Titanic mysteries that may never be solved
They said it was “unsinkable.” So how could the Titanic have sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic just four days into its maiden voyage?
Was it even the Titanic?
Everyone agrees that a luxury liner set sail on April 10, 1912, and sank five days later, taking the lives of around 1,500 of the 2,223 aboard. But that’s pretty much where the consensus ends. Some insist the ship that sank wasn’t the Titanic, but rather, the nearly identical R.M.S. Olympic. As the story goes, the Olympic had been damaged in an accident the year before, but in order to score a bigger insurance payoff, the ships’ common owners passed off the Olympic as the Titanic and then deliberately sank it. While there are lots of holes in this Titanic theory, serial numbers found on parts of the ship that didn’t sink support it.
Did a fire actually seal the ship’s fate?
A recent documentary offers credible evidence that the Titanic (let’s just call it that, for argument’s sake) had been damaged by a coal fire, which had been raging for three weeks before the ship even set sail. The damage would have weakened the hull of the ship, thus hastening the ship’s sinking when it collided with an iceberg. (If it collided with an iceberg, which is another Titanic mystery we discuss below.)