Titanic

Titanic is a book about a ship from 1912 that sunk on its maiden (first) voyage. The story is about almost all you need to know about the famous ship. It begins with the explanation of its construction in Belfast, Ireland by a company called Harland and Wolff. Then you read about its journey from Southampton, U.K. to some other countries before heading across the Atlantic to New York, the ship's main destination.

On the way over to New York, several hundred miles from Newfoundland, Frederick Fleet, the man in the crow's nest of the ship (basically the lookout), sees a black object. If he had binoculars, he would have seen the iceberg sooner. Once he realizes what it is, he calls down to the bridge (the controls of the ship) and says he sees an iceberg. The man who hears it runs to Captain Edward J. Smith and tells him. He then closes the ship's watertight compartments, built to keep out water and tells the people at the main controls to put the ship on reverse and "hard a' starboard", meaning away from starboard, which is right (as in starboard. Port is left). So basically saying go reverse and turn left.

When the ship passes the berg, it looks to some as if the ship just missed it. However, in the lower part of the ship, the boiler rooms keeping the engines running start to flood at the front of the ship. Slowly, the water tips from compartment to compartment because they didn't seal all the way. Captain Smith tells his crew to begin putting people in the lifeboats.

In an hour, the lifeboats are out in the ocean, and when there could be 1,109 in the lifeboats, only about 700 were loaded. This caused many deaths to women, children, and men especially. The crew had the most lost lives, then third class, second class, and first class. First class only had maybe six deaths, whereas the crew had about 700 die. Most of the crewmen that died were in the boiler rooms when the Titanic hit the iceberg. When Captain Smith became aware of the water coming into the Titanic, he immediately locked down the water compartments, trapping many people working at the boilers to fuel the ship's engines.

As the Titanic continued to sink, at around 2:00 in the morning, the stern (back) of the ship was at about a 45-degree angle. All the weight in the stern caused a lot of stress at the lower part of the ship, between the sunken and yet to be sunk parts of the ship. The lower area, the hull, could not handle the stress. The middle of the ship has so much stress, the wood on the decks of the ship begins to split. Slowly, the metal of the ship, iron, begins to split as well. Soon the splitting reaches the hull, and it is the only thing keeping Titanic in one piece.

The stern is now horizontal again, but the middle of the ship, where it split, has water rushing into it, speeding up the sinking. It pulls the middle down, making the upper parts of the ship smash into each other again, then, the hull splits. The front of the entire ship has broken off the stern, and is now plummeting to the ocean floor. Meanwhile, the stern is horizontal, but it begins to climb to a steeper and steeper angle, until it is completely vertical. It remains in that position for approximately five minutes, then begins its descent to the bottom of the ocean.

The 700 of the 2,200 people that survived the sinking waited for four to five hours for the rescue ship, Carpathia, reaches their location. They are picked up by the ship and taken to New York, the original destination of the doomed Titanic. The entire world had news of the sinking within a day or two. Everyone knew that the Titanic had sunk, although Bruce J. Ismay, chairman of White Star Line (which owned the Titanic) had said, "This ship is unsinkable!" He was led to believe that because of the watertight compartments Titanic had. Of course, he had turned out to be wrong.