16. Many passengers either didn’t realize the ship had been hit, or assumed it was nothing to worry about.
When it happened, many of the passengers didn’t even realize that the ship they were on had hit an iceberg. Those in Steerage – or Third Class – were on the lowest decks and felt the force of the collision the hardest. But even most of them weren’t unduly concerned. In the First Class cabins, the collision led some passengers to remark that it felt like the great ship had, in the words of one wealthy woman, “just gone over about a thousand marbles”. Even many of the crew were unaware of the magnitude of the crash – until, of course, the water started coming in.