Before reaching the perpendicular, when at an angle of 50° or 60°, there was a rumbling sound which may be attributed to the boilers leaving their beds and crashing down on to or through the bulkheads. She became more perpendicular and finally absolutely perpendicular, when she went slowly down. After sinking as far as the after part of the boat deck she went down more quickly. The ship disappeared at 2.20 a. m. OBSERVATIONS. I am advised that the _Titanic_ as constructed could not have remained afloat long with such damage as she received. Her bulkheads were spaced to enable her to remain afloat with any two compartments in communication with the sea. She had a sufficient margin of safety with any two of the compartments flooded which were actually damaged. In fact, any three of the four forward compartments could have been flooded by the damage received without sinking the ship to the top of her bulkheads. Even if the four forward compartments had been flooded the water would not have got into any of the compartments abaft of them though it would have been above the top of some of the forward bulkheads. But the ship, even with these four compartments flooded, would have remained afloat. But she could not remain afloat with the four compartments and the forward boiler room (No. 6) also flooded. The flooding of these five compartments alone would have sunk the ship sufficiently deep to have caused the water to rise above the bulkhead at the after end of the forward boiler room (No. 6) and to flow over into the next boiler room (No. 5), and to fill it up until in turn its after bulkhead would be overwhelmed and the water would thereby flow over and fill No. 4 boiler room, and so on in succession to the other boiler rooms till the ship would ultimately fill and sink. It has been shown that water came into the five forward compartments to a height of about 14 feet above the keel in the first 10 minutes. This was at a rate of inflow with which the ship's pumps could not possibly have coped, so that the damage done to these five compartments alone inevitably sealed the doom of the ship. The damage done in the boiler rooms Nos. 4 and 5 was too slight to have hastened appreciably the sinking of the ship, for it was given in evidence that no considerable amount of water was in either of these compartments for an hour after the collision. The rate at which water came into No. 6 boiler room makes it highly probable that the compartment was filled in not more than an hour, after which the flow over the top of the bulkhead between 5 and 6 began and continued till No. 5 was filled. It was shown that the leak in No. 5 boiler room was only about equal to the flow of a deck hose pipe about 3 inches in diameter. The leak in No. 4, supposing that there was one, was only enough to admit about 3 feet of water in that compartment in 1 hour 40 minutes. Hence the leaks in Nos. 4 and 5 boiler rooms did not appreciably hasten the sinking of the vessel.