PASSENGERS aboard the stricken cruise liner Explorer told yesterday of their “Titanic moment” when they were set adrift in darkness in lifeboats and rubber dinghies after the ship was holed below the water line.

The holidaymakers, including 24 Britons, were left to huddle together for warmth as they floated for five hours in sub-zero temperatures in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic ocean, not knowing when they would be rescued.

At one point the flooded engines of the Explorer roared back into life and the vessel, by now listing at 45 degrees, began to churn the water as it moved backwards in a circular motion perilously close to them.

The passengers countered their fear by cracking jokes about the original Titanic disaster in 1912 when the world’s biggest passenger liner hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank with the loss of 1,490 lives.

Bob Flood, 52, a scientific journal editor and ornithologist from the Scilly Isles who had joined the £4,000-a-head cruise to give lectures about birds such as the albatross and the storm petrel, said: “We didn’t panic because we knew there must be other cruise ships in the area. The bizarre thing was that people began to tell Titanic jokes.”

It was just after midnight on Friday when the starboard bow of Explorer, a 30-year-old veteran of Antarctic cruises on a trip to retrace the steps of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Anglo-Irish polar explorer, collided with a dagger-shaped ice floe just below its water line.

The stiletto-sharp ice tore through the ship’s steel bulkhead into one of the cabins. Passengers were awoken by the crash and by ice-cold water gushing in. They rushed to the upper decks to sound the alarm.

Andrea Salas, a guide on the cruise which had left Ushuaia in her native Argentina 12 days earlier, said: “I was in the ship’s bar having a drink with colleagues and some passengers when two passengers from the cabins below came in shouting, ‘There’s water, there’s water!’ ”

Crewmen struggled for an hour to strip walling and insulation from the cabin to reach the foot-wide hole but water poured down a 2in-wide scupper pipe used to remove condensation from the cabin. It flooded the engines below and there was a power cut, knocking out the bilge pumps which had been clearing the water from the hull.

Peter Svensson, the Explorer’s first officer, said: “In the water we tried to cover the hole — we managed it at first but then we got a small blackout and the water started coming in more.”

As the Explorer began to list at 25 degrees, an order was given to abandon ship.

Raymond King, 67, on holiday from Belfast, said: “It was pretty horrific. It was wet, it was cold, it was scary. I’ve got the clothes I am wearing, my watch, my camera and that’s it.”

The 2,400-ton vessel’s Mayday messages were picked up by two other liners, the Nordnorge and the Endeavour, and by a Brazilian warship. They took five hours to reach the scene as a Chilean navy helicopter hovered overhead and coastguards from Falmouth in Cornwall co-ordinated the rescue with their counterparts in Argentina and the United States.

The Nordnorge used its own lifeboat as a “lift”, lowering and raising it to bring the 91 passengers, nine expedition staff and 54 crew of the Explorer aboard 10 at a time from their four lifeboats and eight dinghies.

The operation took half an hour. Three of the passengers were suffering from hypothermia and had to be clad in thermal blankets and fed hot drinks until they recovered.

Those rescued were then dropped at two Antarctic bases, one Chilean and one Uruguayan, a few hundred yards apart. Last night some were being flown to Punta Arenas on the Chilean mainland aboard a Chilean air force Hercules aircraft.

The Explorer finally sank to the icy depths yesterday, 75 miles north of Antarctica.

Additional reporting: Daisy Collins

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