The Sinking of the S.S. Arctic

When the S.S. Arctic joined the Collins line fleet in the 1850s, it was by all accounts a glorious ship. But in 1854, the steamer collided with another ship in a fog, and the resulting panic led to the deaths of most of the passengers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com and welcome to the podcast. I'm
I'm Trasevie Wilson. And if there's a thing we get
lots of requests for it is more maritime and shipwreck story. Yep.

(00:21):
So we're going to head back to the ocean today.
And this particular incident is often held in a particularly
tragic light because it seems that in the sinking of
this ship, which was the s s Arctic, the what
we now today perceive as a rule of women and
children first and the captain goes down to this ship,
those things did not hold true. Uh, none of the

(00:44):
women or children aboard the vessel survived the sinking spoiler alert.
And the captain did survive, even though he did not
expect to. Yeah, he did not abandon ship, but he
did survive the ordeal. We'll also talk about this whole
women and children first idea, Yeah, and the episode once
we have all this context in our belts. Yeah, there's
some cool modern statistical analysis that's been done as well

(01:07):
as some research on sort of where that concept came from,
and it puts things in an interesting light. I think
when we talk about shipwrecks, so we're gonna start talking
about the s s Arctic. And it was completed in
eighteen fifty and by every account it was a really
glorious ship. She was the third of four Atlantic steamers

(01:28):
in the Collins fleet, and they were recognized as just
the finest of their time when they were introduced. The
other ships were the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Baltic
and uh the pride of the Collins Line of New York,
which was founded by Edward Knight Collins. The Arctic was
a wooden hull, panel wheel steamer that was designed to

(01:49):
carry both cargo a small amount and up to two
hundred passengers, although the passenger space was expanded to accommodate
two eight passengers in eighteen fifty one. And it was
two eighty five feet long, which is about eighty seven meters,
and it weighed in at two thousand, eight hundred and
fifty six tons. Although it launched on January one, eighteen fifty,

(02:12):
it's maiden voyage didn't happen until October twenty seven of
that year. And like her three sister ships, the Arctic
could maintain a speed of twelve knots, which is really
fast for the time, and in February of eighteen fifty
to the Arctic set a record for the fastest eastbound
crossing of the Atlantic, hitting a speed of more than
thirteen knots and sustaining it for a while. When the

(02:34):
Arctic started its career, it was part of a lucrative
contract that the Collins Line had with the United States
government to be a mail runner between America and Great Britain.
And in addition to their income from mail service, they
competed with the well established Cunard line, which came out
of Britain for passenger service. Yeah, and initially the Collins

(02:56):
line did very well against Cunard. Their ships were really
again beautiful, they were brand new. They could run several
nuts faster than the Kenard fleet. But the cost of
ongoing maintenance of this advanced machinery that was in the
Colin ships did draw off some of their competitive edge.
Uh and sometimes it would put their ships out of
rotation while they were being serviced. So when you see

(03:17):
sort of business analysis of the situation, it's like Collins
arrived on the scene and initially stole a lot of
business from Kinnard, and then it kind of leveled out
as it became apparent that, you know, they couldn't always
be running all of the ships, and it did cost
a lot, so their their initial wide profit margin shrank
a little bit as it had to be allocated into

(03:39):
just maintaining the fleet. On Wednesday September, the S s
Arctic departed from Liverpool on what would it be its
last voyage. On board were two three passengers and a
hundred and fifty or so crew members. The captain was
James C. Loose and on September twenty seven, so a

(04:02):
week into the voyage, the ship entered into a thick
fog while it was approaching the Grand Banks, which is
southeast of Newfoundland, Canada. Also in the fog was the
French vessel Vesta, which is was headed for Grand Vie, France.
When the Vesta was spotted, they sounded the alarm, but
both ships were traveling at full speed and it was

(04:22):
just too late. A collision was unavoidable at that point.
And while it may sound incredibly reckless for a ship
to be running a headful in dicey visibility, it was
actually policy at this time in the Colins Line to
run through a fog as quickly as possible so that
they could clear the visual obstruction in the shortest possible time. Yes,

(04:44):
this policy was as unwise as it sounds, though it
was not uncommon for ships to do this at the
time because the Vesta was doing a similar thing. So
I feel like it's important to mention that this was
not a poor judgment call on the captain's part. That
was just standard operating procedure to get into fog and
gun it. It does in sort of a Hindenburgh kind

(05:07):
of a situation. In hindsight, what a poor idea. Both
of the ships were damaged in the collision, and initially
it was believed that the Vesta, in spite of having
this iron hull, had been damaged much worse. This belief
was so pervasive that the passengers and the crew of
the Vesta started traveling to the Arctic h But it

(05:30):
became quickly apparent that the Arctic was sinking and was
not going to help anybody in the situation, and the
Arctics wooden hull had been basically annihilated by the iron
hull of the Vesta. There were multiple holes, and the
ship quickly took on water and the speed of the
ocean rushing in through these multiple large holes caused a

(05:52):
panic aboard the Arctic. The captain directed the crew to
point the ship toward the closest land, which was Cape Ray,
and they started to accelerate toward it, but they took
on more and more water and started to sink faster.
Within four hours, the ship's furnaces were taking on water
and that just stopped the steamer dead. And meanwhile, the

(06:14):
panicked crewmen did not follow the captain's orders to prioritize
the lives of the women and children, and instead many
of them jumped into the lifeboats themselves. The first attempts
to launch the lifeboats resulted in those boats being destroyed
and the men aboard were lost. Subsequent boats did launch successfully,

(06:34):
but most of them were lost at sea. A large
raft that was assembled from the wreckage started out with
nearly eighty passengers, but all but one of them were
eventually swept into the water, and only two of the
lifeboats reached Newfoundland, carrying a total of forty five men,
and two thirds of those men uh were I think

(06:56):
it's thirty one men and fourteen as the numbers too
words were crew members and only fourteen were passengers. Captain
Loose had tried to save his unconscious son, although was
the ship continued to break apart. He was hit in
the head by a piece of debris and killed. The
captain managed to scramble aboard a paddle box and use

(07:17):
it as a raft, and he and two other men
were eventually picked up by the Cambria. The Cambria was
captained by John Russell, and it picked them up on September.
So all one hundred nine of the women and children
that were aboard were killed, as well as one forty
nine male passengers and two crew members. And then I

(07:39):
think we should have a note on these numbers because
the actual number of deceased fluctuates a good bit amongst accounts,
you'll see anywhere from two to three fifty one listed.
Uh So the counts, even in women and children, passengers
and crew, should not be taken as absolute. Some passengers
managed to make it to the Vesta and they would

(08:02):
have been theoretically reported, and others were picked up adrift
in the water, but they there wasn't always a clear
line of record as to what had happened to everybody.
So even like the captain's account, which we'll get to
in a bit, he lists the two thirty three passengers,
but other historical accounts will list different ones, So just

(08:24):
keep that in mind that there's some spongy nous to
the math on this whole thing. Well, and at the
point that he was rescued, he'd been in the water
for a couple of days, so we we do not
we cannot imagine his mental state, although based on his description,
which we'll get too shortly, it was an extremely rough
experience as you would imagine. Also aboard the ship during

(08:47):
this wreck where e k Collins's life and his children
and they, naturally, based on the numbers that we just said,
did not survive. The Vesta did manage to make ports
in St. John's three days after the collision, and accounts
of the time kind of talked about the great skill
of her captain at managing to to take that damage
ship into port. But before we get to the next

(09:08):
little bit of business and how this affected the Collins line,
would you like to take a moment and talk about
our sponsors. Let's do that, So let's get back to
what happened once people realized the death toll. Yeah, So,
as uh, news of this horrible incident reached news Uh

(09:32):
outlets and the shore. The disproportionate amount of the crew
survivors versus passenger caused a major scandal on both sides
of the Atlantic, and it really really set in motion
what was eventually the financial ruin of the Collins Line.
While the American Maritime Company had initially been a huge

(09:53):
threat to the established Qunard Line of Britain, the singing
of the Arctic, followed by the disappearance of the p
Cific daring a voyage in eighteen fifty six, meant that
the Collins line was basically finished. Despite attempts to revive
their reputation with a new and larger vessel named the Adriatic,
they went bankrupts just a few years after the Pacific

(10:13):
was lost. And as a point of interest, the Cunard
line is still in business today. They did quite well
for themselves and survived UH. And now we get to
Captain Loose's account of what happened. So on October fourteenth
of eighteen fifty four in Quebec, that captain wrote a
letter to E. K. Collins to describe the incident and

(10:36):
notify him of his family member's deaths, and the letter
begins with Dear sir, it becomes my painful duty to
inform you of the total loss of the Arctic under
my command, with many lives, and I fear among them
must be included your own wife, daughter, and son, of
whom I took a last leave the moment the ship
was going down, without ever expecting to see the light

(10:58):
of another day. To give you an accoun out of
the heartrending scene. He goes on to say that about
fifteen minutes after leaving the deck at noon, he heard
hard starboard called out from the officers of the deck,
and immediately after the crash, Loose himself believed that the
primary goal that he and the crew should focus on

(11:19):
should be the rescue of the people aboard the Vesta.
They really did think that the Vesta was the one
that was going to go down, and his account says
that his first officer took six men and one of
the boats with the intent that they were going over
to the Vesta to collect people to bring back to
the Arctic. He also describes the general state of panic
and the abandonment of the women and children. He writes,

(11:43):
finding the leak gaining on us very fast, notwithstanding all
our very powerful efforts to keep her free. I resolved
to get the boats ready and as many ladies and
children placed in them as possible. But no sooner had
the attempt been made than the firemen and others rushed
into them in spite of opposition. Seeing this state of things,
I ordered the boats astern to be kept in readiness

(12:04):
until order could be restored. When, to my dismay, I
saw them cut the ropes in the bow and soon
disappear astern in the fog. Another boat was broken down
by the persons rushing at the davits, and many were
precipitated into the sea and drowned. This occurred while I
had been engaged in setting the starboard guard boat ready
and placed the second officer in charge, when the same

(12:27):
fearful scene is what the first boat was being enacted.
Men leaping from the top of the rail twenty feet,
pushing and maiming those who were in the boat. So uh,
quite clearly not exactly noble or chivalrous behavior. And just
as a quick side note, when we reference fireman in
this instance you probably know by context, but they mean

(12:47):
the people that are working in the in the steam
engine area, not firemen in the modern sense of people
that deal with fires. One of his officers, who was
a Mr. Dorian, did try to get a boat filled
with women and children. Low did. But when when an
alarm sounded signaling that the shop the ship was sinking,
the boat was really hastily shoved off with no oars

(13:08):
or other safety equipment. Yeah, it sounds like he trying
to keep the oars out of the boat on purpose,
so that these gentlemen that were rushing the boats and
just trying to take them would not be attempted to.
But as a consequence, those oars got left behind when
the boat was shoved off without sort of a proper check.
Uh and Loose describes the sinking, and he says, in

(13:31):
an instant, about a quarter to five pm, the ship
went down, carrying every soul on board with her. I
soon found myself on the surface after a brief struggling
with my own helpless child in my arms, And when
again I felt myself impelled downwards to a great depth,
and before I reached the surface the second time, had
nearly perished and lost the hold of my child. As

(13:52):
I again struggled to the surface of the water, a
most awful and heartrending scene presented itself to my view.
Over two hundred men, women and children struggling together amidst
pieces of wreck of every kind, calling on each other
for help and imploring God to assist them. Such an
appalling scene. May God preserve me from ever witnessing again.
Loose goes on to give an account of losing his

(14:13):
son and watching the others die slowly around him during
the days of drift, and it's truly harrowing, it really is.
It's so it's one of those letters that's clearly written
from the point of view of a man who is
trying to do his job and write a report, and
it is clearly messed up by the whole thing. Um.
And it should be noted that he captained nine other
vessels before taking his position on the Arctic, and he

(14:37):
had lost only two of them, which is actually quite
a good record. Uh. He was considered to be a
really skillful navigator and a very able captain. And according
to his obituary, when he returned to his hometown of Yonkers,
New York, after this incident, he quote found two long
lines of citizens formed through which he walked, receiving warm
congratulations and hearty welcome. He then went on to work

(14:59):
for more than two decades as an inspector for the
Great Western Marine Insurance Company, and he died in July
eighteen seventy nine of heart disease. He was seventy nine
years old. And we're gonna pause one more moment, uh,
and take another word from a sponsor, and then we're
going to talk about some modern analysis of this stuff.

(15:19):
So now, like, let's look at this whole idea of
women and children first. Yeah, that's one of those things
where it's a good question to ask where it came
from and sort of how that happened, and it's uh.
In an interesting coda to this issue, there was a
study that was performed by the Upsala University in Sweden
and it was published in July, and it suggested that

(15:41):
women and children actually have the least likelihood of survival
in a maritime disaster. This study was co authored by
two economists, Mikhail Ellender and Oscar Ericsson, and they analyzed
data from eighteen shipwrecks that happened between eighteen fifty two
and two thousand eleven. They only included the instants that

(16:01):
involved at least a hundred people with at least five
percent surviving and at least five percent dying. And these
statistics took into account the fates of more than fifteen
thousand people from thirty countries. Yeah, and that's those numbers
kind of gave me a bit of a jolt at first,
and like, fift people, but it's only eighteen shipwrecks. And
when you're thinking about it in the context of a

(16:23):
shipwreck like this, where it's roughly three people, that seems
impossible math. But then when you think about the more
modern ones. Cruise liners, for example, can carry anywhere between
two to six thousand people depending on their size, So
that kind of makes up for those what seems like
a big number gap maybe on first look. Uh. And

(16:44):
the Titanic, which was included in this study, had three
times more women survived the incident than men, but this
turned out to be the exception rather than the rule.
A similar outlier was the HMS Birkenhead, which sank in
eighteen fifty two, and in fact, the women and Children
First rule is sometimes referred to as the Birkenhead drill

(17:05):
because that ship sinking off the coast of South Africa
is usually recognized as the first time that order was
ever given, So all of the women and children that
had been aboard the Birkenhead did actually survive, while many
soldiers just stood there silently, sinking with the ship into
shark infested waters. According to Ellender and Ericson's findings, women

(17:28):
were only half as likely to survive a shipwreck as men.
Crew members had an eighteen point seven percent greater chance
of survival than passengers, and only seven out of sixteen
captains actually went down with the ship and their data set.
And furthermore, UH women had the worst survival rates on

(17:48):
British vessels, even though the women and Children first order
is documented is having having been given much more frequently
on British ships than other vessels. Yeah, and today people
look at it as sort of a victory in British sensibility. UH.
In particular, prior to this research, there had been a
theory that selfish behavior would more likely erupt on fast

(18:11):
sinking ships, while a slower sinking would allow people who
were involved to stay calmer and exhibit more socially accepted
behavior patterns. But Elfinder and Ericson found that it was
actually the captain's behavior rather than a time sensitive situation
that tended to determine the cruise behavior. So in only

(18:31):
five of those eighteen sinkings that they studied was the
women and children first order issued by a captain. Ellender
frames this information as an insight into human behavior. He says,
although maritime disasters are tragic events, they can contribute to
our understanding of how people behave under extreme stress and
when it is a matter of life and death. Yeah.

(18:52):
I think it's one of those things where, um, it's
easy to kind of vilify people or kind of judge
them for their behavior, but I don't I don't know
how I would react in such a moment. I don't
think you know until you're in it. Yeah, well, as
you've undergone very specific like emergency style training, right. Well,

(19:14):
And in their particular study looks generally at the question
of men and women, but not some of the other
factors that influence who makes it off the ship and
who doesn't. Like on the Titanic, for example, um, first
class women and children had a pretty astounding survival rate,
but women and children and steerage did not so much.

(19:35):
So it was not quite so much women and children first,
as it was rich women and children first when it
came to the Titanic in particular, I kind of after
I read your notes, I kind of went down this
rabbit hole of the whole idea of women and children
first and where it comes from and what it means
today when since when it first came about was in

(19:57):
the eighteen fifties, and and that was a very different
aunt time in terms of gender relation and gender relations
and uh, sort of the perception of women as both
whether women were perceived as weak or strong, and whether
women were perceived as like actual autonomous people or objects.
And so I kind of went down a crazy rabbit

(20:17):
hole of that, and it reminded me in a way
of how I've I've traveled by ship several times in
the past few years, and we always have a safety drill,
and the safety drill is always about getting everyone off
the ship. It's about like every person knowing where they
need to go to get on a lifeboat, and every
ship having enough lifeboat accommodations for every person on the

(20:39):
ship to make it off safely. And the only real
reference to children that has come up in the ships
that I have been on has been that um for
the parents. If their children are not with them, the
parents are to go to their lifeboat station and their
children will be brought to them by crew because all
the children have to have a little wristbands or whatever
on saying this is my lifeboat station. So it's like

(21:00):
there are still special accommodations for children, but other accommodations
seem to be based on like, uh, actual threats to
people's safety, people who may have a mobility impairment that
needs to be assisted with getting off the ship, and
not so much based on gender or class. Yeah, and

(21:20):
it is also a very different time in terms of
now this is kind of always referenced as part of
the Titanic's legacy. Now there are enough lifeboats for everyone.
They did that on purpose, yes, whereas there were not.
That was not standard operating procedure for a very long time.
So it did become a matter of who do we
save And there have been some interesting discussions if you

(21:42):
kind of trawl around the internet and like maritime interest
boards at all, uh, where discussions will come up of well,
women and children are less likely just physically to survive
something like hypothermia adrift at sea than men might, so
in saying women in children first, are we in fact
doing everyone to die? And that gets into a very

(22:04):
interesting arena of discussion and can get very heated very quickly,
So you're not ready for very grown up angry talk.
Don't visit those boards. It definitely does seem to come
from a sense of like chivalry, and what we might
classify today is benevolent sexism, which we I don't think
we've talked about that on this podcast, but but we

(22:24):
have on our our prior podcast before talked about the
idea that they're sometimes sexism is intended to to be benevolent,
even though it doesn't really play out that way when
you follow it to its logical end um. So it's
framed that way rather than in any kind of practical
sense of actually ensuring the survivability of the group. Yeah,

(22:46):
it gets into a very interesting stuff and I like
that there. Um. The study that was done in Sweden
to analyze all of this covered such a nice wide
range of you know, eighteen fifties to modern day cruise ships,
because that's a pretty wide variety. For example, now we
have enough boats for everybody, but even so they're finding

(23:07):
that still men have better survival rain well, and the
differences between first class and what used to be called
steerage are much different now. Yeah. So that's today's maritime story. Uh,
we'll have more, I'm sure, but everybody loves a good
shipwrecked tail, and it did. This one is interesting to
me because it did bring up so many, um interesting

(23:31):
questions about, uh, how people handle panic and fear and yeah,
I can't judge anybody. I don't. I don't know what
I would do. Do you have listener mail? I do,
And this one is actually a listener mail in which
I am going to call out to our listeners as
well for help and answering it. Uh. So this came

(23:52):
from our listener Lucy, and she is excited because she's
going to New Orleans in February, and she says, I'm
super excited. However, a little overwhelmed at what to do
in just three point five short days. We are staying
in the French Quarter, and I was wondering if you
could give me some ideas of things I can't miss
out on. I plan on going to oak Allley one morning,
and I want to see the Madame LaLaurie mansion and

(24:12):
I want to check a cemetery or two, but which one?
Also we like food and hole in the wall bars,
so I answered her already, and I mentioned Matary Cemetery,
which is the famous one that's near the end of
the Red Street car line. I also mentioned the Ogden
Museum of Southern Art, which I love, the insectarium, which
I love. If you go to New Orleans and you've
never been and you like bugs, you have to run there. Uh.

(24:33):
And for food. Unfortunately, my favorite restaurant closed a few
years back, but there's a it's actually a chain. There
are three locations of this one called the Ruby Slipper,
but it's a fun little place to pop into for brunches. Uh.
And she'll also be there for part of the early
part of Mardi Gras. And one thing that she is
going to have a really good chance to see is
the Crew of Barcus, which is a parade that is

(24:55):
centered around dogs and it happens in the French Quarter.
I love it. Uh. But those were my ideas. But
I know we have listeners in New Orleans and listeners
that love New Orleans, and I bet they have even
better ideas than I have, So uh, right into us
and let us know with your thoughts and I will
pass those on or you can post them. Uh. So

(25:18):
if you want to write to us with those thoughts,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also post them on Facebook at Facebook dot
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dot tumbler dot com. And you can always visit us
on Pinterest. So though it's probably not a great place

(25:38):
to put travel ideas, probably not, but I'm also selfishly
going to use any suggestion as we get from my
own itinerary next time I go to New Orleans, uh,
the city I really really love. So if you would
like to learn more about what we talked about today,
you can go to our website and type in the
word shipwreck and one of the articles that comes up
to is taken by the Sea eleven real life shipwrecks,

(25:59):
And if you would like to learn about that, or
almost anything else you can come up with, you can
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