Until 1912, the history of shipwrecks did not know disasters of such magnitude as the sinking of the Titanic. This is the largest passenger ship of the early 20th century. was built in 1911 in Great Britain. Its displacement is more than 46300 tons, length is about 269 m, width is 28.2 m, speed is 25 knots. The Titanic sank on her maiden voyage from Southampton (UK) to New York (USA) in April 1912. She carried approximately 2,200 people. The death toll, according to various sources, is from 1400 to 1517 people. 705 people were saved.
According to the official version, the liner collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912 at 23 hours 40 minutes and sank at 2 hours 20 minutes.
In the course of the investigation carried out after the disaster, it was found that the Titanic was ill prepared for an emergency, and its captain Edward Smith made a number of serious mistakes (in particular, ignored warnings from meteorologists about possible encounters with icebergs at this time of year) and was unable to a critical moment to make the only right decision and do everything possible to save people.
For a long time, it was not possible to pinpoint the exact location of the sinking of the Titanic. Only in 1985, a joint American-French expedition discovered a sunken ship about 800 km southeast of the island of Newfoundland. In July 1986, an American expedition took the first pictures of the Titanic lying at a depth of 3800 m and the objects scattered around it. Since then, several expeditions, including the Russian one, have visited the site of the ship's wreck.
There are many mystical stories associated with the Titanic. For example, a few weeks before this disaster was published a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann "Atlantis", which tells about the tragic death of the ship "Roland" in the Atlantic, which collided with an iceberg. Strikingly, the disaster described in the novel coincides in the smallest detail with the one that actually happened in April 1912 - with the sinking of the Titanic.
Other strange events preceded this tragedy. 19 people who bought tickets for the Titanic saw her in a dream a few days before the disaster, some of them refused to travel because of this. There were those who handed over their tickets at the last moment, obeying a sixth sense.
All these stories and the official version are detailed in many articles and books. But the official version has many opponents. Some of them believe that sabotage was the cause of the sinking of the Titanic, and put forward the following arguments as proof.
It is known, for example, that J. P. Morgan, owner of the ship, and Lord Gird, president of Harland & Wolfe, which built the Titanic, refused to participate in the maiden voyage of their offspring. But both of them were usually always on board when their ships made their maiden voyage. Maybe they knew something? Or did their intuition also work, warning, like hundreds of other passengers, that they should not board the Titanic?
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Further. At the trial that followed the disaster, the person responsible for loading and unloading, Frank Pretit, said that he, along with the workers, loaded gold bars into the ship's holds. The Bank of England sealed the documents on the loading of these valuables for a hundred years (until 2012). It may well be that the bullion was a payment for the military supplies of the United States of Great Britain. Recall that England faced certain difficulties when entering the First World War. And then the version that some German submarine a couple of years before the war fired torpedoes into the Titanic or a high-power bomb was planted in it, becomes quite plausible. In addition, the alleged aggressor could be sure that many more decades would pass before humanity had the technical ability to conduct a real investigation. Until recently, it was believed that the secret was forever buried under a four-kilometer water column.
And then new data appeared. In the spring of 1996, the English company "Discovery Channel" and the French company "Ellipse Programs" organized another expedition. The ship Nadir arrived at the site of the sinking of the Titanic. For thirty days, highly qualified engineers and scientists on it examined the Titanic's hull using an underwater vehicle capable of withstanding enormous pressure at such a depth. And they made an unexpected discovery: below the waterline, six holes were found, located in the most vulnerable places on the bow and occupying an area of no more than 5 m2. If an iceberg collided with the Titanic, it would leave a huge hole in the hull. On the other hand, the small holes suggested that the ship was sinking slowly, at a speed almost imperceptible to the crew, who realized everything too late.
After a collision with an iceberg, a hole of at least 30 m should have formed in the ship's hull, and not a series of "holes" in different places.
These are the arguments of the supporters of the version of the deliberate sinking of the Titanic. More expeditions will probably be organized to the place of his death. And sooner or later, time will put everything in its place.
Author: Nepomnyashchy Nikolay Nikolaevich. From the book: "100 Great Mysteries of History"