Besides the _Isis_ which, on the 8th of October, 1842, sank off Bermuda, having previously struck on a reef, the company lost, on the 15th of April, 1843, the _Solway_, 20 miles west of Corunna. She was one of their finest vessels. Her captain, the surgeon, various passengers, and a portion of the crew, consisting in all of sixty persons, perished with the ship. The _Tweed_, another of their first-class vessels, of 1800 tons burden and 450 horse-power, was totally lost on the 12th of February, 1847, on the Alicranes reefs off Yucatan, in the Gulf of Mexico, while on her voyage to Vera Cruz. Her loss was most disastrous, and caused great excitement at the time. The crew and passengers amounted to 151 persons (seventy-two of whom were drowned), and their sufferings, as graphically described by one who had escaped,[277] formed a subject of conversation for a longer period than such calamities now do. After five days’ suffering, the remainder of the passengers and crew were rescued from the barren reef of rocks on which they had been cast. Again, on the 1st of February, 1849, the _Forth_ was also completely lost on the same rocks which had caused the total destruction of the _Tweed_; while, in the following year the _Actæon_ was wrecked in rounding the point near Carthagena on a shoal extending, as was alleged, much further into the sea than had been laid down on the Admiralty charts. Nor must the loss of the _Medina_, wrecked on the 12th of May, 1844, on a coral reef near Turks Island, be omitted, as this was, certainly, one which ought not to have occurred. [Sidenote: Causes of these losses.] Some of these disasters, no doubt, arose from the intricate nature of the navigation among the West India Islands, and others may have been caused, as the supporters of the company alleged, “by those sudden changes of the weather, hurricanes, squalls, northers, &c., with which the West India Islands, Spanish Main, and Gulf of Mexico are so frequently visited,” but the rocks and shoals of the Gulf could have had nothing to do with the loss of the _Solway_ off Corunna, and, as the company has met with much fewer disasters of late years, I may be allowed to suspect that incompetency had too much to do with the almost periodical losses of the first eight or ten years of its career. [Sidenote: Loss of the _Amazon_.] But by far the greatest disaster which befell any of this company’s ships was the destruction of the _Amazon_ by fire at sea; indeed, nothing could be more terrible than the loss of this ship and the sufferings of those who perished with her. The _Amazon_ was built by Messrs. R. and H. Green, at Blackwall, and launched from their yard on the 28th of June, 1851: she was the largest wooden merchant steam-ship which had up to that time been constructed. An illustration of her, as she lay at anchor ready for sea, on her first and only voyage, will be found on the following page.[278]