Johnny's

RMS TITANIC - BY HANSON W. BALDWIN
The White Star liner Titanic, largest ship the world had ever known, sailed from Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York on April 10, 1912. The paint on her strakes was fair and bright; she was fresh from Harland and Wolff’s Belfast yards, strong in the strength of her forty-six thousand tons of steel, bent, hammered, shaped, and riveted through the threeyears of her slow birth.

There was little fuss and fanfare at her sailing; her sister ship, the Olympic—slightly smaller than the Titanic—had been in service for some months and to her had gone the thunder of the cheers.
But the Titanic needed no whistling steamers or shouting crowds to call attention to her superlative qualities. Her bulk dwarfed the ships near her as longshoremen singledup her mooring lines and cast off the turns of heavy rope from the dock bollards. She was not only the largest ship afloat, but was believed to be the safest. Carlisle, her builder, had given her double bottoms and had divided her hull into sixteen watertight compartments, which made her, men thought, unsinkable. She had been built to be and had been described as a gigantic lifeboat. Her designers’dreams of a triple-screw giant, a luxurious, floating hotel, which could speed to New York at twenty-three knots, had been carefully translated from blueprints and mold loft lines at the Belfast yards into a living reality.

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The Titanic’s sailing from Southampton, though quiet, was not wholly uneventful. As the liner moved slowly toward the end of her dock that April day, the surge of herpassing sucked away from the quay the steamer New York, moored just to seaward of the Titanic’s berth. There were sharp cracks as the manila mooring lines of the New York parted under the strain. The frayed ropes writhed and whistled through the air and snapped down among the waving crowd on the pier; the New York swung toward the Titanic’s bow, was checked and dragged back to the dock barely intime to avert a collision. Seamen muttered, thought it an ominous start.

Past Spithead and the Isle of Wight the Titanic steamed. She called at Cherbourg at dusk and then laid her course for Queenstown. At 1:30 P.M. on Thursday, April 11, she stood out of Queenstown harbor, screaming gulls soaring in her wake, with 2,201 persons—men, women, and children—aboard.

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Occupying the Empirebedrooms and Georgian suites of the first-class accommodations were many well-known men and women—Colonel John Jacob Astor and his young bride; Major Archibald Butt, military aide to President Taft, and his friend Frank D. Millet, the painter; John B. Thayer, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Charles M. Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada; W. T. Stead, the Englishjournalist; Jacques Futrelle, French novelist; H. B. Harris, theatrical manager, and Mrs. Harris; Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus; and J. Bruce Ismay, chairman and managing director of the White Star Line.


Down in the plain wooden cabins of the steerage class were 706 immigrants to the land of promise, and trimly stowed in the great holds was a cargo valued at $420,000: oak beams, sponges, wine,calabashes, and an odd miscellany of the common and the rare.


The Titanic took her departure on Fastnet Light and, heading into the night, laid her course for New York. She was due at quarantine the following Wednesday morning.

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Sunday dawned fair and clear. The Titanic steamed smoothly toward the west, faint streamers of brownish smoke trailing from her funnels. The purser held servicesin the saloon in the morning; on the steerage deck aft the immigrants were playing games and a Scotsman was puffing “The Campbells Are Coming” on his bagpipes in the midst of the uproar.

At 9:00 A.M. a message from the steamer Caronia sputtered into the wireless shack:


Captain, Titanic—Westbound steamers report bergs growlers and field ice 42 degrees N. from 49 degrees to 51 degrees...