CHAPTER V.
THE LIST OF PASSENGERS.
We must pause yet once more before accompanying the voyagers, that we may know as many of them as we possibly can. Many we perhaps shall never know: their very names are already forgotten; or if we turn to look at them they tell of no history, and suggest no personal remembrance. On such a day they were in the London, on such a day they sank with her in the Bay of Biscay. This is all perhaps we shall ever know concerning them.
A gentleman, who knew most of the passengers on board—and we give an authorized list of the names in the Appendix—when he heard of the catastrophe, remarked, that it would throw half Melbourne into mourning. Doubtless it will, and into how many other places besides will not the news of the catastrophe carry mourning? That one poor Bavarian, those two hapless Danes, had they no friends in the world to shed a tear over their watery grave? We dare not forget that each one, as he embarked, carried within him, as it were, a very world of varied interest, and that the hopes and sympathies of the unknown and poor were as precious and beautiful to those who knew and loved them, as were the plans and fortunes of the well-known and wealthy to the circle of which they formed part. Every death we see recorded should bring before us, in imagination, a bier, around which we see gathering a collection of mourners, refusing to be comforted, because their loved one is not. When we hear of a multitude of persons perishing in some dread calamity like the present, we must remember that, while all died together, each died alone, and will be mourned as if he alone had died. More than two hundred individual worlds of thought and feeling, of sympathy and design, went down beneath the ocean wave on that wild stormy afternoon. Each of these worlds was perhaps the very sun of other worlds, that will now receive a sudden and awful shock. Many men, many poor men even, so live that they are centres of operations which, although not brilliant in the world’s estimation, are of the deepest possible interest to all concerned in them, and when they die, it is as if the sun had been removed out of its place.
Nor do we forget, as we take up the list of passengers who went out in the London, that every one had a separate and solemn history. We do not forget that the issues of life were unspeakably important, not only to all, but, in a very solemn manner, to each—to the poor Danish sailor as well as to the Oxford scholar: we do not forget that to each one on board, this question was proposed amid circumstances most appalling, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” We dare not forget the infinite value of every soul on board.
As, during the week which followed the mournful announcement that the London had foundered, we looked each day into the first column of the Times, or as country newspapers reached us, we tried more and more vividly to realize how much that list of the drowned meant, and how names that we had read confusedly amidst a mass of others, became eloquent with interest as we caught snatches here and there of the life-history belonging to them. But we have no doubt that there was not one on board whose history was completely destitute of interest and charm, to some few at least, and that tears have been shed for many who were nothing more than plain, humble people, getting an honourable living by the sweat of their brow, and who will find no biographer to tell the unassuming story of their lives. In the scores of shipwrecks that occur every year, the worthy unknown should not be without the sympathy, if they are shut out from the recognition which well-known names immediately demand. Of late years, perhaps, if we may judge from the newspapers, from letters which have reached us, and from interviews with friends of the deceased, there has not often been a wreck in which such a variety of characters had each to act a most solemn part. On board the London there was life beginning and life ending in the aged and the young who were going out to the new land. There was the competence which had come after arduous and successful toil, and there was the poverty whose only capital lay hidden in its hopeful industry: there was the lawyer and the divine, the merchant and the engineer, the man of letters and the rude brawny artisan; the actor and the banker; the experienced traveller and the humble villager from Cornwall. Something of the varied life of the world at large lay mirrored in that vessel that was preparing to steam away from Plymouth. The brief notices of deaths which appeared day after day revealed dark depths of sorrow, into which one was almost afraid to look,—tragedies enacted full of horror unspeakable.
Let us glance for a moment at those of whom we know nothing beyond their names, before proceeding to notice those whose position in society and whose well-known histories speedily found biographers.
On the 11th inst., lost at sea, on board the steamship London, James Thomas, Esq., late of London, formerly of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, together with his beloved wife and two children; also Elizabeth Hartley, for many years a most faithful servant of the above.
On the 11th inst., lost at sea, in the steamship London, aged 23, John Ruskin Richardson, youngest son of the late John George Richardson, Esq., many years a resident of Sydney, New South Wales.
On the 11th instant, in the steamship London, in his twenty-first year, Archibald, seventh son of Hellen Sandilands, of 56, Belsize-park, and of the late John Sandilands of Conduit-street.