heard the distress calls but only one, a Cunard liner, the
Carpathia, was close enough to render assistance. Carpathia was 58 miles
away and was racing towards Titanic at top speed but would take three hours
to arrive.

A little over two and one-half hours after the collision, the bow of the
Titanic was completely submerged and the stern stood suspended well over
the water line. Over 1500 people were still on board or were floating near
the ship in their life preservers.

At 2:18 am, Titanic's lights finally failed and, two minutes later, the
liner broke in two and slipped beneath the placid surface of the Atlantic
to the ocean floor some 2 1/2 miles below. Titanic would not be seen again
for 73 years.

The anticipated suction that had caused many of those in the half-empty
lifeboats to row away from the ship had not occurred but the hundreds of
floating survivors quickly died of hypothermia as the water temperature was
near freezing. The only survivors were those who had managed to find space
in a lifeboat.

A little over an hour after the sinking, Carpathia arrived at the Titanic's
last radioed position. Of the 2,227 passengers on board, it found 705
survivors in thirteen small lifeboats, all that remained of the greatest
ocean liner in the world. After spending a few hours loading survivors,
hauling the lifeboats on board and fruitlessly searching for additional
survivors, the Carpathia turned around and headed back to New York.
On April 17, White Star engaged a number of ships at various Canadian ports
to search for bodies and, they hoped, additional survivors. The
Mackay-Bennett, out of Halifax, found 306 bodies and no survivors. The
corpses were embalmed on the deck of the ship and returned to Halifax.
Among the bodies was that of first-class passenger John Jacob Astor, one of
the wealthiest men in the world. Astor's body was returned to his family
along with the several thousand dollars that they had found in his pockets.
The less affluent were buried in a number of graveyards in Halifax that are
maintained to this day by the Cunard Line which eventually merged with
White Star.

For weeks, other ships would find bodies and debris carried by the Labrador
current, sometimes hundreds of miles from where the collision had occurred.
Bits of wooden debris, including deck chairs and paneling from the
Titanic's rooms, were found washed up on the shores of New England and the
Maritime provinces for years afterwards.

A number of distinguished Canadians were on board Titanic and most of them
did not survive. Charles M. Hays was an American-born railroad executive
who had become president of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1905. He had been
looking forward to opening the GTR's new hotel in Ottawa, the Chateau
Laurier. Hays' private railway car was waiting for him in New York but his
wife and daughter would be the only survivors to board the special train
that would take them back to Montreal.

H. Markland Molson, of the Canadian brewing dynasty, was another first
class passenger who did not survive as was little Lorraine Allison of
Montreal, the only child in first class who perished because she stayed
with her mother and father rather than get into a lifeboat with the family
maid and her baby brother.

Major Arthur Peuchen, a chemical manufacturer from Toronto, was luckier. He
was vice-commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club on Toronto Island and
it was his skill as a yachtsman that would save his life. Peuchen was
standing on the Titanic's deck observing one of the lifeboats being
lowered, when a woman cried out that there were no seamen in the boat. The
officer supervising the loading asked for volunteers and, when Peuchen
spoke up, he was told that he could enter the boat if he could lower
himself hand-over-hand fifty feet down the rope along the side of the ship.
He did so and became the only male passenger allowed into a lifeboat by
that officer.

By the time the Carpathia had arrived back in New York on the evening of
April 18, the whole world was aware of the disaster, knew who was on board
the Titanic, and were breathlessly awaiting the details of who had survived.
To the surprise of the thousands of onlookers, Carpathia first proceeded to
the White Star dock where it unloaded the thirteen lifeboats, stark and
graphic evidence of all that remained of Titanic.

As the Titanic survivors dispersed, the United States Congress began a full
inquiry into the disaster which began on April 19. Many influential
Americans had died including Archie Butt, the military advisor to President
Taft. The head of the inquiry, Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan,
wanted to know who was responsible.

Later the British Board of Trade would hold their own investigation. Since
they were responsible for the outmoded lifeboat regulations, that inquiry
was a whitewash. The White Star Line never fully recovered from the
disaster and its chairman, Ismay, retired from public life unable to
adequately explain why he had survived and hundreds of women and children
had not. The captain of the Californian was the designated scapegoat.
The most immediate consequence of the disaster was a rapid overhauling of
various marine regulations. A commercial liner would never again go to sea
in peacetime without enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Class
distinction would never again be a factor in deciding who had access to
those boats in an emergency. Shipboard wireless rooms would remain
operational for 24 hours a day; the Atlantic sea-lanes were moved farther
south; and an international ice patrol was established and remains
operational to this day.

The sinking of the Titanic was then the biggest news event of the century.
News reports on the inquiries, memorial services for Titanic's victims, and
local stories about survivors kept the event in the news for months
afterwards.

The Titanic's older sister ship, Olympic was used to transport Canadian
troops overseas from Halifax during World War 1. She was put back into
commercial service after the war, became a popular Transatlantic liner
during the tourist boom of the 1920's, and was eventually retired in 1935.
Legend has it that the third of the White Star superliners was to be called
the Gigantic but that the name was changed after the Titanic disaster. At
any rate, the Britannic was launched in 1914 and immediately requisitioned
as a hospital ship by the British navy. In 1916, it was sunk by the Germans
in the Mediterranean.

Thus, of the three liners built for New York service, only one was ever to arrive in that harbor.