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 wherein the world, as Western man has known and shaped it, is undermined from within, not overcome from without; and ends not in holocaust but with a quiet slip into oblivion.” Don Lynch's "Inside the Titanic" (1997) presents an overview of the ship and the disaster, illustrated by the artist Ken Marschall, whose pictures of "Titanic" and other lost ships have become famous. Susan Wels' book "Titanic: Legacy of the World's Greatest Ocean Liner" (1997) documents the salvage work of RMS "Titanic" Inc, while Daniel Allen Butler provides a scholarly examination of the "Titanic" story in his 1998 book "Unsinkable: