People are the dominant reason ships sink. The weird world of shipwrecks is filled with tales of overzealous captains, unrealistic schedules, hubris in the face of dangerous weather, and weary crews. One bad decision begets another, and eventually the lower decks are taking on water. That’s usually the beginning of the end, as it was on April 15, 1912. One shipwreck among millions, plucked from a slow recession into obscurity and instead transformed into a cultural symbol that became, through the lens of time, a turning point in history.

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  People who study shipwrecks for a living are often tired of talking about the Titanic. It was interesting, they’ll grant, and some famous people died. But there’s little about the fate of the most domineering ship of twentieth-century folklore to warrant its disproportional place in the cultural zeitgeist.

  Large ships had failed before, many from collisions with icebergs. In 1854, the SS City of Glasgow disappeared on its way from Liverpool to Philadelphia, along with four hundred eighty people. The SS Naronic, en route from Liverpool to New York in 1893, also vanished, with seventy-four aboard. Not only was the Naronic’s fate met with apathy, it was also a complete mystery until messages were later found floating in bottles, apparently written by passengers who blamed their disappearance on an iceberg strike. Icebergs were such a common scourge of the North Atlantic that by 1912, most experts were relieved that collisions with icebergs appeared to have declined. Prior decades saw as many as seven strikes each month; by 1910, there were only about four per year.

  A high death toll wasn’t it, either. Other wrecks had drawn greater losses of life, like the Chinese junk ship Tek Sing, whose sixteen hundred passengers were killed in 1822 when it ran aground in the South China Sea, or the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc, which sank in 1917 after an explosion so fierce in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, that falling debris killed more than two thousand people on shore.

  When it comes to explaining the Titanic’s enlarged relevance, there are the nebulous explanations about human confidence, about a symbol of a new era and the embodiment of modernism, a boat against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past. The satirical newspaper The Onion put a fine point on it in a retro edition headline, “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg.” These theories carry water, but they also too easily dismiss the fact that the Titanic didn’t become an instant metaphor or a cultural realignment in its day. It was a tragedy, one of many in an uncertain era, that happened to kill mostly rich people.

  The Titanic’s quick growth into a news story big enough that it warranted The New York Times renting out an entire floor of a hotel to cover the sinking was based on one particular and often overlooked fact. It wasn’t that fifteen hundred people died, but that seven hundred people lived. Had every last soul been dragged to the bottom of the Atlantic, it would’ve joined the voluminous annals of devastating maritime tragedies. Memorials would’ve been held, insurance checks would have been paid, and the world would’ve moved on. But a tragedy with hundreds of survivors meant there would be hundreds of gripping accounts of the ship’s final moments, the wrestling and jockeying, the rescued and the abandoned, the brave and the weak. There were many—and at times conflicting—tales of valor, cowardice, fear, triumph, and horror for the public to adjudicate. History, after all, isn’t told by the dead.

  What’s more, on account of women and children being granted the limited spots to escape, many of the survivors were young, and their youth ensured decades of tellings and retellings of their stories. Eva Hart was seven in 1912 when she stepped off the Titanic into a lifeboat with her mother. She realized years later that the barely three-day experience during her childhood would be the seminal moment of her life. Like many survivors, she struggled to shed her association with the disaster, which had killed her father, as the centerpiece of her identity, and when she realized no amount of changing the subject or politely declining to answer the same questions again and again would be sufficient, she embraced the role. She spoke out against the “ridiculous” shortage of lifeboats and, decades later, about the “greed” of the vultures who wanted to salvage the wreck site. Throughout her life she monetized her tragedy in speeches and a book and transformed into an Oprah-like figure who turned her early-life trauma into a message of resilience, perseverance, and hope.

  Other survivors dwelled in primal human emotions, even among people who had already heard the story ad nauseam. “The agony of that night can never be told,” Charlotte Collyer, a thirty-year-old wife and mother, would write in a letter to her mother after she survived. And yet, she would also tell people, “I shall never forget the terrible beauty” of the Titanic in its final moments as she watched its famous twenty-three-degree tilt and its ferocious snap. The searing memories of such horror were too complex for a person to process in a single lifetime, and this mix of confusion, pain, and awe was like a flame. No one could look away. Who said what, who argued with whom, and all the while, what the band was playing. The details have been turned over and over, and for some reason, even when you know how the story ends, it never gets old. (This may also explain the phenomenon, unique in 1997, when moviegoers went to see James Cameron’s film multiple times in theaters, never able to get enough.)

  The most compelling explanation for the Titanic’s outsize cultural staying power is the simplest. And in the case of a century-old shipwreck among thousands of other deadly boating accidents, the rationale seems to come down to something timeless: good storytelling.

  Isolate all the components that the Titanic shared with other ships and other disasters—iceberg strike, loss of life, human overconfidence—and what’s left are the same components that make any story in any era worth hearing: high stakes, an intricate but linear narrative arc, emotional turns of tragedy and triumph, and a dollop of suspense, even still, about what exactly happened. Taken together, it’s little wonder why anyone who touches the Titanic risks getting caught up in its endless current. Like barnacles on a hull, some people just want to be near it.

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  How can you be sure about the way a ship sank? You can study the accounts of witnesses or simulate the conditions of a ship in a storm. Many passenger ships now have voyage data recorders, the equivalent to the black boxes in airplanes, which record a vessel’s final gasping hours. But get past the what that caused a vessel to sink and it becomes a marvel to study how ships sink. How they fall through the water, the twists and pirouettes, the grace followed usually by a crash.

  Every ship can sail thousands of times and carry millions of people. But when it sinks, it sinks only once. There’s worldwide certainty about what caused the Titanic to sink. But then what? Did it twist and then turn, or turn first? How did it land on the seafloor, and at what speed? It’s reasonable to wonder if it matters. It sank, people died, it’s gone. But studying what shipbuilders refer to as “shipfall” informs how future ships might be better built and how to fortify them from the sort of destruction that struck the most famous one.

  There are many theories about how the Titanic sank, how it fell through the various ocean layers known as the water column and crashed violently into the deep-ocean seabed. One of the most advanced theories, based on computer modeling and nautical forensics by National Geographic and a handful of scientists, holds that the Titanic began its fall slowly before picking up violent speed and pressure as it fell. The calculations are based on simple physics equations of mass, ocean current, and distance. Plug them into modeling software and the Titanic takes on a clumsy elegance. When the Titanic ripped in two, the bow swung down, held to the stern by a thin layer of steel the way two halves of a cut tree still hold fibers that are hard to break. That lasted mere seconds before the rupture was complete.

  For barely a moment—and for the last time—the ship traveled through the thin layer of water, from zero to six hundred feet, known as the surface ocean. Had a passenger taken a deep breath, he might have survived this depth and the growing clamp of pressure. But no one survived what came next.

  The bow, the pointed front of the ship, entered a free fall, its sharpest edge steering straight for the ocean bottom. Above ground, this would be known as planing, when a bird stiffens its wings and glides with no effort. Underwater, though, it’s just falling, sinking, or, put scientifically, succumbing to the laws of density and gravity. Even in water, this happened fast. As a ship, the Titanic was designed for a maximum surface speed of twenty-one knots, or twenty-four miles per hour. As a newborn shipwreck, it amassed greater power, accelerating to a terminal thirty miles per hour, while nearly three hundred pounds per square inch of pressure crushed every possible air pocket in the couch cushions, the wine bottles, and the narrow space between a painting and its glass. The most that early-twentieth-century scientists knew about pressure at these depths had been learned by lowering a length of rope a mile deep. When it was pulled back to the boat, the end that had touched bottom was half as thick as when it started.

  The Titanic’s stern, meanwhile, lagged behind. It received a forceful bob upward when the bow severed its hold, but this trajectory was brief. Barely a minute after the bow started downward, the stern began its own undersea journey with a vertical lean and a slow succumbing from the surface. It fell slower, dragged by the angle at which it fell, blunt end first. Bigger air pockets in the stern, occupied by first-class cabins, smoke rooms, and the grand staircase, gave way to an implosion so forceful it was supposedly heard by survivors floating hundreds of feet above.

  Had it been daytime instead of night, sunlight would’ve illuminated everything to this point. The first thousand feet of water, known as the epipelagic zone, from the Greek words for the top of the sea, is home to almost all fish, kelp, reefs, and marine animals known to science, all of which benefit from the warmth and photosynthesis of the sun. Only one time has a human swum below this zone and lived to tell about it, an Egyptian army officer named Ahmed Gabr. In 2014, Gabr scuba dove a fifth of a mile, a journey that took him twelve minutes down and fifteen hours up to decompress. At his deepest, Gabr withstood more than four hundred forty pounds on every square inch of his body, making him feel extremely heavy and cold. That was the worst part. The best part, he said, was on the way up, when a baby oceanic whitetip shark hung out with him for six hours.

  Even on the brightest day, water below six hundred feet turns black. And from here, both halves of the ship fell with accelerating speed as all the handrails, the lampposts, the mast, and any fastened debris were pulled violently off. Below six hundred feet, the ship entered the twilight zone, a three-thousand-foot stretch of the water column sparsely populated with weak gelatinous fish that tend to eat whatever detritus falls from above or is buoyant enough to float up from below. There would be fewer of them as the ship entered lower depths, known as the midnight zone, or as the Greeks called it, the bathypelagic, from the word for deep.

  Despite its lack of hospitality for human life, the midnight zone is quite pretty. The fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and jellyfish that survive this deep find their way in the darkness by creating their own light using chemical bioluminescence. Their sprinklings of color, most of it blue, help attract prey. Swimming too far at these depths is energetically expensive, so some fish in the midnight zone evolved other qualities to make life easier, like red bodies that in the absence of red light give them a noir effect of invisibility to predators. Other fish called tubeshoulders release clouds of luminescent fluid to lure smaller organisms. Once they’re close, they bite with backward-pointing teeth—an evolutionary quirk designed to minimize effort in a part of the ocean that’s hard enough to begin with.

  Into this otherworldly constellation rushed the broken bow of a ship falling pointed-side down and then stabilizing to be right-side up. Engineers have since chalked up the Titanic’s changing position to drag; the smooth underside of a ship will cut through the water faster than its textured top, not to mention air bubbles, desperate at this punishing depth to escape the wreck through the easiest path possible, which was the top.

  The stern, meanwhile, followed the bow quickly. First it imploded, and then it fell into a spiral, a bit like a helicopter blade, as the air bubbles acted as propulsive jets that pushed the structure around and around. Eventually it stabilized, having ejected most of the remaining air. Then it fell right-side up.

  The best possible position for a ship to fall through the water is flat, identical to its above-water position. This maximizes the surface area of the vessel when it strikes the bottom, which minimizes to every extent possible the explosion expected if a vessel strikes the floor like a missile. There are humanitarian reasons to optimize shipfall, as well as financial ones. A vessel largely intact underwater makes it easier to extract dead bodies, treasure, or valuable equipment, like a voyage data recorder. More than one hundred years after the Titanic sank, scientists still believed it was possible to excavate the ship’s famous telegraph, which begged for help from nearby ships.

  The way a ship falls is also crucial to knowing how it lies, and where it lies helps determine how to explore it. Anyone who clung to the ship or was trapped inside one of its crevices was dead before it reached the seabed. But if there was even one sentient cell left, its final trauma would have been the ground strike followed by three other powerful forces. The first was the ship “breaking its back,” a technical term for when the long steel plates that made up the ship’s keel and deck panels received a forceful concussion, the same way the steel in a crashing car buckles on impact.

  A moment later, the ground strike caused the second force, an enormous burst of water pushed violently from inside the wreck outward. Researchers found in 2012 that this outburst was enough to blow off the ship’s front hatch cover, a manhole-size piece of metal held down by more than a dozen large bolts. Even at twelve thousand feet, a hydraulic burst would feel to a human like sitting under Niagara Falls.

  The final insult, after the iceberg, the implosions, the ground concussions, and the hydraulic outbursts, was a powerful jet stream of water that struck the ship from above. This phenomenon is known as the downblast effect and occurs when something sinking pulls the water behind it, filling in the momentarily empty space it leaves in its wake. The downblast effect helps explain the myth of suction, the mistaken notion that one must swim away from a sinking ship to avoid being pulled down with it. It’s a notoriously hard thing to test, but when the suction effect has been observed, it’s only when large wrecks have started sinking at high speed, putting in motion the water column behind them.

  Again, why does this matter? You might think differently if you’re ever on a sinking ship. There’s little scientific consensus about what you should do, so generally, do whatever will save or prolong your life. But captains and lifeguards tend to agree that the best thing you can do if your boat is sinking is to stay on the endangered boat as long as possible. Climb to high ground if you can, and even higher ground after that. If you’re within sight of land or another ship, take off your clothes for the same reason that no Olympic swimmer ever won a race wearing waterlogged blue jeans. And then, once you touch water, start swimming toward a lifeboat or a piece of debris. Try not to be directly above the ship after it’s underwater, since it will probably be releasing air bubbles, which make the water less dense, and thus make it harder to swim. But if you are above the ship as it sinks underwater and all else fails, take the biggest breath you can, push off the boat, and kick up with everything you’ve got.

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  Women and children were supposed to be rescued first. And for the most part with the Titanic, they were; 70 percent of women and children made it off the ship alive. But this was a historical anomaly, because for almost all other sinking ships, women and children go last, if they’re rescued at all. In 2012, two Swedish researchers studied eighteen maritime disasters involving fifteen thousand people of more than thirty nationalities over three centuries and found that not only are men’s survival rates twice as high as women’s, but that children fare worst of all—just 15 percent tend to make it off alive. What’s more, while the notion of a captain “going down with the ship” was true in the case of the Titanic, it’s far from historical reality for almost all other shipwrecks. Captains and crew survive at significantly higher rates than passengers, a disparity likely explained by the fact that professional seafarers have more advanced survival skills and knowledge of a ship’s layout, but also an indictment that they don’t stay to help once it’s every person for themselves. The myth of women and children first was a creation of the British elite, who used it for centuries as an argument against women’s suffrage. Why do women need to vote, they claimed with straight faces, when even when facing death, men will put the interests of women first? The argument largely worked. Sixteen years and hundreds more shipwrecks occurred, ones where women’s lives weren’t prioritized or even assisted at all, before women in England were granted the same voting rights as men.

  To survive the Titanic was better than the alternative that befell more than fifteen hundred passengers. But it was still no picnic. First there was the cold and the wind, and then the sight of horror unfolding in front of the survivors. The men rowing each lifeboat rowed harder and harder, as though trying to escape the looming fog of disaster while scanning the horizon for any sign of other boats. There were also the arguments: Should each lifeboat return to the site to pick up more people in the water? Lifeboat number one, commonly known as the captain’s boat and with a capacity of forty, left the ship with only twelve. A fireman named Charles Hendrickson was one of the twelve and spent years after the disaster claiming that he was the only one on the lifeboat to propose going back to rescue more people still clamoring in the water. He was savagely overruled, he claimed, which brought shame upon the other eleven. The story was exaggerated and later refuted by an investigation by the British Board of Trade. But the damage had been done in the press, and one of the eleven, a fashion designer named Lucy Duff-Gordon, lived the rest of her life trying to salvage her and her husband’s reputations as heartless cowards.