Besides the Isis which, on the 8th of October, 1842, sank off Bermuda, having previously struck on a reef, the company lost, on the 15th of April, 1843, the Solway, 20 miles west of Corunna. She was one of their finest vessels. Her captain, the surgeon, various passengers, and a portion of the crew, consisting in all of sixty persons, perished with the ship. The Tweed, another of their first-class vessels, of 1800 tons burden and 450 horse-power, was totally lost on the 12th of February, 1847, on the Alicranes reefs off Yucatan, in the Gulf of Mexico, while on her voyage to Vera Cruz. Her loss was most disastrous, and caused great excitement at the time. The crew and passengers amounted to 151 persons (seventy-two of whom were drowned), and their sufferings, as graphically described by one who had escaped,[277] formed a subject of conversation for a longer period than such calamities now do. After five days’ suffering, the remainder of the passengers and crew were rescued from the barren reef of rocks on which they had been cast. Again, on the 1st of February, 1849, the Forth was also completely lost on the same rocks which had caused the total destruction of the Tweed; while, in the following year the Actæon was wrecked in rounding the point near Carthagena on a shoal extending, as was alleged, much further into the sea than had been laid down on the Admiralty charts. Nor must the loss of the Medina, wrecked on the 12th of May, 1844, on a coral reef near Turks Island, be omitted, as this was, certainly, one which ought not to have occurred.
Causes of these losses.
Some of these disasters, no doubt, arose from the intricate nature of the navigation among the West India Islands, and others may have been caused, as the supporters of the company alleged, “by those sudden changes of the weather, hurricanes, squalls, northers, &c., with which the West India Islands, Spanish Main, and Gulf of Mexico are so frequently visited,” but the rocks and shoals of the Gulf could have had nothing to do with the loss of the Solway off Corunna, and, as the company has met with much fewer disasters of late years, I may be allowed to suspect that incompetency had too much to do with the almost periodical losses of the first eight or ten years of its career.
Loss of the Amazon.
But by far the greatest disaster which befell any of this company’s ships was the destruction of the Amazon by fire at sea; indeed, nothing could be more terrible than the loss of this ship and the sufferings of those who perished with her.
The Amazon was built by Messrs. R. and H. Green, at Blackwall, and launched from their yard on the 28th of June, 1851: she was the largest wooden merchant steam-ship which had up to that time been constructed. An illustration of her, as she lay at anchor ready for sea, on her first and only voyage, will be found on the following page.[278]
When surveyed by the Admiralty before her departure from Southampton, she was reported capable of carrying fourteen 32-pounders, and two 10-inch pivot guns of 85 cwt. each on her main-deck; her coal bunkers were constructed to carry 1000 tons of coals, or upward of sixteen and a half days’ consumption at the rate of 2½ tons per hour for her twenty-six furnaces. Her engines were fitted in a framework independent of the vessel, so that little or no perceptible vibration was felt when they were at work: moreover, allowing 12 superficial feet for each man, she had accommodation in her lower decks for 360 soldiers, besides elegant cabins for first-class passengers. Her cost, when ready for sea, was somewhat over 100,000l.
“AMAZON.”
On the 2nd of January, 1852, the Amazon, under command of Captain Symons, took her departure from Southampton with the usual mails for the British and foreign West Indies, the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish Main, &c., fifty passengers, and a large and valuable cargo. Her crew numbered 110, exclusive of the Admiralty officer in charge of the mails. The Amazon was the first of the direct line of steam-ships arranged by the company to run fortnightly between Southampton and Chagres, touching only at St. Thomas, at which place various lines of branch packets for the accommodation of the West Indies, the Gulf of Mexico, &c., were to meet, diverging thence to the different islands and ports embraced in the new arrangements with Government, and thus establishing, as it was termed at the time, “a great steam ferry between Europe and the Isthmus of Panama.”