20th March, 2025 in Maritime

The break-up of Titanic: Surrounded by myths

By Eugene Nesmeyanov

The Titanic disaster is famous not only for the two-hour-forty-minute stately submerging of the ship into the icy water and the numerous human dramas that unfolded on board, but also for the breaking up of its hull that became the dreadful culmination of the tragedy. When studying the break-up of Titanic, one cannot help but marvel at the abundance of historical myths and misconceptions that permeate this hotly debatable topic, not just in mass culture and visual arts, but sometimes even in specialised publications.

The belief in the absence of the break-up as such should be recognised as the first and foremost of these striking distortions of reality. It gained wide popularity and took root in many people’s minds because it was championed not by some yellow press or amateurs but by a serious government body, the official British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry: its final report stated specifically that ‘The ship did not break in two; and she did eventually attain the perpendicular …’^[1]. Curiously enough, there are the whole two erroneous statements appear next to each other within this short quote: one denies the break-up (it’s hard to find someone for whom the incorrectness of such a denial would not be obvious today), while the other portrays the hull of the vessel in a nearly vertical position towards the end (the fight to revise this popular portrayal is still ongoing).

A deeper connection can be suggested between these two assertions. The emphatic denial of the break-up – at least at the official level – could have played a role in the way the sinking of the ship was thought of and visualised at the final stages; if the ship didn’t break apart, it was probably somewhat easier to imagine the stern of the steamer rising to a dizzying height above the water and then assuming an almost perpendicular position, like many witnesses have claimed. However, the application of the scientific method of collating different lines of evidence – critical analysis of written historical sources coupled with underwater archaeological data and modern computer modelling – has shown that not all survivor accounts should be taken at face value or perceived literally, regardless of their eloquence and multiplicity. The most ardent deniers of the Titanic’s break-up, including the highest-ranking surviving bridge officers, were eventually proven wrong. Mindful of this, we ought to treat the reports of the ship allegedly reaching a trim angle of 45 to 60 degrees and finally shooting up even higher, just like a duck going down for a dive^[2] or like ‘an enormous black finger against the sky’^[3], with caution and reasonable scepticism as well.

Establishing the Titanic’s trim angle with the greatest possible accuracy may seem like a minor matter – ‘not a big deal’ – but it is actually important for understanding the break-up and correctly assessing the stress distribution on the ship structure.

Another widespread old myth indirectly related to the break-up is that the boilers exploded. A large number of witnesses claimed they heard some loud noises that led them to believe that the ship’s steam boilers had burst when flooded with seawater. However, it should be taken into account that by the time of the events described, the temperature and pressure levels in the boilers were already insufficient for an explosion of any noticeable magnitude to occur – and that the boilers observed both in the wreck and out in a debris field bear no signs of explosion damage. In all likelihood, the explosive noises heard by survivors should be classified as sounds that accompanied the violent deformation and rupture of steel plates, decks and other components of ship framing during the break-up.

The confirmation of the fact of the break-up after the Ballard/Michel joint discovery in 1985^[4] put an end to an often-repeated fallacy that the mighty liner sank intact (amidships). ‘We didn’t want the Titanic to have broken up like this,’ James Cameron confessed from the pages of the National Geographic magazine in 2012. ‘We wanted her to have gone down in some kind of ghostly perfection.’^[5]

Finding a vessel at the bottom of the ocean brutally torn to pieces – two large ones and a considerable number of other fragments of various sizes^[6] – shattered the illusion of its integrity and the myth of ‘unbreakability’ (in a similar spirit to the ‘unsinkability’) that have dominated the public consciousness, artistic images, films and literature for decades. The shipbuilders of the era preferred not to admit openly that the amount of tension and physical forces involved in the breakdown of that seemingly perfect structure were truly colossal (or, as someone might say, titanic). This was only affirmed in recent years by using professional software for naval architects.

The main myth was successfully debunked, but it was just the beginning of a long and difficult journey towards clarifying the prerequisites and stages of a complex fracture process. In Breaking Titanic: Analysing RMS Titanic’s Hull Fracture, I have made every effort to describe in detail the twists and turns of that scientific journey.

_{[1] British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry Report (Titanic Inquiry Project) https://www.titanicinquiry.org/BOTInq/BOTReport/botRepFinEff.php}

_{[2] A figurative comparison from the newspaper accounr dictated by junior Marconi operator Harold Bride (‘Thrilling Story by Titanic‘s Surviving Wireless Man’. The New York Times, 19 April 1912, p.1). The authenticity of some parts of this account is seriously questionable.}

_{[3] ‘Loss of the Titanic. Lady Duff-Gordon’s Narrative’, The Townsville Daily Bulletin, 23 April 1912, p.5.}

_{[4] For more details on this, see chapters 2 and 3 of my book The Titanic Expeditions – Diving to the Queen of the Deep: 1985-2021 (The History Press, revised and expanded 2nd edition, 2022)}

_{[5] Quoted from: Sides, Hampton, ‘The lights are finally on’, National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 221, No. 4, April 2012, p.99}

_{[6] Among the latter, such key pieces of wreckage as the double bottom sections, the ‘tower’ debris and the Big Piece (recovered in 1998) should be mentioned.}