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 romantic tragedies with personal heroism. It has inspired many moral, social and political metaphors and is regularly invoked as a cautionary tale of the limitations of modernity and ambition. The RMS "Titanic" has been commemorated in a wide variety of ways in the century after she sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. As D. Brian Anderson has put it, the sinking of "Titanic" has "become a part of our mythology, firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness, and the stories will continue to be retold not because they need to be retold, but because we need to tell them."