As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing,
To my mind (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a wreck at sea,
Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and wafted kisses, and that is the last of them!
Thus begins the fifth section of Walt Whitman’s free-verse poem ‘Thought’ from his epic Leaves of Grass collection, first published in 1855. The short poem recalls two of the 19th century’s most famous shipwrecks; the SS President and the SS Arctic. These pages look at the circumstances surrounding the loss of these two vessels, and examines why Whitman chose to highlight them.
Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President,
Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder’d
The SS President had been built by Curling and Young of London in 1841 for the British and American Steam Navigation Company (BASNC). This shipping line had been established by Junius Smith, an American lawyer who has since been called ‘Father of the Atlantic Liner’. By chartering the Irish steamer Sirius, Smith had been able to claim victory in the race to establish a transatlantic steamship service, the Sirius reaching New York one day ahead of Brunel’s newly-built flagship of the Great Western Steamship Company in April 1838. The President was BASNC’s second purpose-built ship following the British Queen. Both ships were the largest of their type in the world on commissioning, and were regarded as more comfortable than the Great Western, although unable to match Brunel’s ship for speed.
The introduction of a transatlantic steamship service was a hugely significant development, more than halving journey times between the Old and New World. The Great Western, the first unofficial holder of the Blue Riband, averaged 16 days for the westbound crossing and a mere 13 and a half steaming eastward, passages that would take a sailing ship an average of 40 days.
At 2,350 gross tonnage, the President was 25% larger than the British Queen and double the size of the steamers recently built for the Cunard Line, which ran the mail service from London to Halifax. Unfortunately, the addition of an extra deck by her designers led to her being top heavy and comparatively sluggish compared to her contemporaries. Her speed problem was compounded by a legal patent issue that meant she was unable to carry the latest ‘feathering’ type paddles. She was a full knot slower than the Great Western. The President did nonetheless offer unrivalled luxury. Her interior featured an 80ft saloon and staterooms for up to 110 passengers. As the first large steamship to bear the name, her figurehead represented George Washington.
Notwithstanding her advantages in size and comfort, the President struggled to compete with the sleeker ships of rival companies on her first two return voyages to New York. Before beginning her third, she was docked for a refit in an attempt to improve her speed and stability. She was given a new skipper; Royal Navy captain Richard Roberts had been in command of the Sirius on her historic crossing three years earlier. Despite these changes, the westbound leg of the ship’s third voyage still took 21 days.
The President departed for Liverpool again on 11th March 1841 carrying 136 passengers and crew and a substantial cargo. The ship was accompanied out of port by the packet Orpheus, whose skipper Captain Cole lost sight of her around sunset of the following day during a furious gale. According to the report given by Cole to the British Consul in New York, ‘she was rising on the top of a tremendous sea pitching heavily and laboring tremendously.’
The President was then positioned in the dangerous seas between Nantucket Shoals and Georges Bank, an area ‘where the Gulf Stream strikes soundings, and where the waves rise almost straight up and down and as high as a four or five story house.’ Whereas sailing ships could often ride out stormy conditions by trimming their sails, steamers, should their fires be extinguished by heavy seas entering the engine room, were left helpless before the elements. It was Cole’s contention that the President had foundered within the next 24 hours with all hands, the gale having ‘continued with unabated fury until midnight of the 13th.’
The excitement was understandable as the President was the first transatlantic passenger steamship to be lost at sea. Notables aboard had included former ‘Chaplin of the Senate’ the Rev. George Grimston Cookman and the popular Irish actor, playwright and theatre manager Tyrone Power. Her sinking raised all sorts of questions about the safety of such vessels. The fallout from her disappearance was enough to bankrupt the British and American Steam Navigation Company. Her loss was, in short, the most significant peacetime maritime disaster up to that point. It was one Whitman would not forget, especially as no less than three of his own brothers had been named after former US presidents, one of them George Washington. (Walt had taken his own name from his father Walter.) Her loss must have felt almost personal.
Of the steamship Arctic going down,
Of the veil’d tableau-women gather’d together on deck, pale, heroic,
waiting the moment that draws so close—O the moment!
As the succeeding lines of Whitman’s poem highlight, the loss of the SS Arctic had a particularly tragic feminine aspect to it. The Arctic was one of four large passenger steamers built for the Collins Line, an American company set up by the businessman Edward Knight Collins. When introduced in the early 1850s, these large, wooden-hulled paddle-steamers made the company a serious transatlantic competitor to the then dominant British Cunard Line, being not only relatively luxurious but also fast. On board comforts were said to include steam heating and running water. With a top speed approaching 13 knots; a significant advance compared to the early 1840s; the Arctic briefly held the record for east-west crossings, making the trip from her home port of New York to Liverpool in just nine days and 17 hours in February 1852, under the captaincy of James Luce.
James Luce was still in command of the Arctic in the fall of 1854 as she was making her latest return voyage from England. On 27th September, after an uneventful crossing, she ran into heavy fog off the Grand Banks in Newfoundland. It was here that the ship was struck amidships by the small French steamer Vesta. Steel-hulled and compartmentalised, the Vesta suffered serious damage to her bow but was eventually able to make port. The timbered hull of the Arctic, however, was fatally breached. Luce attempted to run his doomed ship for Cape Race, some 60 miles distant, but this only hastened the flooding inside her hull.
Realising the ship was doomed, Luce attempted an orderly evacuation using the ship’s six lifeboats, but a breakdown of discipline meant that they were precipitously launched by members of the crew and male passengers eager to save themselves and with no regard for the safety of the many women and children on board. Luce chose to go down with his ship but he was saved by a quirk of fate when the wooden paddle board he stood upon broke free underwater as and resurfaced as flotsam. Several other crew and passengers managed to endure the frigid conditions on improvised rafts and were later rescued. Three of the hastily launched lifeboats, however, disappeared without trace.
There were around 85 documented survivors; 61 crew and 24 passengers; all male. Among the estimated 300 people drowned were all the women and children on the manifest. These included Mrs Edward Collins and two of the couple’s children. The Arctic disaster made headlines not just for the cowardly actions of the crew and certain male passengers but also the scandalously inadequate provision of lifeboats, which even if full could only have accommodated a maximum of 180 people; a situation that shamefully would not be rectified until after the Titanic disaster almost 60 years later.
News of the Arctic’s sinking took two weeks to reach New York – the first telegraph between Newfoundland and the American East Coast was still several years away – where as recently as 1848 Whitman had worked as editor for the Brooklyn Eagle, and where he continued to reside. At the time of the disaster, he was completing his epic work Leaves of Grass, which contains numerous literal and metaphorical references to ships and the sea. (He would reluctantly return to journalism in 1857.)
Among these was Sleepers, in which the poet referenced the stranding of the Barque Mexico in January 1837. The poorly-provisioned ship had run aground at Hempstead Beach close to where the 18-year-old Whitman was living at the time in freezing gale force conditions. 116 passengers and crew had literally frozen to death within sight of land and safety in what was up to that point the greatest loss of life on American soil from such a disaster. Sharing in the guilt of a community unable to save those left aboard the stranded ship, Whitman wrote:
The beach is cut by the razory ice-wind, the wreck-guns sound,
The tempest lulls, the moon comes floundering through the drifts.
I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as she strikes, I hear the howls of dismay, they grow fainter and fainter.
I cannot aid with my wringing fingers, I can but rush to the surf and let it drench me and freeze upon me.
I search with the crowd, not one of the company is wash’d to us alive, In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in a barn.
As with the Mexico, the loss of the Arctic would have made front page news in the ship’s home port and the one it had been due to disembark at. Both were to some degree local tragedies, New Yorkers and Long Islanders being among the many dead and many more bereaved. The Arctic’s owner and its captain were both natives of nearby Massachusetts. In spite of such publicity, such high profile deaths, and outrage at the unjust nature of the evacuation, no official inquiry was ever held. (The Collins Line would fold only two years later after the loss of the Arctic’s sister-ship, the Pacific, in circumstances even more baffling than those of the President.)
Whitman’s poem affects particular sympathy for the women victims of the sinking left mercilessly to their fate by panicked and pusillanimous actions of the menfolk. This, despite the poet being himself unmarried (allegedly homosexual) and having grown up in a largely male household. (Interestingly, he makes no mention of the child victims.) The verse continues:
A huge sob—a few bubbles—the white foam spirting up—and then the
women gone,
Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on—and I now
pondering, Are those women indeed gone?
Are souls drown’d and destroy’d so?
Is only matter triumphant?
The final lines, which ask three unanswerable questions, reveal Whitman’s religious skepticism and the transcendental philosophy on life he has since become known for. Such unjust and arbitrary ‘wrecks at seas’ as the President and the Arctic must have provided the poet with convincing testimony that there is no benignantly interceding God to whom the virtuous and meek might pray for deliverance.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 