Timeline of United States discoveries four days into the ship's maiden voyage, "Titanic" struck an iceberg and sank two hours and forty minutes later, early on April 15, 1912. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. After nearly 74 years of being lost at sea on the bottom of the ocean floor, a joint Franco-American expedition led by American oceanographer Dr. Robert D. Ballard, discovered the wreckage of the RMS "Titanic" two miles (3 km) beneath the waves of the North Atlantic on September 1, 1985. Ballard
Passengers of the RMS Titanic Palestinian American journalist, watched the "Titanic" (1997) film and noticed some background characters saying "yalla", meaning "hurry" in Arabic. This prompted him to research the issue and he discovered that Arab passengers were on board. In 1998, he wrote a column about the Arabs on the RMS "Titanic", "Titanic: We Share the Pain But Not the Glory." According to Hanania's analysis, there were 79 Arab passengers on board the ship, though the task to "identify precisely" which passengers were Arab is difficult. Hanania stated that many were Christians because church sponsorship made it easier for Christians to get passage as