COLLISION OF THE BYWELL CASTLE AND THE PRINCESS ALICE.
Collisions amongst iron ships have been so painfully frequent of late years that it is impossible to conjecture what may be the result of this wholesale loss of life in the future. It is doubtful, however, whether any previous accident ever equalled in its harrowing results the loss of the Princess Alice. Excepting the fatal accident to the Grosser Kurfürst, the running down of the Northfleet off Dungeness by the Spanish steamer Murillo, comes next in horror to the cutting in two of the Princess Alice. This terrible affair, and the heartless conduct of the commander of the Spanish steamer, will make the night of the 22nd of January, 1873, ever memorable in the dark annals of the sea; 293 persons went down with the ill-fated passenger ship. A sad case was that of the Lady Elgin, run into by a schooner on Lake Michigan on September 8th, 1860. The Lady Elgin was an excursion steamer with 400 souls on board; she sank within fifteen minutes of the collision and with the loss of 287 people. Then, again, in 1854, in this fatal month of September, on the 27th, the Arctic, a ship of the Collins line, came into collision with the screw steamer Vesta in a fog. This time the scene of the tragic disaster was the coast of Newfoundland; out of a list of 368 all told, 323 were lost, among whom were the Duc de Grammont and the Duc de Guynes. In the same year we have to record the loss of the City of Glasgow with 480 persons on board; and the Lady Nugent, a British transport, which carried reinforcements for the army at Rangoon; the total loss in this case was 400. Neither of these ships was ever heard of after leaving port; a fate as terrible and mysterious as that [pg 285]which befell the City of Boston and the Pacific, the former of which left Liverpool on the 23rd of January, 1856, with 186; while the City of Boston had 191 persons on board when she sailed from Halifax, N.S., on January 26, 1870. Who amongst the living does not remember that black-letter day when news arrived in England of the capsizing of the Captain off Cape Finisterre on September 7, 1870, with Captain Burgoyne and a complement of 500 all told, which remains the greatest calamity that has yet befallen the British Navy.
The army, however, suffered a loss nearly as appalling in the foundering of the Birkenhead off the Cape of Good Hope, where a contingent, made up from the 12th Lancers, 23rd and 92nd Foot, helped to make up the 438 lives destroyed on that occasion, February 26, 1852. Nor were the greatest horrors entirely occasioned by the unruly elements and the sometimes pitiless sea, for added to these ever-impending dangers was the incombatable enemy—fire. The most heart-rending on record of these marine conflagrations was that which destroyed the S.S. Austria on its way from Hamburg to New York, U.S., on September 23, 1858. By this fire, out of 528 passengers and crew, 461 were either burnt to death or drowned; how many met the more horrible death of burning can never be known, nor is it well for the mind to dwell upon the painful subject. Going back a little farther we find the record of the burning of the Ocean Monarch in Abergele Bay, August 24, 1848, with loss of 178 lives. Then we have the S.S. London, which went down in the Bay of Biscay on January 11, 1866, carrying down with her to a watery grave 239 out of a complement of 258. The wrecks of the Atlantic and the Royal Charter are conspicuous in the black list: the latter, an Australian clipper ship, was smashed to pieces on the coast of Anglesea on October 26, 1859, when, while some forty people or so managed to get on shore, 459 of men, women, and children, were added to the ocean sepulchre. The Atlantic, of the White Star Line, struck on a sunken rock off Nova Scotia, April 1, 1873, and 481 out of 931 were lost. The Annie Jane, of Liverpool, swells the death-roll by 393, by being driven on shore at Barra Island, one of the Hebrides, on September 29, 1853; while the Pomona, another emigrant ship, through carelessness in the reckoning, went ashore on the Wexford coast on April 28, 1859, losing 386 lives. And this sad list only represents the more prominent cases which occurred during thirty years.
Although the chief outward and visible sign of usefulness of the Seamen’s Hospital Society exists no longer on the Thames, many of our readers knew the old Dreadnought well. She was the largest floating hospital in the world, and no other ship housed so cosmopolitan a crew as could be found among her 200 patients. Dysentery, scurvy, hepatic diseases in most varieties, and typhoid, were among the medical specialities to be seen on board, and it is probable that Budd gained much of his experience of enteric fever from this ship, which received annually from sixty to seventy cases of the disease. The surgical practice was equally useful, and we believe that the first resection (that of the shoulder) in London was performed by Busk on the Dreadnought. A large number of men, now teaching in our schools, gleaned useful knowledge here, and (an important matter in surgery) learnt how to do little things well. Although in maintaining a necessary and constant communication with the shore, there were the usual perils of water, including a strong current, a crowded stream, ice, &c., no person engaged directly or indirectly in the business of the ship [pg 286]was ever drowned during the half century that she and her predecessors were moored off Greenwich. The late Dr. Rooke, one of the ablest and kindest of the Dreadnought’s officers, nobly earned the Humane Society’s medal by saving a boy who fell off a barge close at hand; three patients jumped overboard at different times, in a state of delirium, but all were rescued and recovered. There were convivial gatherings now and again in the snug recess of the admiral’s cabin, used as a mess room by the medical staff. The Dreadnought suffered many blows from without, and was run into seriously on several occasions. But the old ship stood it all, and was missed by the bargemen, who made a cushion of her wherewith to cannon off to the opposite shore. There can be no doubt that the managing committee of the Seamen’s Hospital Society acted wisely in removing their clients to a home on shore, so that we need not say altogether regretfully, although truly, “Take her all in all, we shall not look upon her like again.”
Of all the hospitals there is none so interesting as a sailor’s, and that at Greenwich, which represents the old Dreadnought floating hospital, is particularly so. It is here Jack ashore is seen at his best, and his best is very good indeed as a general thing, especially when all the good qualities are developed as they are when he settles down to enjoy the autumn calm of his life, which generally begins in the hospital. Not only are there seamen from every clime, and every creed, too, here, but one ward is occupied by a few old naval pensioners. In this ward the first thing that attracts the eye, and is placed prominently over the fire-place, is Dibdin’s simple legend of the “Sweet little cherub that sits up aloft.” Every inmate of this ward could tell his interesting yarn of personal experiences of the Battle and the Breeze. One old fellow is both blind and deaf, and still happy and contented under the sympathetic care of an ancient cherub, who has sailed through three-quarters of a century of life’s uncertain tide. Why the blind tar should be called “the nightingale” has not been clearly stated, though the fact remains the same, and may possibly refer to great vocal powers. His messmate has been through enough battles to fill a volume; while another, an octogenarian marine, speaks with pride of the part he took in the Chesapeake affair, which was beaten and captured thirteen minutes after the first gun was fired by the weather-beaten Shannon.
“You see,” he is wont to say, as he straightens himself, “by my military cut that I’m not a regular tar, though I’ve been in as many cutting-out parties as any a’most, and had the grape and canister pelting round me like hailstones, pretty nigh as often as I remembers feeling real hailstones. But I remembers best when the king—God bless him!—sent out thirty barrels of porter, that me and the rest of us might drink his majesty’s health in; that was in the time of the war with Ameriky, and good times they was too,” a little bit of individual opinion that no one would dream of controverting here. Next come we to another pensioner, who sits over the fire hugging his feeble knees, and who is just in the last year of his ninth decade. He tells you of the part he took in 1805, in the capture of two French frigates, and some of the latent fire returns as he speaks of it; for it was a fight that lasted three days and nights before victory was fairly ours.
Take the wards en masse, and we see peering out of the medley the delicate sallow skin and long black hair of the Greek, who is estimated by every British commander at seventy-five per cent. below the English tar in hauling power and endurance, while the South Sea Islander, the Scandinavian, the dusky Turk, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, Spaniards, [pg 287]Americans, Chinamen, are here side by side with the hardy sons of our own isles. In one corridor there is even a Fantee, with the mark of his tribe upon his ebon-hued forehead, but minus feet, having lost them through their being frost-bitten in the Black Sea. Another and more painful case is that of a poor fellow wrecked off Cape Horn, who, drifting for fourteen days in an open boat, reached shore only to find that he must purchase life at the cost of both nether limbs. The surgical operator was an unskilled sailor, the instrument a rough ship’s knife, with which he succeeded in performing successfully the dangerous operation, but with what torture to the sufferer can too vividly be imagined. He is cheerful enough now as he potters about on his stumps, full of dry humour and as cheerful as any able-bodied man could be. The light occupations of these disabled sons of the sea are varied and congenial to their different tastes, and their labour is chiefly confined to decorating the wards of the hospital. Amongst the many inscriptions are a beautiful white wreath with “Albert the Good” on it, and Nelson’s famous last signal. One German sailor lad has entirely decorated one ward with a taste and elegance simply surprising. This boy is an original, seeing that he went all the way to Jerusalem to learn English! “In Hamburg, his native place, he heard other boys, and occasionally travellers, say that there was a good school there where English was taught. Thereupon, seizing his opportunity, he worked his passage from Hamburg to Alexandria, took ship to Jaffa, and induced the German Consul to forward him to the Holy City.” Evidently he did not think there was anything remarkable in this singular method of acquiring our language![83]
The Thames Church Mission is a society established to minister to the spiritual necessities of the vast fluctuating population of the Thames, consisting of seamen, bargemen, steamboat-men, fishermen, &c. Services are held on board troop, emigrant, and passenger ships, screw colliers, and every description of vessels; also in the mission and reading-room which has been opened for seamen, &c., by the bank of the river at Bugsby, near East Greenwich. Bibles, Testaments, and Prayer-books are sold at reduced prices, and tracts distributed. A chaplain (licensed by the Bishop of London to visit ministerially and officiate on board all ships and vessels on the Thames), four missionaries, and five seamen colporteurs, constitute the missionary staff. The Mission undertakes the sale of Scriptures to English and foreign seamen, and gives Testaments to emigrants on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society; it places on board emigrant ships packets of tracts, and distributes the cards and circulars of the Sailor’s Home among seamen arriving in the Thames. The field of operation extends from London Bridge to the anchorages below Gravesend. The chaplain also holds Sabbath services on board the training ships Arethusa, Chichester, and Cornwall, and has weekly classes with the boys; and the missionaries act as honorary agents for enrolling members of the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society. There are many other excellent institutions for the seamen’s benefit, from London city to Gravesend town, but which cannot be described with the space at our command.
Every reader knows the Trinity House, but he may not be aware of its value to the seaman, the voyager, and the interests of commerce. The Trinity House, as it stands on Tower Hill, was built towards the end of the last century by Samuel Wyatt. It is of the Ionic order, and has some busts of naval heroes, whose deeds, like themselves, are of the past. [pg 288]Amongst its many interesting pictures is a very large Gainsborough, representing the Trinity Board of that day. This picture, by the way, is upwards of twenty feet in length, and, if merit go by measurement, is necessarily a very great picture. The Board of Trinity House has control of the beaconage and pilotage of the United Kingdom. The Corporation existed fully one hundred years before its original charter, which was granted in 1514, and was at that early date known simply as the “Shipmen and Mariners of England”—a voluntary and influential association of some standing, and at that time protected maritime interests and gave substantial relief to the aged and indigent of the seafaring community.