p. 16 | THE LAST SEA HORROR

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 28, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 30.

THE LAST SEA HORROR.

The loss of the French passenger steamer, the Bourgogne, bound from New York to Havre, which was sunk July 4, off Sable Island, shows blacker and more terrible as viewed more in detail. While 104 of officers and crew were saved, only 61 passengers were rescued, and only one woman. Every first-cabin passenger was drowned, or killed by brutal passengers or sailors.

One Eastern paper tells us that while other transatlantic liners avoid the northern fog belt at this time of year, the owners of La Bourgogne use that route because it is a few hours shorter. It is also said that speed is kept up in a fog, under the theory that the ship which is going at full speed has the advantage in a collision. It will sink the ship it collides with, instead of being sunk. How much better it would have been to have sailed at the very slowest rate in such a dense fog! The iron Cromartyshire would not in such case have sent the life-laden steamer to the bottom. But what a disregard of human life this shows on the part of the company owning the ship; and the same selfish spirit seems to have possessed the crew as well! It is fearfully criminal. The New York Christian Advocate thus speaks of those who went down:—

“One might almost say the whole civilized world was represented among her passengers. Wealth, fashion, learning, and piety went down with poverty, ignorance, filth, and vice. There were artists and actors, merchants, mechanics, scientists, and clergymen. ‘The Terrible Turk,’ who had thrown every person in the world who dared to risk his grapple, was thrown by the king of terrors, and went down with the Greeks. The Armenians and the Syrians were there; of the latter there were 75, of whom all but 8 perished; music teacher and musicians, 15 of them, 3 of whom, belonging to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, were lost. Among them were sculptors, professors of Johns Hopkins University and of the University of Michigan, a patent lawyer and his wife, the wife of one of the greatest New York lawyers and her daughter, a score of teachers, the publication agent of the Courrier des États-Unis of this city, and Father Kessler, who was on his way to enjoy the first vacation he had had for thirty-five years.”

Other sad horrors of the deep may be mentioned as follows: March 11, 1841, the President put to sea with 136 persons on board, but never was heard from again. March 1, 1854, the City of Glasgow disappeared with 373 passengers and 74 officers and crew. September 27, the same year, the Arctic, only a little way from where the French liner met her fate, collided with the Vesta, and 322 lives were lost. She also was running in a fog 13 knots an hour. Sept. 13, 1858, the Austin, of the Hamburg American line, burned, and 470 were lost. April 1, 1873, the British steamer Atlantic was wrecked, and 585 were drowned. The same year, we believe, the Ville du Havre, of the same line as La Bourgogne, was struck by a sailing vessel, and 226 perished. In 1875 the German steamer Schiller was lost with 312 persons. In 1883, on the Hamburg steamer Cimbria, 403 lives were lost. The Utopia, of the anchor line, was, March 17, 1891, lost by a collision in Gibraltar Bay, and 563 were drowned. But a short time ago the North German Lloyd Company’s Elbe went down, with 334 souls lost. And yet in the way of duty the sea is as safe as the land. “The sea is His, and He made it.”