Chapter 1: What happened on the night of the Titanic sinking?
Hello. Hello. We've all heard the story of the Titanic. Some of us may even have bought a Lego Titanic kit and then been so embarrassed they sent it back immediately. No.
No.
You have no idea how big it is. Oh. It arrived and I was like, you can't do... It arrived at the person's house. And they thought to themselves, you cannot seriously be thinking about this 35-year-old person. So I got... Oh, fair enough. Maybe one day if I'm really good, I can have it. Sure, sure, sure. As a treat. It's not today.
Okay.
The unsinkable ship whose maiden voyage ended in tragedy... securing a place in history as one of the deadliest ever disasters at sea, doing it all while not looking any bigger than the Mauritania. You might also think that you know how it all really went down.
Jack and Rose met, shagged in the steamy car, the iceberg hit, panic ensued, over 1,500 were left dead, freezing in the Atlantic Ocean and the floating door that absolutely did have space on it. But have you ever wondered if you would survive that fateful night? Well, wonder no more, because we are going to talk you through your chances step by step.
Strap on your life vest, and let's find out if your heart really would go on, or if it would be doomed to stop forever in the icy darkness. This is The Shorthand. I read the other day that the reason we know the time it sank is because of all of the watches that froze at 20 past two. Makes sense.
Also, this is the, if you're listening to this on the day of release, tomorrow is the anniversary of the Titanic sinking. Wow. A very unceremonious anniversary, though. It's the 114-year anniversary. Oh, give me five. I'm trying my best.
Sorry. Sure, give me five.
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Chapter 2: How did class and ticket type affect survival chances on the Titanic?
Even without calculated discrimination, the social landscape of the Titanic naturally stacked the odds against those guys from the very start.
So let's say you actually managed to get to the upper decks where the lifeboats were being launched. As of now, your class wouldn't matter anymore, but something else would. Your gender. Captain Smith gave the orders to the officers in charge of loading the boats to follow the rule of women and children first.
So if you are a bloke, sorry, back of the queue unless you're willing to beat women or steal a child like Cal. But sidebar, as I mentioned, women and children first does get talked about like it's some ancient unbreakable law of the sea and the world, an unbreakable chivalric code that sailors have always followed. But that is bollocks.
A 2012 study by Swedish researchers Mikael Allender and Oskar Eriksson looked at 18 major shipwrecks over more than a century and found that in most disasters, men actually had a much higher survival rate than women and children did. So Titanic was not the rule, it was notably the exception. So, you know, don't let men tell you lies.
So Captain Smith did explicitly enforce this rule as the Titanic was going down. But the way it was applied was interesting. Loading boats on the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch took Captain Smith's words, as they were intended, women and children first. If there were spaces on the lifeboats after that, he let men climb aboard.
But on the port side, Second Officer Charles Lightoller, for some reason, took it to mean women and children only. He refused to let any men board, even threatening them at gunpoint. Needless to say, this caused absolute fucking chaos. Families were split up, with many women actually refusing a spot on the boats because they didn't want to be separated from their husbands or loved ones.
and it meant that most of the boats were launched at just 60% capacity, reducing the already dodgy survival odds even more.
It was goodbye for a little while, just a little while. Even aside from Lightoller's blunder, it was a total shitshow of an evacuation. The crew undertook basically no emergency training before settling sail, and a planned lifeboat drill that very morning had been mysteriously cancelled by Captain Smith.
Since the vast majority of crew members were not seamen, their inexperience and general sense of panic exacerbated everything. There were numerous close calls where lifeboats took on water or came close to crashing on top of each other. Each lifeboat had to be lowered about 70 feet down the side of the ship into black, freezing water.
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