Photos show how 700 of Titanic's 2,200 passengers were saved by the Carpathia when the ship sank 112 years ago

A British passenger liner, the Titanic was operated by White Star Line and was traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City.

The two lookouts, Fredrick Fleet and Reginald Lee, failed to spot the iceberg in time.

Fleet and Lee were contending with an unusually calm ocean, which made icebergs less visible since there would be no breaking water at the base. Their binoculars were also locked in a cabinet, which meant the lookouts were tasked with spotting icebergs using their eyes alone.

However, lookouts were trained to spot objects with the naked eye first, and 1912-era binoculars were not much more advanced than the trained eyesight of the lookouts, according to Encyclopedia Titanic. Given the short amount of time between when the lookouts saw the iceberg and the time of impact, binoculars still likely wouldn't have prevented a collision.

The Titanic attempted to avoid the iceberg, but it failed to turn in time. As the ship scraped the iceberg, it tore a hole in the side of the ship, rupturing at least five of the watertight compartments.

After just an hour, the ship was quickly filling with water, and passengers began to panic, Britannica reported. Due to the water, the ship's bow continued to sink, causing the stern to rise into the sky.

By 2 a.m., the crew was released by the captain. Shortly after, the Titanic's lights went out, the ship broke into two pieces, and the bow sank beneath the waves. Twenty minutes later, the stern followed suit, sending hundreds of crewmembers and passengers into the sea.

As the ship began to take on water, the lifeboats were launched with women and children only. There were only 20 lifeboats aboard the Titanic, according to Britannica, which could carry up to 1,178 people, only half of the ship's passengers and crew.

These boats were launched below capacity, for fear that the device lowering the boats would break if the boats were full. For instance, the first lifeboat to leave Titanic had the capacity for 65 people but was carrying only 27 when it launched, Britannica reported.

After the ship sank, people in lifeboats returned to search for survivors, but they found most people who entered the water had not drowned. Instead, they had frozen to death.

No lifeboat or fire drills were carried out before the ship's sinking. In fact, a lifeboat drill had actually been planned for the morning before Titanic's sinking but it was canceled.

Loading passengers into the lifeboats turned to chaos. While some boats launched half full, others got stuck as they were being lowered into the water and were swarmed by people desparate to get on, Prologue magazine reported, per the National Archives.

When flares from the Titanic woke the captain, he assumed they were "company rockets," or signals passed between ships owned by the same company, not distress signals, the BBC reported.

The Titanic's distress call reached the Carpathia, a transatlantic passenger liner manned by Captain Arthur Rostron, at 12:20 a.m., but it was more than three hours away.

Another ship, the Olympic, was too far away to help.

Lifeboat No. 2 was the first to reach and board the Carpathia, Britannica reported. It would take several hours for the ship to pick up all of the survivors.

The ship was then ordered by the captain to search the wreckage and frigid waters for any other survivors, but none were found. The ship did discover four bodies, which crew members buried at sea, according to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

The Carpathia's crew and fellow passengers gave their beds to survivors and offered them warm clothing and blankets, the Maritime Executive reported. Many of the survivors were upset and could do nothing but cry, or were shell-shocked by what they had experienced.

The closest destination was Halifax, Nova Scotia, but it required traveling through more ice, and there wasn't enough food on board to meet the needs of the Titanic passengers in addition to Carpathia's if the ship sailed on to its original destination.

The ship's captain decided to head back to New York, which had been the Titanic's original destination.

Halifax later became the main port for ships retrieving bodies from the wreckage. According to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, three ships dispatched from Halifax were able to retrieve 328 bodies from the wreckage, or only one in five victims.

Roughly half of the Titanic victims' bodies are buried in Halifax, 119 bodies were buried at sea, and only 59 bodies were claimed by victims' relatives and returned home. A majority of the bodies buried at sea were damaged beyond recognition or belonged to crew members or third-class passengers.

The main vessel charged with retrieving bodies, the Mackay-Bennett, also ran out of embalming supplies — the ship didn't expect to find so many bodies in the water — forcing crew members to bury more people at sea than intended.

The White Star Line office in New York was flooded with people wanting confirmation on the fate of the Titanic, but White Star initially refused to confirm if the ship had sunk, according to the New York Daily News.

Even as publications began to report on the sinking, White Star Line wouldn't confirm the news to the public until almost two days after the ship went down.

Captain Rostron ordered his crew to ignore all calls from the press regarding the Titanic. So to get the scoop, journalists shouted questions at the passengers and crew through megaphones from the tugboats.

The ship had left from the same dock, only seven days earlier, according to the Maritime Executive.

Families of passengers arrived hoping to be reunited with loved ones, according to the New York Daily News. Ambulances and hearses lined the streets waiting to tend to the survivors or cart away any of the dead.

Families reunited with each other, while others learned their loved ones had perished.

Among the casualties, the crew and third-class passengers suffered the greatest losses with 700 and 536 fatalities, respectively, according to Britannica.

According to Titanic Universe, the Carpathia did not have the space for all 20 and left seven lifeboats in the North Atlantic.

The 13 lifeboats they brought back were placed in the possession of the White Star Line.

Rostron was reluctant to speak publicly about his role in the Titanic rescue, and he avoided any spotlight for the rest of his life.