So the great ship creeps up the Channel. Once in a while an answering blast is borne over the water, a bell is heard tolling afar, but never a thing is in sight. It is a weary night for the captain, but in the morning all is clear; we are off Holyhead; the pulse of the engine has recovered its regularity; the faces of the passengers are beaming, and Snowdon is visible over the starboard bow, piled up in white vapor.
The navigation of the Channel in foggy weather can never be free from danger, and more fine steamers of the great transatlantic lines have been lost between Fastnet and Liverpool through fogs than through any other cause. It was only last summer that the City of Rome ran in a dense fog against Fastnet itself—that perilous, shore-less, horn-shaped rock which stands in the direct pathway of all ingoing and outgoing ships—and barely escaped destruction. A few years earlier, when the Cunarder Aurania was approaching land in a fog, the passengers who were smoking their after-dinner cigars suddenly saw looming above them, and above the topmasts, the cliffs which were supposed to be many miles away. The captain was far out of his reckoning, but was going so slowly that he was able to back into the Channel with slight damage. A similar accident to this happened to the White Star steamer Baltic when she was proceeding up the Channel to Liverpool.
One of the most brilliant lights in the Channel is that of the South Stack, which lies under the flank of the mountainous precipice of Holyhead. The Stack is an egg of rock, much higher and much bolder than Fastnet, which has become detached from the main-land, and its apex is crowned with the white tower and crouching buildings of the lighthouse keepers. The sea is eating it away, and has already scooped out a vast cavern which they call the Parliament Hall. It is wider and loftier than any chamber at Westminster, and there is more justification for its name in the babble of the sea-birds flitting in and out of it than in its dimensions. From the foot of it to the low, white wall which encircles the light, it is a sheer precipice of dark, exfoliating rock, forbidding and hopeless, without a resting-place for any living thing less secure than the birds, which cluster like beads on a string upon the edges of the shale. The sea frets itself around it and gurgles in the cavern; ledges and reefs abut on it. All vessels aim to give it a wide berth, and usually keep at such a distance that a glass has to be used to discover its destructive points. To say “ashore at South Stack” is as good as to say a “total wreck.” There is hardly one chance in a hundred that the luckless ship which strikes here will live.
Eddystone Lighthouse, English Channel.
(Tower about one hundred feet high.)
The Baltic was feeling her way up the Channel, and was supposed to be 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.
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.