The ill-fated Titanic wasted more than 45 minutes before sending out distress signals after it had hit an iceberg, just four days into the luxury liner’s maiden voyage, a new book has claimed.
The largest passenger steamship in the world hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, United Kingdom, to New York in April 1912, and sank with loss of 1,517 lives.
Now, in his book, noted author Tim Maltin has said that the Titanic spent a lot of time assessing the damage from the iceberg when nearby ships could have been steaming to the rescue, ‘ The Daily Telegraph ’ reported.
The book, ‘101 Things You Thought You Knew About The Titanic... But Didn’t’, claims that no alert was sent from the ailing vessel for some 47 minutes because the ships’ officers wanted to keep the disaster quiet.
Maltin said: “They (the ship’s authorities) may have been considering the public relations aspect of it and was it going to sink or not because then they would have rather kept it quiet, there may have been a slight bit of delay.”
He said the order to go to the lifeboats was given at the same time as the distress signal. “It may be that it took them that long to look at the damage but it seems likely to me that they were unwilling to send out a distress message.”
