September 27, 2025 • 25 mins
This 2014 episode covers the collision of the S.S. Arctic with another ship in a fog in 1854. The resulting panic led to the deaths of most of the passengers.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The ss Arctic sank on September twenty seventh,
eighteen fifty four, or one hundred and seventy one years
ago today on the day this episode is coming out.
Our episode on this disaster is Today's Saturday Classic.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Please excuse our pronouncing the word Newfoundland the way we
were taught to pronounce it in school, which is also
how it's listed as pronounced in American English dictionaries, rather
than the way many Canadians have told us that it
ought to be pronounced. This episode originally came out on
January fifteenth, twenty fourteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(00:42):
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fryed, I'm
Tracy V. Wilson.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
And if there's a thing we get lots of requests for,
it is more maritime and ship yep. 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 ss Arctic, the what we now today perceive
(01:16):
as a rule of women and children first, and.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
The captain goes down to this ship. Those things did
not hold true. None of the women or children aboard
the vessel survived the sinking spoiler alert. And the captain
did survive, even though he.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Did not expect to. Yeah, he did not abandon ship,
but he did survive the ordeal. Yeah, we'll also talk
about this whole women and children first idea. Yeah, end
of the episode. Yeah, once we have all this context
under our belts. Yeah, there's some cool modern statistical analysis
that's been done as well as some research on sort
of where that concept came from, and it puts things
(01:53):
in an interesting light I think when we talk about shipwrecks. Yeah,
so we're gonna start was talking about the SS 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 and the Colins Fleet, and they
were recognized as just the finest of their time when
they were introduced. The other ships were the Atlantic, the Pacific,
(02:17):
and the Baltic.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
And the Pride of the Collins Line of New York,
which was founded by Edward Knightcollins. The Arctic was a
wooden hull paddelwheel steamer that was designed to carry both
cargo a small amount and up to two hundred passengers,
although the passenger space was expanded to accommodate two hundred
and eighty passengers in eighteen fifty one. And it was
(02:40):
two hundred and eighty five feet long, which is about
eighty seven meters, and it weighed in at two eight
hundred and fifty six tons.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Although it launched on January twenty first, eighteen fifty its
maiden voyage didn't happen until October twenty seventh of that year.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And like her three sister ships, the Arctic could maintain
a speed of twelve knot, which was really fast for
the time, and in February of eighteen fifty two, 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 Arctic started
its career, it was part of a lucrative contract that
(03:17):
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 Canard line, which came out of
Britain for passenger service. Yeah, and initially the Colins line
did very well against Kinnard. Their ships were really big
(03:39):
and beautiful, they were brand new. They could run several
knots faster than the Cunard 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
and sometimes it would put their ships out of rotation
while they were being serviced. So when you see sort
of a business analysis of the situation, it's Collins arrived
(04:00):
on the scene and initially stole a lot of business
from Kunard, 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 initial wide profit margin shrank a little bit
as it had to be allocated into just maintaining the fleet.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
On Wednesday, September twentieth, eighteen fifty four, the SS Arctic
departed from Liverpool on what would it be its last voyage.
On board were two hundred and thirty three passengers and
one hundred and fifty or so crew members. The captain
was James C. Loose and on September twenty seventh, so
(04:41):
a 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 was headed for grand Ville, France.
When the Vesta was spotted, they sounded the alarm, but
both ships traveling at full speed and it was just
(05:01):
too late.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
A collision was unavoidable at that point. And while it
may sound incredibly reckless for a ship to be running
a head full in dicey visibility, it was actually policy
at this time in the Collins line to run through
a fog as quickly as possible so that they could
clear the visual obstruction in the shortest possible time. Yes,
(05:23):
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 right to get into fog
and gun it. It does in sort of a Hindenburg
(05:46):
kind of a situation. Yeah, 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 eye 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. But
(06:09):
it became quickly apparent that the Arctic was sinking and
was not going to help anybody in the situation, and
the Arctic's 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
(06:31):
a panic aboard the Arctic. The captain directed the crew
to point the ship toward the closest land, which was
Cape Race, 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,
(06:53):
the panicked crewmen did not follow the captain's orders to
prioritize the lives of the women and children and instead dead,
many of them jumped into the lifeboats themselves.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
The first attempts to launch the lifeboats resulted in those
boats being destroyed and the men aboard were lost. Subsequent
boats did launch successfully, but most of them were lost
at sea. A large raft that was assembled from the
wreckage started out with nearly eighty passengers. All but one
of them were eventually swept into the water, and only
(07:26):
two of the lifeboats reached Newfoundland, carrying a total of
forty five men, and two thirds of those men were
I think it's thirty one men and fourteen as the numbers.
Two thirds were crew members and only fourteen were passengers.
Captain Luce had tried to save his unconscious son, although
(07:47):
as 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 it as a raft, and he and two other
men were eventually we picked up by the Cambria. The
Cambria was captained by John Russell, and it picked them
up on September twenty ninth, so all one hundred and
(08:09):
nine of the women and children that were aboard were killed,
as well as one hundred and forty nine male passengers
and ninety two crew members. And then I 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 eighty five to three fifty one listed,
(08:30):
So the counts, even in women and children, passengers, and crews,
should not be taken as absolute. Some passengers managed to
make it to the Vesta and they would 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
(08:53):
the captain's account, which we'll get to in a bit,
he lists the two hundred and thirty three passengers, but
their historical accounts will list different ones. So just keep
that in mind that there's some sponginess to the math
on this whole thing.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Well, and at the point that he was rescued, he'd
been in the water for a couple of days. Yeah,
so 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 this wreck, where E. K. Collins's wife and
(09:29):
his children and they, naturally, based on those numbers that
we just said, did not survive. The Vesta did manage
to make port in Saint 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 take that
damage ship into port. But before we get to the
next little bit of business and how this affected the
(09:50):
Collins line, would you like to take a moment and
talk about our sponsors.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Let's do that.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
So let's get back to what happened once people realized
the death toll.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Yeah. So, as news of this horrible incident reached news
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
(10:33):
what was eventually the financial ruin of the Collins line.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
While the American Maritime Company had initially been a huge
threat to the established Quneard line of Britain, the Singing
of the Arctic, followed by the disappearance of the Pacific
during 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.
(10:59):
They went and bank just a few years after the
Pacific was lost, and.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
As a point of interest, the Kunard line is still
in business today. They did quite well for themselves and survived.
And now we get to Captain Luce's account of what happened.
So on October fourteenth of eighteen fifty four in Quebec,
the captain wrote a letter to E. K. Collins to
(11:23):
describe the incident and 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
(11:46):
see the light of another day. To give you an
account 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
(12:07):
focus on 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.
(12:30):
He writes, 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
(12:51):
kept in readiness until order could be restored. When, to
my dismay, I saw them cut the ropes in the
bow and soon disappear as stern 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,
(13:15):
when the same 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 quite clearly not exactly noble or chivalrous behavior.
And this is a quick side note. When we reference
firemen in this instance you probably know by context, but
(13:35):
they mean the people that are working in the steam
engine area, not firemen in the modern sense of people
that deal with fires. One of his officers, who was
a mister Dorian, did try to get a boat filled
with women and children loaded, but when an alarm sounded
signaling that the ship was sinking, the boat was really
hastily shoved off with no oars or other safety equipment. Yeah,
(13:59):
it sounds like he tried 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 as tempted to. But as a consequence,
those oars got left behind when the boat was shoved
off without sort of a proper check, and Luce describes
the sinking, and he says, in an instant, about a
(14:20):
quarter to five pm, the ship went down, carrying every
soul on board with her. I soon found myself on
a 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 a second time, had nearly perished and lost
the hold of my child. As I again struggled to
(14:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
LuSE goes on to give an account of losing his
son and watching the others die slowly around him during
the days of drift, And it's truly harrowing.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
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 is clearly messed up by the whole thing.
And it should be noted that he captained nine other
vessels before taking his position on the Arctic, and he
had lost only two of them, which was actually quite
a good record. He was considered to be a really
(15:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
He then went on to work 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 going to
pause one more moment and take another word from a sponsor,
and then we're going to talk about some modern analysis
of this stuff. Yeah, so, now let's look at this
(16:17):
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 in an interesting coda to this issue. There
was a study that was performed by the Uppsala University
in Sweden and it was published in July of twenty twelve,
and it suggested that women and children actually have the
(16:39):
least likelihood of survival in a maritime disaster. This study
was co authored by two economists, Mikhail Ellender and Oscar Erickson,
and they analyzed data from eighteen shipwrecks that happened between
eighteen fifty two and twenty eleven. They only included the
instance that involved at least one hundred people with at
(17:00):
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 those
numbers kind of gave me a bit of a jolt
at first, and like, fifteen thousand people, but it's only
eighteen shipwrecks, and when you're thinking about it in the
context of a shipwreck like this, where it's roughly three
(17:23):
hundred ish people. That seems impossible math, But then when
you think about the more modern ones right, 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. And the Titanic, which was included
in this study, had three times more women survive the
(17:46):
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 because that ship, sinking off the
coast of South Africa is usually recognized as the first
(18:07):
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 Ericsson's findings, women were only half as likely to
survive a shipwreck as men. Crew members had an eighteen
(18:29):
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, women had
the worst survival rates on British vessels, even though the
women and Children first Order is documented as having been
(18:50):
given much more frequently on British ships than other vessels. Yeah,
and today people look at it as sort of a
Victorian British sensibility in particular.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Prior to this research, there had been a theory that
selfish behavior would more likely erupt on fast sinking ships,
while a slower sinking would allow people who were involved
to stay calmer and exhibit more socially accepted behavior patterns.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
But Elsinder and Erickson found that it was actually the
captain's behavior rather than a time sensitive situation, that tended
to determine the crew's behavior. So in only 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
(19:40):
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, I
think it's one of those things where it's easy to
kind of vilify people or kind of judge them for
their behavior. But I I don't know how I would
(20:01):
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, 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, first class women and children had
(20:25):
a pretty astounding survival rate, but women and children in
steerage did not so much. Yeah, so it was not
quite so much women and children first as it was
rich women and children first when it came to in
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
(20:47):
where it comes from and what it means today when
since when it first came about was in the eighteen fifties,
and that was a very different time in terms of
gender relation and relations and 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
(21:09):
people or objects. Right, So I kind of went down
a crazy rabbit hole of that, and it reminded me
in a way of how 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,
(21:30):
and every ship having enough lifeboat accommodations for every person
on the ship to make it off safely. Yep.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
And the only real reference to children that has come
up in the ships that I have been on has
been that 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 little wristbands or
whatever on saying this is my lifeboat station. So it's
like there are still special accommodations for children, but other
(22:01):
accommodations seem to be based on actual threats to people's safety,
people who may have a mobility impairment that need to
be assisted with getting off the ship, and not so
much based on gender or class yeah, and it is
also a very different time in terms of now this
is kind of always referenced as part of the Titanic's legacy.
(22:24):
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, right, So
it did become a matter of who do we save?
And there have been some interesting discussions if you kind
of trawl around the internet and like maritime interest boards
at all, where discussions will come up of well, women
(22:47):
and children are less likely just physically to survive something
like hypothermia adrift at sea than men might. So in
saying women and children first, are we in fact doing
everyone to die? It's into a very interesting arena of
discussion and can get very heated very quickly. So you
are not ready for very grown up angry talk. Don't
(23:07):
visit those boards. No, it definitely does seem to come
from a sense of like chivalry. Yeah, and what we
might classify today is benevolent sexism, which I don't think
we've talked about that on this podcast, but we have
on our prior podcast before talked about the idea that
there's sometimes sexism is intended, yeah, to be benevolent, even
(23:29):
though it doesn't really play out that way when you
follow it to its logical end. So it's framed that
way rather than any kind of practical sense of actually
ensuring the survivability of the group.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, it gets into very interesting stuff and I like
that there. 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, right,
because that's a pretty wide For example, now we have
enough boats for everybody. But even so they're finding that still, yeah,
(24:06):
men have better survival right.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Well, the differences between first class and what used to
be called steerage are much different now.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah. Yeah, so that's today's maritime story. Uh, we'll have more,
I'm sure, but everybody loves a good shipwreck tale and
it did. This one is interesting to me because it
did bring up so many interesting questions about, uh, how
people handle panic and fear and yeah, I can't judge anybody.
(24:35):
I don't I don't know what I would do.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. The ss Arctic sank on September twenty seventh,
eighteen fifty four, or one hundred and seventy one years
ago today on the day this episode is coming out.
Our episode on this disaster is Today's Saturday Classic.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Please excuse our pronouncing the word Newfoundland the way we
were taught to pronounce it in school, which is also
how it's listed as pronounced in American English dictionaries, rather
than the way many Canadians have told us that it
ought to be pronounced. This episode originally came out on
January fifteenth, twenty fourteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(00:42):
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fryed, I'm
Tracy V. Wilson.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
And if there's a thing we get lots of requests for,
it is more maritime and ship yep. 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 ss Arctic, the what we now today perceive
(01:16):
as a rule of women and children first, and.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
The captain goes down to this ship. Those things did
not hold true. None of the women or children aboard
the vessel survived the sinking spoiler alert. And the captain
did survive, even though he.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Did not expect to. Yeah, he did not abandon ship,
but he did survive the ordeal. Yeah, we'll also talk
about this whole women and children first idea. Yeah, end
of the episode. Yeah, once we have all this context
under our belts. Yeah, there's some cool modern statistical analysis
that's been done as well as some research on sort
of where that concept came from, and it puts things
(01:53):
in an interesting light I think when we talk about shipwrecks. Yeah,
so we're gonna start was talking about the SS 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 and the Colins Fleet, and they
were recognized as just the finest of their time when
they were introduced. The other ships were the Atlantic, the Pacific,
(02:17):
and the Baltic.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
And the Pride of the Collins Line of New York,
which was founded by Edward Knightcollins. The Arctic was a
wooden hull paddelwheel steamer that was designed to carry both
cargo a small amount and up to two hundred passengers,
although the passenger space was expanded to accommodate two hundred
and eighty passengers in eighteen fifty one. And it was
(02:40):
two hundred and eighty five feet long, which is about
eighty seven meters, and it weighed in at two eight
hundred and fifty six tons.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Although it launched on January twenty first, eighteen fifty its
maiden voyage didn't happen until October twenty seventh of that year.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And like her three sister ships, the Arctic could maintain
a speed of twelve knot, which was really fast for
the time, and in February of eighteen fifty two, 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 Arctic started
its career, it was part of a lucrative contract that
(03:17):
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 Canard line, which came out of
Britain for passenger service. Yeah, and initially the Colins line
did very well against Kinnard. Their ships were really big
(03:39):
and beautiful, they were brand new. They could run several
knots faster than the Cunard 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
and sometimes it would put their ships out of rotation
while they were being serviced. So when you see sort
of a business analysis of the situation, it's Collins arrived
(04:00):
on the scene and initially stole a lot of business
from Kunard, 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 initial wide profit margin shrank a little bit
as it had to be allocated into just maintaining the fleet.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
On Wednesday, September twentieth, eighteen fifty four, the SS Arctic
departed from Liverpool on what would it be its last voyage.
On board were two hundred and thirty three passengers and
one hundred and fifty or so crew members. The captain
was James C. Loose and on September twenty seventh, so
(04:41):
a 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 was headed for grand Ville, France.
When the Vesta was spotted, they sounded the alarm, but
both ships traveling at full speed and it was just
(05:01):
too late.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
A collision was unavoidable at that point. And while it
may sound incredibly reckless for a ship to be running
a head full in dicey visibility, it was actually policy
at this time in the Collins line to run through
a fog as quickly as possible so that they could
clear the visual obstruction in the shortest possible time. Yes,
(05:23):
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 right to get into fog
and gun it. It does in sort of a Hindenburg
(05:46):
kind of a situation. Yeah, 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 eye 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. But
(06:09):
it became quickly apparent that the Arctic was sinking and
was not going to help anybody in the situation, and
the Arctic's 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
(06:31):
a panic aboard the Arctic. The captain directed the crew
to point the ship toward the closest land, which was
Cape Race, 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,
(06:53):
the panicked crewmen did not follow the captain's orders to
prioritize the lives of the women and children and instead dead,
many of them jumped into the lifeboats themselves.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
The first attempts to launch the lifeboats resulted in those
boats being destroyed and the men aboard were lost. Subsequent
boats did launch successfully, but most of them were lost
at sea. A large raft that was assembled from the
wreckage started out with nearly eighty passengers. All but one
of them were eventually swept into the water, and only
(07:26):
two of the lifeboats reached Newfoundland, carrying a total of
forty five men, and two thirds of those men were
I think it's thirty one men and fourteen as the numbers.
Two thirds were crew members and only fourteen were passengers.
Captain Luce had tried to save his unconscious son, although
(07:47):
as 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 it as a raft, and he and two other
men were eventually we picked up by the Cambria. The
Cambria was captained by John Russell, and it picked them
up on September twenty ninth, so all one hundred and
(08:09):
nine of the women and children that were aboard were killed,
as well as one hundred and forty nine male passengers
and ninety two crew members. And then I 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 eighty five to three fifty one listed,
(08:30):
So the counts, even in women and children, passengers, and crews,
should not be taken as absolute. Some passengers managed to
make it to the Vesta and they would 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
(08:53):
the captain's account, which we'll get to in a bit,
he lists the two hundred and thirty three passengers, but
their historical accounts will list different ones. So just keep
that in mind that there's some sponginess to the math
on this whole thing.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Well, and at the point that he was rescued, he'd
been in the water for a couple of days. Yeah,
so 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 this wreck, where E. K. Collins's wife and
(09:29):
his children and they, naturally, based on those numbers that
we just said, did not survive. The Vesta did manage
to make port in Saint 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 take that
damage ship into port. But before we get to the
next little bit of business and how this affected the
(09:50):
Collins line, would you like to take a moment and
talk about our sponsors.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Let's do that.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
So let's get back to what happened once people realized
the death toll.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Yeah. So, as news of this horrible incident reached news
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
(10:33):
what was eventually the financial ruin of the Collins line.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
While the American Maritime Company had initially been a huge
threat to the established Quneard line of Britain, the Singing
of the Arctic, followed by the disappearance of the Pacific
during 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.
(10:59):
They went and bank just a few years after the
Pacific was lost, and.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
As a point of interest, the Kunard line is still
in business today. They did quite well for themselves and survived.
And now we get to Captain Luce's account of what happened.
So on October fourteenth of eighteen fifty four in Quebec,
the captain wrote a letter to E. K. Collins to
(11:23):
describe the incident and 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
(11:46):
see the light of another day. To give you an
account 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
(12:07):
focus on 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.
(12:30):
He writes, 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
(12:51):
kept in readiness until order could be restored. When, to
my dismay, I saw them cut the ropes in the
bow and soon disappear as stern 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,
(13:15):
when the same 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 quite clearly not exactly noble or chivalrous behavior.
And this is a quick side note. When we reference
firemen in this instance you probably know by context, but
(13:35):
they mean the people that are working in the steam
engine area, not firemen in the modern sense of people
that deal with fires. One of his officers, who was
a mister Dorian, did try to get a boat filled
with women and children loaded, but when an alarm sounded
signaling that the ship was sinking, the boat was really
hastily shoved off with no oars or other safety equipment. Yeah,
(13:59):
it sounds like he tried 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 as tempted to. But as a consequence,
those oars got left behind when the boat was shoved
off without sort of a proper check, and Luce describes
the sinking, and he says, in an instant, about a
(14:20):
quarter to five pm, the ship went down, carrying every
soul on board with her. I soon found myself on
a 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 a second time, had nearly perished and lost
the hold of my child. As I again struggled to
(14:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
LuSE goes on to give an account of losing his
son and watching the others die slowly around him during
the days of drift, And it's truly harrowing.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
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 is clearly messed up by the whole thing.
And it should be noted that he captained nine other
vessels before taking his position on the Arctic, and he
had lost only two of them, which was actually quite
a good record. He was considered to be a really
(15:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
He then went on to work 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 going to
pause one more moment and take another word from a sponsor,
and then we're going to talk about some modern analysis
of this stuff. Yeah, so, now let's look at this
(16:17):
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 in an interesting coda to this issue. There
was a study that was performed by the Uppsala University
in Sweden and it was published in July of twenty twelve,
and it suggested that women and children actually have the
(16:39):
least likelihood of survival in a maritime disaster. This study
was co authored by two economists, Mikhail Ellender and Oscar Erickson,
and they analyzed data from eighteen shipwrecks that happened between
eighteen fifty two and twenty eleven. They only included the
instance that involved at least one hundred people with at
(17:00):
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 those
numbers kind of gave me a bit of a jolt
at first, and like, fifteen thousand people, but it's only
eighteen shipwrecks, and when you're thinking about it in the
context of a shipwreck like this, where it's roughly three
(17:23):
hundred ish people. That seems impossible math, But then when
you think about the more modern ones right, 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. And the Titanic, which was included
in this study, had three times more women survive the
(17:46):
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 because that ship, sinking off the
coast of South Africa is usually recognized as the first
(18:07):
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 Ericsson's findings, women were only half as likely to
survive a shipwreck as men. Crew members had an eighteen
(18:29):
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, women had
the worst survival rates on British vessels, even though the
women and Children first Order is documented as having been
(18:50):
given much more frequently on British ships than other vessels. Yeah,
and today people look at it as sort of a
Victorian British sensibility in particular.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Prior to this research, there had been a theory that
selfish behavior would more likely erupt on fast sinking ships,
while a slower sinking would allow people who were involved
to stay calmer and exhibit more socially accepted behavior patterns.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
But Elsinder and Erickson found that it was actually the
captain's behavior rather than a time sensitive situation, that tended
to determine the crew's behavior. So in only 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
(19:40):
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, I
think it's one of those things where it's easy to
kind of vilify people or kind of judge them for
their behavior. But I I don't know how I would
(20:01):
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, 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, first class women and children had
(20:25):
a pretty astounding survival rate, but women and children in
steerage did not so much. Yeah, so it was not
quite so much women and children first as it was
rich women and children first when it came to in
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
(20:47):
where it comes from and what it means today when
since when it first came about was in the eighteen fifties,
and that was a very different time in terms of
gender relation and relations and 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
(21:09):
people or objects. Right, So I kind of went down
a crazy rabbit hole of that, and it reminded me
in a way of how 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,
(21:30):
and every ship having enough lifeboat accommodations for every person
on the ship to make it off safely. Yep.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
And the only real reference to children that has come
up in the ships that I have been on has
been that 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 little wristbands or
whatever on saying this is my lifeboat station. So it's
like there are still special accommodations for children, but other
(22:01):
accommodations seem to be based on actual threats to people's safety,
people who may have a mobility impairment that need to
be assisted with getting off the ship, and not so
much based on gender or class yeah, and it is
also a very different time in terms of now this
is kind of always referenced as part of the Titanic's legacy.
(22:24):
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, right, So
it did become a matter of who do we save?
And there have been some interesting discussions if you kind
of trawl around the internet and like maritime interest boards
at all, where discussions will come up of well, women
(22:47):
and children are less likely just physically to survive something
like hypothermia adrift at sea than men might. So in
saying women and children first, are we in fact doing
everyone to die? It's into a very interesting arena of
discussion and can get very heated very quickly. So you
are not ready for very grown up angry talk. Don't
(23:07):
visit those boards. No, it definitely does seem to come
from a sense of like chivalry. Yeah, and what we
might classify today is benevolent sexism, which I don't think
we've talked about that on this podcast, but we have
on our prior podcast before talked about the idea that
there's sometimes sexism is intended, yeah, to be benevolent, even
(23:29):
though it doesn't really play out that way when you
follow it to its logical end. So it's framed that
way rather than any kind of practical sense of actually
ensuring the survivability of the group.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, it gets into very interesting stuff and I like
that there. 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, right,
because that's a pretty wide For example, now we have
enough boats for everybody. But even so they're finding that still, yeah,
(24:06):
men have better survival right.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Well, the differences between first class and what used to
be called steerage are much different now.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah. Yeah, so that's today's maritime story. Uh, we'll have more,
I'm sure, but everybody loves a good shipwreck tale and
it did. This one is interesting to me because it
did bring up so many interesting questions about, uh, how
people handle panic and fear and yeah, I can't judge anybody.
(24:35):
I don't I don't know what I would do.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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