A reporter explores the role that criminal negligence may have played in history’s most famous disaster at sea.
The RMS Titanic was hailed as largest, strongest, safest ship of its time, an exemplar of British shipbuilding. But what the 1,500 victims who sailed to their watery graves never knew was that much of the ship was imperfectly forged from cheap and recycled scrap iron—and that the tragedy may have been caused by gross negligence and greed.
Investigative reporter Robert Strange has studied scientific, forensic evidence from metal raised from the ship’s carcass miles deep on the ocean floor, and secrets hidden for a hundred years within the archives of the shipyard that built and launched the vessel, to answer the question: Who sank the Titanic? This book examines the intense cost-cutting pressures which could have contributed to the Titanic’s demise and one of the greatest loss-of-life disasters in maritime history. The book makes the argument that there was negligence in every area of the ship’s planning and construction—and that her owners, her planners, her builders, and the government ministers who watched her set sail could be considered complicit in one of the greatest mass homicides in history.
