A manuscript which describes the final hours of the Titanic by the most senior officer to survive the sinking was auctioned yesterday for £8,400. Christen Pears looks at our enduring fascination with the world's most famous ship.

The Titanic's first officer Charles Lightoller was in his cabin, about to go to sleep, when he felt a grinding vibration shaking the mighty liner. Jumping from his bunk, he rushed out on deck, still wearing his pyjamas. He met another officer and although neither man could see anything, they knew the vessel had hit something.

RMS Titanic, the White Star Line's "unsinkable" ship was making her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. On April 14, 1912, sailing full steam ahead, her lights blazing in the darkness, when she ran into an iceberg 400 miles off Nova Scotia. Within three hours, she had been swallowed by the icy Atlantic and 1,500 of those on board were dead.

Mr Lightoller, played by Kenneth More in the 1958 film, A Night to Remember, was 38 at the time of the disaster and recalled the events of that night in a harrowing account to his wife Sylvia.

He described in vivid detail "the cold green water crawling its ghostly way up the staircase" and the growing sense of panic among passengers.

As he helped load the women and children into the lifeboats, the Chief Officer handed him a gun to control the crowds, and he used it to threaten a group of men who had climbed into the last lifeboat meant for women and children.

"I had the satisfaction of seeing them tumbling head over heels on the deck, preferring that to the cold lead which, so they imagined, would follow their disobedience. Actually the revolver was not loaded."

Mr Lightoller refused a place in the boat himself. "I had taken my chance with the rest," he recalled.

As the ship sank, he watched people climbing towards the stern which, by now, was sticking high of the sea. With the water reaching the boat deck, he jumped overboard and almost drowned, clinging to the wreckage for several hours before being rescued by the Carpathia.

He described the last moments of the Titanic in his memoirs. "There was heard a rumbling and crashing from inside the ship, like the sound of distant thunder.

"This had often been referred to as the boilers bursting; actually it was the boilers leaving their beds and crashing down through the bulks.

"It was two o'clock when she assumed the absolute perpendicular and stood there for a space of about two minutes, an amazing spectacle with her stern straight up in the air, then slowly, but with increasing speed, she quietly slipped beneath the water."

The 17-page unpublished document went under the hammer at Sotheby's yesterday, along with other memorabilia relating to the famous ship.

The Titanic sank 90 years ago but while her wreck rusts away two miles beneath the Atlantic, the fascination with her legend shows no sign of diminishing.

By the end of the 19th century, the transatlantic shipping business was thriving, fuelling a bitter rivalry between the Cunard and White Star lines. After Cunard built the Lusitania and Mauretania, White Star responded with the Titanic - bigger faster, more luxurious.

When the Titanic was launched in Belfast in 1911, she wasn't only the largest ship in the world but the biggest movable object ever built, 11 storeys high and the length of four US city blocks.

She symbolised the triumph of modern technology. Thomas Andrews, the Irish designer and shipbuilder who built her, famously declared her to be "unsinkable". Even Edward Smith, the Titanic's ill-fated captain, remarked: "I cannot imagine any condition that would cause (the Titanic) to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that".

Both men were proved tragically wrong, dying on board the world's most celebrated ship.

The Titanic left Southampton on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912.

Her passenger list included society's wealthiest and most influential: John Jacob Astor, one of the world's richest men; Isidor Straus, owner of Macy's department store in New York, and international fashion designer Lady Duff Gordon.

Also on board was WT Stead, former Northern Echo editor and prominent campaigner for social justice. He was on his way to a convention in America to encourage businessmen to take an active role in religious movements.

But the Titanic was much more than a floating hotel for the rich and famous. She was carrying hundreds of immigrants to new lives in America. In a cruel twist of fate, most of them perished on the journey.

Four days into the voyage, the ship was sailing full steam ahead despite repeated ice warnings. Captain Smith, a veteran sailor, had never known ice packs to be so far south and believed there was little cause for concern.

On the night of the disaster, there was no moonlight and someone had misplaced the binoculars, leaving the men on watch in the crow's nest struggling to see into the darkness.

By the time one of them spotted the iceberg and raised the alarm, it was too late. The order was given to swerve and ironically, it was this attempt to avoid a head-on collision that sealed the liner's fate.

Designed to the highest safety standards, Titanic was divided into 16 watertight compartments and could float with the first four completely flooded. Had the ship ploughed straight into the iceberg, it would probably not have damaged all four. But as she swerved, a 250ft gash was ripped along her side, opening six compartments up to the freezing Atlantic waters. The "unsinkable" ship was doomed.

When she sank at 2.20am on April 15, 1,513 out of the 2,220 people on board died. Most of them were third class passengers, trapped below deck in steerage.

Built originally with enough lifeboat capacity for everyone on the ship, the boat deck had seemed too crowded, and half the lifeboats were removed. Even though there was room for half the passengers in the remaining boats, in the panic that engulfed the ship, several were lowered into the water before they were full.

As the enormous liner sank beneath the waves, many of those left on board chose to jump into the freezing water rather than go down with ship. Many died in the sub-zero temperature but others were rescued by the nearby Carpathia.

More would have survived had the Californian, a ship supposedly less than ten miles from the Titanic at the time of the sinking, responded to the distress calls. Investigations suggested the radio operator was off duty and asleep.

Charles Lightoller was the highest ranking officer on the Titanic to survive. He was a key witness at inquiries into the disaster, where he vigorously defended the captain, officers and crew.

He became a gold prospector in the Yukon and a cowboy in Alberta before returning to sea. In 1940, he took his yacht to Dunkirk and rescued 130 British soldiers.

He died in 1952 but his account of the sinking of the Titanic will preserve the horror and heroism of that night forever.