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Titanic Disaster | 11.40pm

At 11:40 PM lookouts Fred Fleet and Reginald Lee were ready to call it a night as their shift ended in 20 minutes. The sea had been flat calm and the air bitterly cold. The two lookouts were without binoculars as they had been misplaced in Southampton. Fleet noticed something directly ahead of the ship and as it grew larger he realized what it was. An iceberg, which was nearly black and difficult to see from having flipped over at some point prior. He immediately rang the bridge and reported "Iceberg right ahead" to Sixth Officer Moody who had answered the phone. Murdoch quickly sprang into action; ordering the engines stopped and then reversed and telling Quartermaster Robert Hichens to turn the wheel "hard-a-starboard". Ships in that era where turned by turning the wheel in the opposite direction they were intending to turn. Thus "hard-a-starboard" meant turning the wheel to starboard, or right, which would turn the ship sharply to port, or left. Murdoch closed all the watertight compartments in the bottom of the ship as Hichens turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go. At the last moment the ship began to veer to the left. It seemed at first that they had made it. However, a grinding sound indicated that they had not been so lucky. The ship took a glancing blow along the starboard bow.

The Titanic's hull was divided into 15 transverse watertight bulkheads into 16 "watertight" compartments. She was designed to float with any two of these compartments flooded. She could float even with all four of the first compartments flooded. But not the first five. The ship was now taking on water in the mailroom. The critical compartment was boiler room No. 6. With the first 5 compartments breached, water would eventually fill them and overflow into each consecutive compartment and eventually pull the ship down by the head. Thomas Andrews, the ship's architect, knew her prognosis first. He estimated that she would go down in an hour, at most an hour and a half.

Captain Smith had no time to ponder what mistakes has led to the disaster. His concern now was the orderly evacuation of the ship and trying to keep her afloat as long as possible. In his long and remarkable career at sea, this was the first real crisis he had to deal with. Smith was faced with the reality that the ship only carried enough lifeboats for roughly half the estimated 2,200 on board. Actually, the Titanic carried more lifeboats than was required by the British Board of Trade regulations of the day.

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