The Royal Mail Steamship Titanic

Introduction

The Royal Mail Steamship Titanic was a British transatlantic ship which was the biggest ship in the world at the time it  sank in the North Atlantic Ocean. It was one of the three transatlantic ships that make up  the Olympic class, produced by White Star Line, and constructed between 1909 and 1912 in Belfast´s shipyard.

Investigation

Throughout the twentieth century there were a lot of expeditions to find the missing ship, although all of them were unsuccessful. Finally, the remains of the tragically destroyed ship were discovered the first of September in 1985. It was found 3.821 m deep in the sea and 675 km from Terranova.

 

Since the ship sank until 1996, it was believed that the Titanic crashed with an iceberg which made a 90 feet fissure in the ship´s hull. However, in 1996, Robert Ballard discovered that the plates of the hull were distorted and displaced, but not cut to length. The real situation was that the collision with the iceberg did not make a hole in the hull, but it broke the rivets that join the plates and this allowed the water to get into the ship.

The new discovery and its subsequent analysis performed by United States investigators, revealed that the rivets used in the bow´s hull were of poor quality. They were made of iron instead of steel, like in the rest of the ship. That might have happened because of the inability of suppliers to meet the deadlines and quantities required by the manufacturer.

 Conclusion

The tragedy cost 1512 lives due to drowning or hypothermia, and that makes this shipwreck one of the worst maritime catastrophes in peace times in the history of the world.