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Reiterate in the lead the point that for the numbers of passengers and of dead we have only estimates. |
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The '''sinking of the RMS ''Titanic''''' occurred on the night of 14 April through to the morning of 15 April 1912 in the north [[Atlantic Ocean]], four days into her [[maiden voyage]] from [[Southampton]] to [[New York City]]. The largest [[superliner (passenger ship)|passenger liner]] in service at the time, ''[[RMS Titanic|Titanic]]'' had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an [[iceberg]] at 23:40 (ship's time{{efn|name=shiptime|At the time of the collision, ''Titanic''{{'}}s clocks were set to 2 hours 2 minutes ahead of [[Eastern Time Zone]] ([[UTC−05:00]]) and 2 hours 58 minutes behind [[Greenwich Mean Time]].{{sfn|Halpern|2011|p=78}} In other words, her time was close to UTC-3 (only 2 minutes ahead).}}) on Sunday, 14 April 1912. She sank two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 (05:18 GMT) on Monday, 15 April, causing the deaths of over 1,500 people, making it one of the deadliest [[List of maritime disasters#Peacetime disasters|peacetime maritime disasters]] in history. Even a century and several researches later, the exact figures for total passengers and for lost passengers cannot be determined. As for the death toll, the official British inquiry of 1912 concluded it was 1,514, but a prominent researcher, Walter Lord (1976), gave a range of estimates from 1,490 to 1,635.
''Titanic'' had received several warnings of sea ice during 14 April but was travelling near her maximum speed when she collided with the iceberg. The ship suffered a glancing blow that buckled her [[starboard]] (right) side and opened five of her sixteen compartments to the sea. ''Titanic'' had been designed to stay afloat with four flooded compartments but not five, and the crew soon realised that the ship was going to sink. They used [[Flare_(pyrotechnic)#Maritime_distress_signal|rocket flares]] and radio (“wireless”) messages to attract help as the passengers were put into [[Lifeboat (shipboard)|lifeboats]]. However, there were far too few lifeboats available and many were not filled to their capacity due to a poorly managed evacuation.
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