A Single Survivor
The ill-fated Titanic voyage is renowned as one of the most infamous maritime tragedies of all time. Only a small percentage of the 2,224 passengers and crew members survived the icy seas of the North Atlantic. One of them was Millvina Dean. She was the Titanic’s youngest passenger, born in 1912 and only two months old when the ship went down. Her mother rescued her by covering her in a sack and placing her into a lifeboat. Dean died in 2009, at the age of 97, after a lengthy life as the last surviving Titanic casualty.
A Single Survivor
Abandonment of Lifeboat Drill
According to survivor accounts, the Titanic’s captain made an unprecedented decision to cancel the scheduled lifeboat training on April 14, 1912. Although the exact cause of this disaster is unknown, some speculate that the crew’s overconfidence in the ship’s unsinkable structure may have had a role. The Titanic was hit by an iceberg the next day and sank, killing nearly 1,500 people. The ship, ironically, only carried 20 lifeboats, which were much too few for the number of passengers and crew. The shortage of lifeboats played a crucial role in the high death toll.
Abandonment of Lifeboat Drill
