Sinking of the RMS Titanic April 1912 when she left Southampton on the first leg of her journey to New York. A few hours later she called at Cherbourg in northern France, a journey of , where she took on passengers. Her next port of call was Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, which she reached around midday on 11 April. She left in the afternoon after taking on more passengers and stores. By the time she departed westwards across the Atlantic she was carrying 892 crew members and 1,320 passengers. This was only about half of her full passenger capacity of 2,435, as it was
Port of Southampton numbers as well as terminal capacity, with Southampton becoming one of the busiest cruise ports in the world. Cruise ship sizes have risen substantially in recent years. The largest vessel using the Port of Southampton is Royal Caribbean's "Anthem of the Seas", with a length of 338.8m, a gross tonnage of 154,407 and a maximum passenger capacity of 4,375. In 2005, the number of passengers using the port totalled 738,000, higher than it had been in any one year of the previous century. Since then it has increased year on year, and the figure for 2010 was 1.2 million passengers,