two or three miles off-shore. The creaming of the breakers, flowing
and dissolving over the ledges like puffs of steam, gave the first
hint of danger, and before the warning was of avail, the dark shape,
darker than the fog, sprang upon the dimmed vision of those on deck—a
precipice that seemed to be toppling over them. “Good God! It is the
South Stack!” a voice cried out, and there was no thought but of doom.
The bells in the engine-room and wheel-house pealed, and the reversal
of the screw sent the latherings surging toward the bow. A moment of
panic among the passengers; a scurrying of figures on the bridge; the
resonant, pistol-like snap of bending iron plates; a sudden resistance
to progress suddenly withdrawn—a confusion of ideas, a murmur of
relief, comparative tranquillity again. The hundredth chance was in
favor of the Baltic, and backing into deep water, she proceeded on her
way to Liverpool.
[Illustration: A Whistling Buoy.]
The three accidents described were without serious consequences, but
in most cases the same difficulty of fog and mistaken reckoning ends
in disaster. No less than five large steamers of the Guion line have
been wrecked between Fastnet and Liverpool—the Chicago, the Colorado,
the Montana, the Dakota, and the Idaho—representing a value of fully
two and a half million dollars, without cargo. The Cunard line lost the
Tripoli on the Irish coast, north of Queenstown, and the City of New
York (the first Inman ship of that name) came to grief on Daunt’s Rock,
near Roche’s Point. The City of Brussels, of the same line, had nearly
completed her voyage and was lying off the Liverpool bar, waiting for
the weather to clear, the captain acting with the utmost prudence, when
an insufficiently manned and badly managed steamer, the Kirby Hall,
ran her down and sank her. Account is taken here only of the passenger
steamers of the well-known lines; the record would be much expanded if
it included the disasters to freight lines, and to those uncared-for
ocean tramps which when they go down often yield a better profit to
their unscrupulous owners, through insurance money, than they do by
carrying cargo while afloat.
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.
Since 1879, the most memorable disasters, besides those already
referred to, have been the burning at sea of the Egypt, of the National
line, and the City of Montreal, of the Inman line, both without loss
of life; the stranding of the State of Virginia, of the State line, on
the quicksands of Sable Island, which quickly entombed her; the sinking
of the State of Florida, of the same line, by collision with a sailing
ship; the disappearance of the National line steamer Erin, which is
supposed to have foundered at sea; and the sinking of the magnificent
Cunarder Oregon in collision with a coal schooner, off Fire Island.
No line in existence has been wholly free from calamity; no line in
existence has not at least one page in its history to tell of anxious
crowds besieging its wharves and offices for news of a ship that has
never come in.
One speculates in vain as to the end of those ships which, sailing
from port in a seaworthy condition, have disappeared without leaving a
survivor to record their fate. Was it fire that consumed, or ice that
crushed, or seas that swallowed them? It may have been collision in a
fog, or an explosion of the boilers, or the collapse of the engine, or
the bursting on board of some tremendous wave from which recovery has
been impossible. Possibly boats and rafts have been lowered, and when
the ship herself has sunk, there has still been hope of reaching land;
days of suffering; glimpses of passing ships that have failed to see;
agony spun out, and death at the end. For all the patient waiting and
listening of those ashore no whisper of the secret has come, and no
fuller account can be written than the word “missing.”
The region of fogs on the Atlantic is also the region of ice; fog and
ice together are a greater source of peril than fog alone is, even when
a ship is making land. Under the latter condition there is the chance
of hearing the warning voice of the “syren,” the reverberation of the
signal gun, or the tolling of the fog-bell; steam “syrens,” guns,
or explosives of some kind, and bells, are all used as auxiliaries
to the lighthouses in overcoming, through the medium of sound, the
difficulties which fog opposes against the transmission of light. The
sounding machine comes into play, and by registering the depth of
water, and bearing testimony to the character of the bottom, affords
further protection to the navigator. But the shoals and islands of
ice, which, with their outreaching, submerged spurs, come drifting
down from the Arctic into the track of the transatlantic steamers, are
unprovided with anything which might tell the ship bearing upon them
in thick weather of their proximity. Sometimes they may be detected
by the echo from the whistle or fog-horn, and by the rapid lowering
of the temperature of the water in their vicinity. These signs cannot
be always counted on, however. The whistle may be going every twenty
or thirty seconds, and the quartermaster posted to the leeward with
the little canvas bag and the thermometer with which the sea is tested
for temperature; all due precaution may be taken, and yet no warning
come of the ice that is ahead. On a clear night a berg rising above
the horizon will have the effulgence of a star; on a clear day it will
notch the horizon with its dazzling whiteness; in a fog it looms up in
the gray like a shadow upon a shadow, and is invisible till the ship is
close upon it.
[Illustration: A Bell Buoy.]
The Hydrographic Bureau at Washington, which is in many ways useful
in transatlantic navigation, issues a series of charts of an area
of ocean reaching eastward from Newfoundland. There are twelve of
them, one for each month of the year, and they differ only in certain
pencillings which vary from month to month. Let us examine the set
issued for a recent year. In the chart for January five little pyramids
are clustered together in the sea, with a sixth to the north of them;
in February the pyramidal little figures can be counted by the score,
surrounded by zig-zag lines—they look like an encampment; in March the
zig-zag lines have disappeared, and the tents, so to speak, are more
scattered; in April they are much the same as in March, but in May they
have increased enormously and can be counted by the hundred, reaching
from the far north to over a hundred miles southward of the Grand
Banks. In June they are fewer, and in July fewer still. In August only
about twenty are visible; in September not more than ten; in October
two, in November one, and in December two. The zig-zag lines disappear
earlier than the pyramids; the former represent field-ice, the latter
ice-bergs; and thus it is seen that during one year there was not a
single month in which the transatlantic route was entirely free from
danger from those sources. In 1882 the bergs appeared in February and
disappeared in August; February, March, and April are the months for
their appearance, and they often linger till October or November.
[Illustration: At Close Quarters, Among the Icebergs.]
Field-ice has its source in the Arctic basin and along the coasts of
Labrador and Newfoundland, and is carried south either by the current
from the Arctic or that from East Greenland. Fully eighty per cent. of
the bergs have their origin in West Greenland, and most of them are
fragments of glaciers, broken off in a process known as “calving,”
as the glaciers slide into the deep water along-shore. Thousands are
thus set adrift each year, and once adrift they begin their journey
southward. Only a small proportion of the whole number ever reach the
track of the steamers; some ground in the Arctic basin and break up in
the frigid zone, to which they properly belong; they are very fragile,
and the concussion of a gunshot is occasionally sufficient to shatter
them; some are borne across from Greenland to Labrador, and lodge there
until they dissolve, or crumble to pieces with the noise of thunder.
The journey of those that escape disintegration in the north is slow.
If they drifted directly south and met with no obstructions, they
would be four or five months in reaching the transatlantic routes; and
being liberated in July and August they would consequently beset the
path of the steamers in December and January. Few of them, however,
are not delayed, and most of them have been adrift at least a year
from the time of “calving” before they arrive south enough to trouble
the steamers. Some are several years in making the journey; they are
held for a season in a shallow; locked up during the Arctic winter;
released with the return of summer; caught again for another winter,
and when once again liberated, retarded in their southward course
by the necessity of ploughing through the field-ice before them.
Not only are there wide variations in the date of the appearance and
disappearance of the bergs in the transatlantic routes from year to
year, but in different years they reach a different southern limit.
It is this variability which causes mischief. If their movements were
always the same, it would be easy for the captain to choose a course
which would avoid them, but a course which may be entirely safe one
year is often beset the next season by large quantities of ice, both in
the forms of bergs and of field-ice.
The list of calamities from ice is a long one. It was only a few years
ago that the Arizona, when going full speed, crashed into a berg and
stove in her bows. From her stem to a point about thirty feet aft
nothing remained of her but a tangle of shapeless iron, and that she
did not sink immediately was due to the smoothness of the sea and the
strength of her forward bulkhead, which withstood the pressure of
the water and enabled her to reach St. Johns, Newfoundland. In the
records of the Hydrographic Office it appears that, from 1882 to 1890,
thirty-six steamers were more or less injured by ice in the North
Atlantic, though some of these were freighting and coastwise vessels,
and not of the class to which this article particularly refers; and
the commonest explanation offered of the fate of the missing ships is
collision with ice in fog or in the darkness of night.
* * * * *
Having come to this point, the reader is probably of the opinion that
the heading of this chapter is a mistake, but the reverse of the
picture has yet to be shown. Notwithstanding all the peril from fog
and ice, and from the fury of cyclones and hurricanes, the steamers of
the transatlantic lines are so staunchly built and so capably handled,
that a man is less likely to meet with accidents on board one of them
than he would be in walking the streets of a crowded city. Never before
have so many passengers been carried as are carried now. The ships
that were regarded as leviathans fifteen or sixteen years ago are as
yachts compared with more recent additions to the various fleets.
Scarcely more than ten years have elapsed since sixteen knots was the
maximum speed; now it is twenty knots, with the certainty of an almost
immediate increase to twenty-one or twenty-two knots. The tonnage has
been increased within the same period from a maximum of five thousand
to ten thousand five hundred, and while ten years ago two hundred
cabin passengers were as many as any steamer could accommodate with a
reasonable degree of comfort on one voyage, it is not uncommon now to
find over five hundred as the complement of one steamer. When steamers
of sixteen and seventeen knots were built, it was said that they were
too large and too fast, and that they would surely come to grief, but
experience has proved them to be as safe as any. In fact, those who are
best qualified to know, declare that the augmentation of speed promotes
safety.
This point was fully discussed by the captains of the principal lines
not long ago, and the opinions expressed were almost unanimously
in favor of the faster ships. They not only diminish the period of
exposure to such dangers as there may be in the transatlantic voyage,
but from the superior power of their engines and boilers they are
better fitted for overcoming those dangers. They are able to escape
from areas of fog and storm sooner than slower vessels, and are more
easily handled in thick and in heavy weather. From the rapidity with
which they can be manœuvred, they can avoid collisions which would be
inevitable under some conditions with slower ships; if a collision
becomes unavoidable their impetus enables them to cut the obstructing
vessel in two with comparatively little injury to themselves.
It is not conceivable that the element of danger can ever be wholly
eliminated from the navigation of the Atlantic, but notwithstanding
the extent and difficulty of the traffic, and the size and speed of
the ships, which, flying to and fro in all kinds of weather, arrive in
port at all seasons with a promptness and regularity quite equal to
that of express trains on land, the number of accidents in proportion
to the number of passengers is constantly diminishing. More cabin
passengers are carried from New York to European ports in one summer
now than were carried in the whole of the first quarter of a century
of steam navigation on this ocean; but while the latter period was
full of disasters, such as the loss of the Arctic with four hundred
and sixty-two lives, and the loss of the Austria, with four hundred
and seventy-one lives, we now see hundreds of thousands of passengers
crossing, with a sense of security which a remarkable record of
immunity from accident fully justifies.
[Illustration: Lighthouse, Sanibel Island, Fla.]
The improvements in the character of the accommodations have not been
greater than the improvements designed to reduce the dangers of the
transatlantic trip to a minimum; they are found in the structure of the
hulls, the engines, and the boilers; in the apparatus of navigation;
in the numbers and discipline of the crews, and in the appliances for
life-saving, such as rafts and life-boats. The old ships of twenty
years and more ago were built on the lines of sailing vessels, and
a poop extended with scarcely a break from the fo’c’s’le to the
quarter-deck. When a sea came on board it was held as in a sluice
between the high bulwarks and the poop, swashing fore and aft with the
pitch of the ship, until it drained off through the scuppers. Most of
the state-rooms were then situated below the main deck, and after such
a sea they were likely to be flooded; many old passengers will remember
how frequent an occurrence it was to find their cabins inundated. This
was the least mischief it did, and when several seas were shipped in
rapid succession, the vessel was in danger of foundering. The modern
steamer is much better protected from incoming seas, and the main deck
is completely covered in, instead of the bulwarks there is a simple
rail and netting, and any water shipped flows overboard as quickly as
it comes on board.
But the greatest improvement of all in the direction of safety is the
system of bulkheads and double bottoms introduced by the builders of
the City of New York and the City of Paris. For many years past it has
been the custom to divide all steamers by transverse bulkheads into
so-called water-tight compartments, the purpose of which is to increase
their buoyancy and stability in case of collision. The Etruria,
the Umbria, the Britannic, the Germanic, and the Arizona have nine
compartments each. Excellent as the theory is, the feeling of everybody
acquainted with the subject has been distrustful of the manner of its
application, the chief objection being the inadequacy of the number of
subdivisions. Sometimes, as when the Arizona ran into the iceberg, the
bulkheads have saved the ship, but in other cases they have been of
little or no use, as in the case of the Oregon. The Oregon was divided
into ten compartments, but she sank in a few hours after her collision
with a coal schooner off Fire Island light. The compartments have
invariably proved useless when the ship has been struck amidships with
sufficient force to open her engine and boilers to the sea, though when
the weather has been calm and the injury forward or astern, they have
kept her afloat.
The insufficiency of their number in proportion to the size of the
ships has not been their only defect, moreover. In order to give an
unobstructed passage along the decks it has been the custom to cut
doors in the bulkheads, and it has frequently happened that in the
confusion following a collision these have been left open, allowing the
sea to rush from compartment to compartment, either because they were
forgotten or because they refused to work.
[Illustration: The Deep-sea Sounding Machine at Work.]
In the newest type of ship, as represented by the City of Paris and
the City of New York, there are no fewer than twenty water-tight
compartments separated by solid transverse bulkheads, which rise from
the keel to the saloon deck, eighteen feet above the waterline, and
which have no doors or openings of any kind whatever. A few feet from
the stem there is a collision bulkhead of extraordinary strength to
protect the ship, should she run “bow-on” against any obstacle—a reef,
a derelict, or a vessel attempting to cross her path; next, aft of this
come three compartments for steerage passengers or cargo; then two
compartments for saloon passengers; then four compartments for boilers,
coal bunkers, kitchens, and machinery; two more for saloon passengers;
one for second-cabin passengers, and two, those farthest aft of all,
for steerage passengers or cargo. Each compartment is thus isolated,
and only by a blow in the line of the dividing bulkhead could two
compartments be flooded at once; the bulkheads also serve in case of
fire to prevent the flames from spreading.
Still another safeguard becomes possible through the adoption of the
twin screw. The propellers are worked by two complete and entirely
independent sets of boilers and engines, and these are separated by a
longitudinal bulkhead in addition to the transverse bulkheads already
described. In a single-screw ship this longitudinal bulkhead is
impossible, and the space in which her engine and boilers are situated
is her most vulnerable point; if she is struck there with sufficient
force to make a fissure large enough to admit any considerable quantity
of water, nothing will save her from sinking. In the case of the
twin-screw ship, however, we have had the best of evidence, within the
past two years, that with one of her engine-rooms flooded and open to
the sea, she will still float and be navigable.
For many years past the value of the twin screw has been debated by the
builders, the managers, the captains, and the engineers of the great
transatlantic lines, to whom it did not commend itself so readily as
to the Admiralty. It was adopted for war-ships several years before
any of the well-known passenger lines ventured to use it, and its
first appearance in this service was in the City of New York, four
years ago. Since then it has been adopted by the White Star and the
Hamburg-American lines, and though the North German Lloyd has not yet
applied it to the recent accessions to its fleet, its advantages over
the single screw for passenger vessels, as well as for war-ships, are
more generally conceded now than ever before. The Admiralty adopted it
for the security it afforded, and for its superior capacity for rapid
manœuvring. Another feature which recommends it is that, should one of
the two sets of engines become disabled from the breaking of the shaft,
or any other cause, the opposite engine would be equal to taking the
ship into port; while a similar accident on a single-screw ship would
compel her to make port under sail (a very difficult feat with the
modern type of ocean steamers), or to wait for another steamer to take
her in tow.
[Illustration: Off Fire Island, New York.]
[Illustration: Gedney’s Channel, outside New York Harbor, at Night.
(Lighted by electric buoys.)]
Until quite recently, the breaking of the shaft was more frequent
than any other kind of accident to the transatlantic steamers. When,
perhaps, the ship was sailing along at full-speed, a jar would come and
shake her from end to end, as though a rock or a submerged wreck had
been struck. The engine would rattle and the sails flap loosely in the
wind, and the familiar tremor of propulsion change to a softer heaving
motion, like that of a sailing vessel. When the accident occurred in
darkness and a gale, it was more alarming than in daylight and a calm
sea. After a few minutes of uncertainty the news would fly that the
shaft was broken, and that the captain and the chief engineer were
consulting in the engine-room. Then would come days, and sometimes
weeks, of drifting, with a corresponding and ever-increasing alarm
on shore as the ship became overdue. Under favorable circumstances
some headway could be made with sails, and occasionally the disabled
vessel reached port without assistance. Oftener, however, she would
drift helplessly in the vacant sea until she was sighted by another
steamer powerful enough to tow her. Left to herself, she was in danger
of falling into the trough of the sea and foundering, and near land
she was exposed to the perils of a strong current and a lee-shore.
Arriving in port, a claim for salvage was sure to be presented against
her, and in some instances the amount awarded was as much as thirty
thousand pounds.
A broken shaft is still a disagreeable possibility, but if one of the
two shafts in a twin-screw ship breaks, the other, as with the engines,
remains to avert complete disablement.