Legends and myths regarding RMS Titanic
At the time the "Titanic" sank, the 1 May 1912 issue of "The Popular Magazine", an American pulp magazine, was on the news stands. It contained the short story "The White Ghost of Disaster," which described the collision of an ocean liner with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, the sinking of the vessel, and the fate of the passengers. The story, by Mayn Clew Garnett (the pseudonym of sea-story author T. Jenkins Hains), created a minor sensation. In 1898, fourteen years prior to the "Titanic" disaster,
Morgan Robertson wrote a book called "Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan". This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the "Titan", which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the "Titan" hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost everyone on board. There are some similarities between the fictional sinking of the "Titan" and the real-life sinking of the RMS "Titanic".
Olympic-class ocean liner
"Titanic" struck an iceberg at while sailing about 400 miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland shortly before midnight. The strike and the resulting shock sheared the rivets, thus opening a leak in the hull below the waterline. This caused the first five compartments to be flooded with flooding in a sixth compartment controlled by the pumps; the ship could only stay afloat with four compartments flooded. "Titanic" sank 2 hours and 40 minutes after the collision. There being not enough lifeboats for all the passengers and the nearest responding ship () being too far away, 1,514 of the 2,224 people on board died, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.