15. April

The crusade’s envoys had contracted with Venice for ships for 33,500 men. Barely a third turned up, and the debt steered the crusade: first to Zara, then to Constantinople.

Crusaders and Venetians under the old, nearly blind doge Enrico Dandolo broke through the sea walls and looted the city for three days. The four bronze horses of San Marco in Venice are part of the loot.

The crusaders broke in along the Golden Horn and plundered the city for three days. Niketas Choniates, who fled with his family, wrote that Saracens would have been kinder; the bronze horses of San Marco in Venice came from this loot.

A month after the first stone of his lantern was laid. He was buried in the cathedral, an honour almost no one got, and his tomb was rediscovered in 1972 in excavations under the nave.

Sir Thomas Kyriell’s relief army, landed at Cherbourg, was drawn out of its archer line by the fire of two French culverins and then caught by a second French army under Richemont. French heralds counted 3,774 English dead; Kyriell was taken prisoner.

Militia for ninety days, to put down “combinations too powerful to be suppressed” by the courts. Asked to fight fellow slave states, four more states of the Upper South chose to leave instead.

Sworn in at the Kirkwood House hotel hours after Lincoln died. Congress overrode 15 of his vetoes, most of them Reconstruction bills, more than for any other president.

Thirty artists who had given up on the Salon’s jury formed a cooperative company and hung about 165 works in the photographer Nadar’s former studio, two weeks before the Salon opened. It ran for a month. Cézanne and Morisot showed alongside Monet, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro.

The captain came up from a dinner in his honour and talked with Second Officer Charles Lightoller about the flat calm, which would leave no surf on a berg to see. If it becomes at all doubtful let me know at once; I will be just inside. — Smith, as Lightoller testified

“Much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs”, right across Titanic's path. The wireless operators worked for the Marconi company and were busy with passenger telegrams; the message never reached the bridge.

First Officer William Murdoch took the watch; lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee were told to watch for small ice. The crow's nest had had no binoculars since Southampton. Well, enough to get out of the way. — Fleet, asked how much sooner glasses would have shown the berg

About 23:00 Californian's only operator, Cyril Evans, called to say his ship had stopped, surrounded by ice. Jack Phillips, working through a backlog with Cape Race, cut him off. Evans soon switched off and went to bed.

Fleet rang the crow's-nest bell three times and telephoned the bridge. Murdoch ordered hard a-starboard, which under the old tiller orders swung the bow to port.

The berg scraped along the starboard bow and opened the hull over about 90 metres. She could float with four compartments flooded; six were open. Many passengers barely felt it, and some played with the ice that fell on the forward well deck.

Steaming into the iceTitanic

A clear, calm Sunday on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Warnings of ice ahead came in all day, and she held her speed of about 22 knots, close to her best.

From the collision to the sinking. The boats could hold 1,178 of about 2,224 aboard, and the first ones left half empty.

Thomas Andrews, the Harland & Wolff designer on board, toured the damage with Smith and told him the ship would founder in an hour to an hour and a half. She lasted a little longer.

The Marconi station on Newfoundland's southern tip, which Titanic had been working all evening, picked up the CQD and passed it on by cable. It was how New York first heard.

Board of Trade rules scaled lifeboats to tonnage, not people, and asked 16 of any ship over 10,000 tons. Titanic carried 20, more than the law required, with room for about half of those aboard.

Phillips sent CQD MGY with a rough position, soon corrected to Fourth Officer Boxhall's fix of 41°46′ N 50°14′ W. The wreck lies about 13 nautical miles east-south-east of it.

Two Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, worked the set until the water reached the cabin. Phillips did not survive.

Harold Cottam, about to go to bed, called Titanic to say Cape Cod had messages for her. The reply: Come at once. We have struck a berg. It's a CQD, old man. Position 41.46 N. 50.14 W.

Captain Arthur Rostron turned his Cunarder north-west and pushed a 14-knot ship to about 17 knots, cutting the heating and hot water for more steam. He doubled the lookouts and dodged icebergs in the dark for 58 miles.

Boxhall and Quartermaster George Rowe fired white rockets and signalled with a Morse lamp at the lights of a ship that seemed a few miles off. She never answered. On Californian the watch counted eight rockets.

Capacity 65; it left with about 28. Few believed the ship would sink. Aboard was the film actress Dorothy Gibson, who a month later starred in Saved from the Titanic.

Eighteen boats were lowered, mostly from the boat deck, women and children first. Two more collapsibles floated off as she went down.

Bride joked that Phillips should try the new international call, in use since 1908: Send SOS; it's the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it. — Bride Titanic was not the first ship to send it.

Quartermaster Robert Hichens refused to go back for people in the water; Margaret Brown took an oar and urged the women to row. Nobody called her “Molly” in her lifetime: that came from a 1933 book and then the 1960 musical.

Second Officer Herbert Stone told Captain Stanley Lord by speaking tube. Lord asked whether they were company signals and said to keep calling with the Morse lamp. Nobody woke the wireless operator.

Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet changed into evening clothes. A steward carried his message ashore: We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.

Bandleader Wallace Hartley and his musicians played ragtime to keep people calm, and kept on nearly to the end. None of the eight survived. Whether the last tune was “Nearer, My God, to Thee” has never been settled.

Capacity 40. Aboard were Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon; Sir Cosmo promised each of the seven crewmen £5 for lost kit, and the British inquiry had to rule on whether it was a bribe not to go back. It found it was not.

Ida Straus gave her seat to her maid and would not leave her husband Isidor, co-owner of Macy's. They were last seen together on deck. The Countess of Rothes took a turn at the boat's tiller.

“We are putting the women off in the boats.” Her sister ship was about 500 miles away, too far to help.

The White Star chairman stepped into a boat with seats to spare as it was lowered. He was cleared by the British inquiry and condemned by the press for the rest of his life.

As it reached the water it drifted under Lifeboat 15, which was coming down on top of it. The falls were cut just in time. Science teacher Lawrence Beesley, aboard 13, wrote one of the first books on the disaster.

The last message Carpathia heard from Titanic, with Carpathia still more than two hours away.

John Jacob Astor, the richest man aboard, asked to go with his pregnant wife Madeleine. Lightoller said no men. Astor's body was found a week later.

About thirty men balanced on the keel of the overturned boat, among them Lightoller, Bride, Colonel Archibald Gracie and 17-year-old Jack Thayer. Lightoller had them stand and lean against the swell. At dawn boats 4 and 12 took them off.

Chief baker Charles Joughin, who had been drinking whisky, said he rode the stern down, stepped off as she sank, and trod water for about two hours before reaching Collapsible B. He said he hardly felt the cold.

Crewmen locked arms around it to hold back the crowd. Aboard were two French boys, Michel and Edmond Navratil, put in by their father, who was travelling as “Louis Hoffman” and died; for weeks nobody knew who they were.

Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it's every man for himself. — Smith, as Bride recalled Phillips kept sending. Smith was last seen near the bridge and went down with his ship.

The two boats still lashed to the officers' quarters roof floated off as the bow went under. A was swamped; B landed upside down.

Virginian heard Titanic calling, faint and blurred, and then an abrupt stop as the power failed.

The engineers kept the lights burning to the end; none of them survived. Survivors saw the hull break in two, but both inquiries concluded she sank intact. The wreck proved the survivors right.

The stern rose, the hull broke between the third and fourth funnels, and she went down at 02:20 ship's time, to about 3,800 metres. The water was −2 °C. The wreck was found on 1 September 1985 by a French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard.

About 1,500 people were left in water at −2 °C. The boats had hundreds of empty seats, but most kept away for fear of being swamped by the crowd.

Fifth Officer Harold Lowe moved his passengers into other boats and rowed back to the wreckage. He found four men alive; one died soon after. At dawn he raised a sail and took off the survivors of swamped Collapsible A.

A bulletin reported Titanic's call for help. When nothing more came, managing editor Carr Van Anda concluded she was lost; the morning's front page read “Sinking by the Bow at Midnight”.

A day of fragments relayed by wireless, some of them false: rumours that all were saved and that Titanic was under tow to Halifax ran in the evening papers.

Carpathia stopped among the boats at about 04:00 and spent four and a half hours gathering them in, turning her three dining saloons into hospitals.

Boxhall had been burning green flares to guide her in. He told Rostron that Titanic had gone down.

At first light the chief officer woke Evans, who switched on his set and learned from other ships that Titanic had sunk. Californian started her engines and pushed south through the ice.

As the sun came up the survivors saw what they had been drifting among: icebergs in every direction, some 150 to 200 feet high, and a field of pack ice stretching to the horizon.

She arrived as the last boat came aboard and found only wreckage. The British inquiry found that had she come when she saw the rockets, she “might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.”

Lifeboat 12, dangerously overloaded with about 70 people, among them the men from Collapsible B. Lightoller was the last survivor up the ladder.

After a short service over the site, Rostron set course for New York with about 705 survivors. She docked at Pier 54 on the night of 18 April.

That morning vice-president Philip Franklin had told reporters the company believed the boat unsinkable. In the evening a message from Olympic confirmed she had sunk, and he read it out.

The first landing ever made on Elephant Island, and the first land under their feet since South Georgia, 497 days before. Shackleton gave the honour to the youngest, Blackborow, who sat down in the surf: his feet were frostbitten and he could not stand.

When the floe split under the camp they launched the James Caird, Dudley Docker and Stancomb Wills, named after the expedition’s backers. Six days and nights in open boats, soaked and frostbitten, short of drinking water; several men were delirious by the end.

Ella Baker of the SCLC called the sit-in students together at her alma mater over Easter weekend and urged them to stay independent of the older groups. They formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which would carry the movement into rural Mississippi and Alabama.

Swinging around the far side 254 kilometres up, the crew were 400,171 kilometres from Earth, the farthest any humans had gone. The record stood until Artemis II in April 2026.

24 minutes 35 seconds out of radio contact, while the crew photographed the far side through the windows and Houston waited.

The spent third stage, steered on purpose into the Moon, struck at about 2.6 kilometres a second. The seismometer Apollo 12 had left behind recorded the shaking for 3 hours 20 minutes, so strongly that its gain had to be turned down.

Two hours after the closest approach to the Moon (pericynthion, “PC”), the descent engine fired again for 4 minutes 24 seconds. It cut about ten hours off the trip home and aimed it at the Pacific, where the recovery ships were.

Carbon dioxide was building up: Aquarius’s scrubbers took round canisters, and the command module’s spares were square. Ed Smylie’s engineers in Houston built an adapter from what was on board, and Joe Kerwin read it up step by step for most of an hour: two canisters, plastic bags, a cardboard cue…