The Titanic

Today on the drive home from the Memorial Day services I read an interesting, short, non-fiction book.  It was written by one of the survivors from the Titanic, Lawrence Beesley.

I have seen the movie 'Titanic' and while there are events that occurred in it that are true, there also were things that were fictionally documented.  For example, Lawrence Beesley tells of how calm and and how much respect for authority the passengers on the Titanic had.  They did as they were told and waited in silence for each order they received from the officers. "Similarly, the engineers below, the band, the gymnasium instructor, were all performing their tasks as they came along: orderly, quietly, without question or stopping to consider what was their chance of safety". (Beesley, 128)
Also, I didn't realize that the main reason a lot of the lifeboats were only half full was because people simply refused to get on. Lawrence Beesley talks of how safe and lighted it seemed on the big "unsinkable" ship and when faced with the choice to get into a small life boat and row into the darkness, many people refused the latter. 
One last bit of information I found interesting was that the iceberg field the Titanic was in when it sunk was 70 miles long and 12 miles wide. Wow!