When I ask myself - as I sometimes do - why I have spent the better part of the past six years intensely exploring the rescue of the Third Class passengers on Titanic, I begin with the fascination of a fabulously singular historical event; an event on the grandest of scales along myriad dimensions, squeezed into two hours and forty minutes of a spectacularly clear starlit night amid the ice fields of the North Atlantic, and thousands of people ranging from the world's creme de la creme to huddled masses of transient workers - immigrants, seamen, shipping magnates, men, women and children together in the middle of a unique journey - all abruptly confronted by death.

Both the proof of its singularity and compounding it is the hold Titanic has had on the popular imagination. Especially since the 1950s, Titanic has been indelibly imprinted in the public mind by a succession of mass entertainments. These have culminated in the last two decades in the larger-than-life adventure in book and film of Robert Ballard's expedition to the wreck of Titanic in 1985, and in 1997 by the making and selling of a film on the grandest of scales, James Cameron's Titanic. This interest requires any serious consideration of what happened on Titanic to engage what we will term the “popular story.” This is to say the “historical imagination” - which we understand to mean a rendering of the event that solely allows in and thereby is solely constrained by what is knowable - must confront the “popular imagination,“ which is fuelled and thereby effectively constrained by the demands of narrative, that is, of story-telling. Be warned then that story-telling is not our purpose. It is a humbler but no less difficult task we take on: to give a coherent account of what most likely in reality occurred.

There is a last, but not least, aspect of Titanic drew me in: the voluminous and minutely detailed information available about it. Of chief importance, the thunderous impact Titanic had on the popular imagination immediately resulted in two extensive investigations, one in the US and one in Britain, into all aspects of the accident.