From 1838, when the Sirius crossed the ocean, till 1879, one hundred
and forty-four steamers, counting all classes, were lost in the
transatlantic trade. The first was the President, which disappeared
mysteriously in 1841. During the thirteen years following only one
life was lost by the wreck of an Atlantic steamer, that steamer being
the Cunarder Columbia, which went ashore in 1843. In 1854, however,
the City of Glasgow sailed with about four hundred and eighty souls on
board, and was never seen or heard from again; and in the same year the
Collins line steamer Arctic, one of the fastest and finest vessels then
afloat, was sunk in collision with the steamer Vesta during a dense
fog, off Cape Race, and five hundred and sixty-two persons perished.
Two years later the Pacific, of the same line, went to sea with one
hundred and eighty-six persons on board, and was never heard from
again. Between 1857 and 1864 the Allan line lost no fewer than nine
steamers. In 1858 the Hamburg-American steamer Austria was burned at
sea, with a loss of four hundred and seventy-one lives; in 1870 the
City of Boston left port with over two hundred persons on board, never
more to be heard from. On a dark night in April, 1873, the White Star
steamer Atlantic ran ashore near Sambro, and five hundred and sixty
lives were lost—some by drowning and some by freezing in the rigging
into which they had scrambled, or upon the ice-bound shore upon which
they were cast. Note must be made also of the wreck of the German
steamer Schiller on the Scilly Rocks, by which two hundred lives were
lost; of the running ashore in the North Sea of the North German Lloyd
steamer Deutschland, by which one hundred and fifty-seven lives were
lost; of the sinking through collision of the Hamburg-American steamer
Pomerania, by which over fifty lives were lost; of a similar disaster
to the Cimbria, of the same line, by which eighty-four were lost; and
of yet another collision, which sent the beautiful Ville du Havre, of
the French line, to the bottom of the English Channel, with two hundred
and thirty of her passengers and crew.
[Illustration: Lighthouse, Atlantic City, N. J.]
Of the one hundred and forty-four vessels lost up to 1879, more than
one-half were wrecked. Twenty-four never reached the ports for which
they sailed, their fate still being unknown; ten were burned at sea;
eight were sunk in collisions, and three were sunk by ice.
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