Titanic’s Last Secrets

There are a least 900 books on Titanic, but none reveal the stories of the men who built the ship and the truth about what happened on the morning of April 15, 1912.

Titanic’s Last Secrets is the culmination of three years of investigation by John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, shipwreck divers, historians, and the protagonists of Shadow Divers, and maritime historian and writer Brad Matsen. Their research, conducted two and a half miles beneath the Atlantic on the wreck of Titanic, and in archives in Belfast, London, and New York, proves that Titanic sank much more quickly than it should have because of structural weaknesses, resulting in the deaths of 1,500 people who would not have died had the ship stayed afloat for just two hours longer. It also reveals that Titanic’s owner, Bruce Ismay and the White Star Line, and her builder, William Pirrie and the Harland and Wolff shipyard of Belfast, pushed the engineering envelope during her construction and later covered up their mistakes when disaster struck. The book has a cast of dozens of historical and contemporary characters, each of whom contributes to the most sensational and damning account of the sinking of Titanic ever written. It is a tale of egotism, greed, bad luck, deception, and discovery told from the intimate perspectives of the people who lived it.

Copyright © 2008 by Brad Matsen