Georgie

In first class, there was one steward for every seven people, so they could calmly knock on your door and escort you out to the deck area.

Hell, you might even have time to grab a few of your jewels on the way.

From the second class cabins, you'd have a few more stairs to climb.

But at least there were no physical barriers blocking you from getting to the boats.

So let's say you finally realise the severity of the situation and decided to make your way from decks E and F up to higher ground.

Not only would you have a long, winding path ahead of you to reach the lifeboats, to add insult to injury, you'd also find security gates physically blocking your route.

The thing was, all the lifeboats were being launched from decks where third-class passengers technically weren't allowed to go under normal circumstances.

And these barriers between steerage and the upper decks weren't just about snobbery.

They were there to comply with US immigration laws.

At the time, third-class passengers, most of them European migrants, had to be processed at Ellis Island for disease checks, whilst other passengers could hop right off at Manhattan Island.

Very small, of course.

You might think those stuffy rules would go out the window in an emergency.

But for a solid chunk of time during the evacuation, eyewitness accounts tell us that some of the gates were shockingly still manned.

Many third-class passengers were forced to seek alternate routes, like climbing emergency ladders or even scrambling up the side of the ship between decks.

Their already tricky path to safety was hindered by red-tape bureaucracy.

And by the time access loosened, most of the lifeboats had already gone.

So yeah, we apologise to everyone who reckoned they'd be travelling in steerage.

Because while the evacuation protocol might not have technically said higher classes get to leave first, that's basically exactly what ended up happening.

Even without calculated discrimination, the social landscape of the Titanic naturally stacked the odds against those guys from the very start.

So Captain Smith did explicitly enforce this rule as the Titanic was going down.