Passengers of the RMS Titanic April 1912 at around 11:40 pm, while the RMS "Titanic" was sailing about south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the ship struck an iceberg and began to sink. Shortly before midnight, Captain Edward Smith ordered the ship's lifeboats to be readied and a distress call was sent out. The closest ship to respond was Cunard Line's away, which would arrive in an estimated four hours—too late to rescue all of "Titanic" passengers. Forty-five minutes after the ship hit the iceberg, Captain Smith ordered the lifeboats to be loaded and lowered under the orders women and children first. The first
RMS Titanic in popular culture gave a fairly short first-hand account in her posthumously published "Titanic Survivor" (1997). "Carpathia"s 1912 captain, Arthur Rostron, published an account of his own role in his 1931 autobiography "Home from the Sea". Various other authors of the first wave published compilations of news reportage, interviews and survivors' accounts. However, as W. B. Bartlett comments, they were "marked by some journalism of highly suspect and sensationalist variety ... which tell[s] more about the standards of journalistic editorialism at the time than they do about what really happened on the "Titanic"." The British writer Filson Young's book "Titanic", described by Richard