"Szent István" was hit by two torpedoes abreast her boiler rooms. The aft boiler room quickly flooded and gave the ship a 10° list to starboard. Counterflooding of the portside trim cells and magazines reduced the list to 7°, but efforts to use collision mats to plug the holes failed. While this was going on the dreadnought steered for the nearby Bay of Brgulje at low speed, before eventually coming to a halt in order to provide additional power to the ship's pumps, which could discharge of water per hour. However, water continued to leak into the forward boiler room and eventually doused all but the two boilers on the port side. This killed the power for the pumps and only left enough electricity to run the lights. The turrets were trained to port in a futile effort to counter the list and their ready ammunition was thrown overboard. Upon returning to the formation at 4:45 am, "Tegetthoff" attempted to take "Szent István" in tow, which failed. Many of the crew members of the sinking battleship assembled on the deck to use their weight along with the turned turrets as a counterbalance, but the ship was taking on too much water, with her watertight bulkheads giving way to the flooding one by one. "Szent István"s chaplain performed one final blessing while the crew of "Tegetthoff" emerged onto her decks to salute the sinking ship. At 6:12 am, with the pumps unequal to the task, "Szent István" capsized off Premuda. 89 sailors and officers died in the sinking, 41 of them from Hungary. The low death toll can be partly attributed to the long amount of time it took for the battleship to sink, and the fact that all sailors with the Austro-Hungarian Navy had to learn to swim before entering active service. The captain of "Szent István", Heinrich Seitz, was prepared to go down with his ship but was saved after being thrown off the bridge when she capsized.