Fourteen hundred and ninety
The ship everyone means by drowning lost 1,490 lives in the British inquiry's count. The counter passes that number in not quite two days.
This counter is 300,000 deaths a year, which is the WHO figure for 2021. Since 2000 the death rate has fallen, on the WHO's account from 6.1 to 3.8 per 100,000, and the number is still large. Children under 5 are nearly a quarter of it. It is among the leading causes of death in childhood. About 92% of the deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. The water is often a pond, a ditch, a river beside a house, a bucket. The water in the famous story is the North Atlantic.
The inquiry's number
On the night of 14 April 1912 the Titanic hit ice, and a little after two the next morning she sank. The British wreck commissioner's inquiry, under Lord Mersey, recorded the loss of 1,490 lives. The same report's figures for the saved do not quite agree with each other from page to page, 711 in one place and 712 in another. The lost figure in the heading of the report is 1,490. That is the number used here. It is not a claim that every body was separately tallied to the last person.
They did not all drown in the narrow sense. Many died of cold in the water. At the rate on this card, those 1,490 deaths are not quite two days.
The other water
The boats explain only part of that number. There were seats for 1,178 people, and about 2,200 on board, so full boats would still have left about a thousand behind. The boats were not full. About 700 people got away. Some were lowered with empty seats. Passengers were slow to get in while the ship still seemed safe, women and children were taken first, and the officers feared a full boat would buckle on the way down. That fear was wrong. A far smaller share of the third class was saved than of the first. The inquiry did not find that first-class passengers had kept the others out. It put the difference on where the third class slept, and on their being slow to leave the ship.
The rest of the year is mostly not liners. Drowning is one of the few injuries that kills the very young in these numbers, which is why it sits so far down the accident column and so far up the list of what kills a child. A ship, however the boats were filled, is a poor description of a small child at the edge of water nobody was watching. A fall that ends on the ground, rather than in the water, is the falls counter.
This is not safety advice. It is a story about a population statistic. It says nothing about any one person's risk in the water.
Sources
- The British wreck commissioner's report, which records the loss of 1,490 lives.
- The same report on the boats: 20 boats for 1,178 people, several of them lowered partly empty.
- The same report on the third class, which rejects the charge that they were kept from the boats.
- The WHO fact sheet on drowning, including the child share and the 92%.
- The annual figure used on the counter is the Ledger's own rounding, set out on the methodology page. For drowning, the round and the WHO figure are the same.