Actually, it was kind of that they were left to find their way up. They were told, but no one was as helpful as they were towards the First Class. Typical of the day.
FYI, Californian and Carpathia were as unlucky as Titanic both were sunk a few years later by U-boats in WW1.
Yep-although in the case of the Carpathia, only five didn’t make it. Her captain from the time of the Titanic rescue, Arthur Rostron, would go on to command the Mauritania, IIRC.
And it’s interesting-they only found the location of Carpathia a few years ago.
Life boats were required by law. Unfortunately the required number was an anachronism from when the biggest ships were a fraction of the size of the Titanic.
I don’t think that the lower deck passengers were intentionally locked down. I need to check out A night To Remember and reread it. I think I recall that the cheap seat passengers were given practically no information or crew assistance in getting topside. In trying to get there they found a lot of locked and blocked passageways resulting in a lot of lost time stumbling around looking for ways up.
As far as off-loading the passengers onto an iceberg. In addition to being useless, there just wasn’t time.
The ship sank in about 2-1/2 hours. According the Britannica: “Shortly before midnight on April 14, the ship collided with an iceberg … [and] The ship sank at 2:20 AM April 15.”
Britannica further states that there were “… only 1,178 lifeboat spaces for the 2,224 persons aboard” and a number of the lifeboads couldn’t be launched or capsized on launching. To conceive, organize and carry out an emergency evacuation of over a thousand people by small boat transfer from a 46000 ton ocean liner in the time available just doesn’t seem reasonable.
Here’s link to a chart showing a breakdown of survivors by class and gender:
http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm
An interesting thing is that the save rate for third class men was twice that of second class men, but many more were lost as there were three times as many as in second class.