Titanic's Lifeboats : Disaster and Survival During the Great Liner's Sinking

a rope ladder onto the lifeboat. Other garments played an important part in the survival of one of the lifeboats which sprung a leak, with the people onboard using clothes to plug the hole.Charles Joughin, the head baker aboard Titanic, floated in the near-freezing ocean for around two hours before being pulled out of the water onto one of the lifeboats. He had not succumbed to the cold due to the amount of alcohol he had drunk.Masabumi Hosono, a civil servant from Tokyo, was the only Japanese passenger onboard Titanic and, being a man, he accepted that the women and children first policy had sealed his fate. However, when a crew member shouted that there were two spaces left in a lifeboat, No.10, Hosono jumped in. As Japanese honour considered it far better for a man to suffer an honourable death than to survive in a shameful manner, when he reached his homeland he was ostracized by his family and lost his job.When it sailed, Titanic carried twenty lifeboats that, between them, could accommodate 1,178

people, a little over half of the 2,209 on board the night the liner sank. Eighteen of these life-saving craft were used that night, but tragically only 706 people found a space in them. This is the dramatic and moving story of the men, women and children who made it into the lifeboats that fateful night in April 1912. [Publisher's Text]