A number of
articles on this blog site have dealt with 19th Century shipping disasters.
There is a horrible fascination about them, since they illustrate how the management
of civilian shipping was often so lackadaisical and how command, control and management
techniques did not keep pace with newly introduced steam-technology. It is
remarkable that through the century the Royal Navy, a strictly disciplined
organisation which consisted at any one time of hundreds of ships, lost far
fewer vessels on a proportional basis than the merchant and fishing fleets. Major
disasters which took hundreds of lives were relatively commonplace – the death toll
being too often increased by absence of the most basic safety provisions such
as life boat provisions – and huge numbers of small trading or fishing craft
were lost annually, often without trace.
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| Mona's Isle of 1830 - paddle steamer on Liverpool - Isle of Man packet service Rothsay Castle would have looked generally similar and in August 1831 was to encounter weather like that shown here |
A disaster in
1831, in the infancy of steam-propulsion at sea, illustrates many of these
shortcomings. It evoked horror and outrage at the time, and yet the obvious
lessons to be drawn from it were not learned and not implemented for decades to
come. The paddle-steamer Rothsay Castle,
built in 1816, was one of the earliest steamers to venture regularly into the open
sea, though her initial service had been on the sheltered waters of Scotland’s River
Clyde. Thereafter she was to operate out of Liverpool and along the coast of
North Wales as an excursion vessel. She had an impressively unspectacular
career for fifteen years and might indeed have been seen as proof of the suitability
of steam power to open sea service. Ninety-three feet long, and of a mere seventy-five
tons burthen, she seems nevertheless to have routinely carried well over a hundred
passengers on such holiday excursions – which must have seemed the same type of
novelty in the 1820s and early 1830s as mass air-travel did in the 1950s.
A Victorian
account of the disaster that overcame the Rothsay
Castle is full of fascinating incidental detail, and the following draws
upon it. On 7th August, 1831 she left Liverpool in mid-morning with
a crew of fifteen officers, seamen and musicians, the latter to provide a
festive atmosphere. The fact that the number of passengers was uncertain –
estimates varied from 110 to 120 – attests to the fact that no real control
existed as to loading. Given the size of the vessel the conditions must have been
cramped in the extreme. The Victorian author noted sombrely that the majority
of the passengers consisted of holiday and family parties, en route to Beaumaris
in North Wales and “chiefly from country places”. He noted with solemn exactitude
that “in one of these companies, who came
on a journey of pleasure from Bury, the hand of death committed a merciless
devastation. It consisted of twenty-six persons; in the morning, joyous with
health and hilarity, they set out upon the waves, and when the shades of that
evening approached, every soul but two saw his last of suns go down.”
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| The horror and terror of shipwreck as envisaged by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) |
Given the
loading of the vessel it is surprising that she ever set sail. A severe storm had
raged earlier, and a strong wind was still blowing from the north-west leaving the
waters outside the harbour rough. By the time the steamer arrived off the “Floating-Light”
buoy, some fifteen miles from Liverpool, many of the passengers were in a state
of alarm – and one imagines that sea-sickness must have added to the misery,
given that many of them were unlikely to have been at sea before.. One of the
survivors stated he had confronted the captain, named Atkinson, who was eating
his dinner and requested him to put back to port. Atkinson replied that “I think there is a great deal of fear on
board, and very little danger. If we were to turn back with passengers, it
would never do—we should have no profit.” To another passenger he said angrily
that “I’m not one of those that turn
back.” He remained in his cabin for the next two hours and refused further
entreaties to turn back.
Atkinson’s
behaviour before dinner appears to have been rational but it changed thereafter,
possibly through drinking. He became violent in his manner, and abusive to his
crew. When anxiously questioned by the passengers as to the vessel’s progress and
the time at which she was likely to reach her destination, he returned dismissive
and frequently contradictory answers. He had been previously confident of reaching
Beaumaris by seven o’clock but it was midnight before reaching the mouth of the
Menai Strait, about five miles from Beaumaris. The tide, which had been running
out of the strait, and which had consequently been slowing the Rothsay Castle’s progress, was now
turning. As she entered the strait the engine lost power – it appeared that the
ship had been taking on water all day and that the bilge pumps were now choked and
incapable of coping with the ingress. Water was now sloshing over the coal in the
furnace and extinguishing the fires – an occurrence which the engine-room staff
did not seem to have though necessary to inform the captain of initially. With
power lost, the vessel was being carried by the tide and by the north-west wind
towards a shoal known as the “Dutchman’s Bank”. Here the bows ran on to the sand
and stuck fast.
Captain
Atkinson attempted to use his sails – like all steamers of the time the Rothsay Castle carried a sailing rig – to get free, though without
effect. He then ordered the passengers and crew to run aft – so as to sink the
stern slightly and so lift the bows, but this was equally unavailing. The
terrified passengers urged Atkinson to hoist lights and distress signals but he
vehemently refused to do There was no danger, he claimed, despite the fact that
the ship was rapidly filling with water. The weather, “at this awful moment, was boisterous, but perfectly clear. The moon,
though slightly overcast, threw considerable light on the surrounding objects. But
a strong breeze blew from the north-west, the tide began to set in with great
strength, and a heavy sea beat over the bank on which the steam packet was now
firmly and immovably fixed.”
The Victorian
chronicler left little to the imagination and milked the drama for all its pathos:
“We cannot describe the scene which
followed. Certain death seemed now to present itself to all on board, and the
most affecting scenes were exhibited. The females, in particular, uttered the
most piercing shrieks; some locked themselves in each others’ arms, while
others, losing all self-command, tore off their caps and bonnets, in the
wildness of despair. A Liverpool pilot, who happened to be in the packet, now
raised his voice and exclaimed, “It is all over—we are all lost!” At these
words there was a universal despairing shriek. The women and children collected
in a knot together, and kept embracing each other, keeping up, all the time,
the most dismal lamentations. When tired with crying they lay against each
other, with their heads reclined, like inanimate bodies. The steward of the
vessel and his wife, who was on board, lashed themselves to the mast,
determined to spend their last moments in each other’s arms. Several husbands
and wives also met their fate locked in each other’s arms; whilst parents clung
to their beloved children—several mothers it is said, having perished with
their dear little ones firmly clasped in their arms. A party of the passengers,
about fifteen or twenty, lowered the boat and crowded into it. It was
impossible for any open boat to live in such a sea, even though not overloaded,
and she immediately swamped and went to the bottom, with all who had made this
last hopeless effort for self-preservation.”
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| Artist's impression of the final break-up |
The Rothsay
Castle was now disintegrating under the pounding of the waves. “The
decks were repeatedly swept by the boiling ocean, and each billow snatched its
victims to a watery grave. The unfortunate captain and his mate were among the
first that perished. About thirty or forty passengers were standing upon the
poop clinging to each other in hopeless agony, and occasionally uttering the
most piteous ejaculations. Whilst trembling thus upon the brink of destruction,
and expecting every moment to share the fate which had already overtaken so
many of their companions in misery, the poop was discovered to give way;
another wave rolled on with impetuous fury, and the hinder part of the luckless
vessel, with all who sought safety in its frail support, was burst away from
its shattered counterpart, and about forty wretched beings hurried through the
foaming flood into an eternal world.”
The final
break-up occurred some ninety minutes after the ship had first grounded. Hanging
on to pieces of wreckage – eight people clung on to the rudder when it was torn
free – the survivors now had to cope with the full fury of the waves. The bodies
of the victims were washed up on the nearby coast in the coming days. There were
only twenty-three survivors plus a dog. That the disaster had been avoidable
evoked sufficient outrage that a lifeboat station was set up the following
year, followed by a lighthouse five years later. But valuable as these measures
were, the root cause of the disaster – the incompetence and wilful carelessness
of the captain, and the inadequacy of the operating procedures – seems to have
been little addressed. Countless further tragedies, many with significant
larger loss of life, were to occur in the decades that followed – and for the same
reasons.
Britannia’s Reach by Antoine Vanner
"Britannia’s Reach is not just political or military alone. What higher interest can there be than consolidation of Britain’s commercial interests?” So says one of the key figures in this novel, which details a murderous war launched by a British-owned company to reassert control of its cattle-raising investment in Paraguay, following a revolt by its workers.
This story of desperate riverine combat brings historic naval fiction into the age of Fighting Steam.
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