Shipwrights in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall’s active boatbuilding area are constructing a 30-foot replica of RMS Titanic’s Lifeboat 13. Experts partially blame an insufficient supply of these lifeboats aboard RMS Titanic for the loss more than 1,500 passengers.
On her first and final ocean voyage, the RMS Titanic carried 20 lifeboats: 14 wooden boats with a capacity for 65 passengers, four collapsible lifeboats with a capacity for 40 and two emergency cutters that could hold 40 passengers each. Only 700 of the more than 3,000 passengers on board survived after the ship struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland on April 15, 1912.
The Lifeboat 13 exhibit will contain information about the crew and passengers who were aboard the 30-foot craft and will be part of a larger display about Titanic. The National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom, will host the exhibit from March 8, 2018 to January 7, 2019.
This video from the National Maritime Museum Cornwall shows the project:
The RMS Titanic disaster is shrouded in mystery. Though it is widely accepted that RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, a Smithsonian Channel documentary suggests that the sinking was caused by a coal fire. You can read about it in Soundings’ April 2017 issue.
