In the meantime the line lost the _Arctic_. While running at a speed of thirteen knots an hour through a heavy fog, forty miles off Cape Race, and making no sort of signal to notify other vessels of her presence in those waters, she was rammed by the French steamer _Vesta_, and sunk with a loss of 307 lives. It has been asserted that she went down because the modern system of bulkheads had not been invented. As a matter of fact, the Norwich liner _Atlantic_, a ship built in 1846, had a collision bulkhead, and other ships had been divided by several bulkheads before the time of the _Arctic_, but experience shows that no system of bulkheads as yet installed has been able to save a ship when rammed in the engine-room. Then on September 23, 1856, a little more than a month after Congress decided to reduce the subsidy, the _Pacific_ sailed from Liverpool, and was never heard from afterward. The two ships thus lost were together insured for $1,250,000, chiefly in England, and the money was paid to the company. The line continued its service after the subsidy was cut (June 30, 1857), but a financial panic swept over the commercial world in the fall of that year, and with the consequent loss of business the line failed. The last voyage was made in January, 1858. In April, following, the sheriff sold the ships (subject to claims of $657,000) for $50,000. Collins died at his home in Madison Avenue, New York City, in June, 1878, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. "I knew the Collins line very well.... They burned an immense quantity of coal; they were fitted out and fitted up in the most sumptuous manner; they had large crews, a large number of officers and a large number of engineers, for they had most powerful engines. They were run at full speed, and the company had not enough ships on the line to enable them to have proper relays so that they began to deteriorate very rapidly, and they ran them out in a very short time. They had very large buildings in New York, a great many officers and a great many people connected with them. All these had to be paid. Then there were a great many deadheads, so that I used to be astonished how they kept running at all." (Admiral Porter, H. R. Rep. 28, 41st Cong. 2 sess. p. 192.) Two other lines, subsidized under the act of March 3, 1847, need a brief consideration. One was the Sloo Line, which, as noted, ran steamships from New York by the way of Havana, to New Orleans, with a branch line to Chagres, on the Isthmus of Panama. The subsidy paid was $290,000 a year. The first ship (the _Falcon_), left New York in September, 1848. The Pacific coast contract went to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company at $308,000 per year. The first ship on this line left New York on October 6, 1848.