The Arctic Shipwreck Disaster of 1854 | Episode 60

It's been a while since we've done an episode with such cartoonish levels of bloodshed and vile behavior. Imagine a shipwreck so awful that you could watch The Titanic right after just to calm down. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll see what happens to the body after spinning around an ocean going paddlewheel. We'll see how much women and children were worth in a disaster before the nineteen hundreds, and you'll find out how bizarre it feels to be stabbed while presumably waiting to sexually assault drowning victoms. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that potentially save your life, our work is done. So well. All that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Since time immemorial, man has longed to explore the world beyond their reach, to leave dry land and discover what lay over the horizon further than they could see, to answer the age old question, hey, what's over there? But the shore has always been a line that says here and no further. So what do people do now? They carve out fallen trees and logs and create own simple canoes and rafts, nothing spectacular, but good enough to stay afloat. But these were the humble origins of early human aquatic life, navigating river and lakes for fishing and transportation. It honestly must have been like watching them invent the automobile, lossing over thousands of years of history of trial and seafaring tragedy. Here is a highly abbreviated history of human aquatic travel. Early humans successfully navigated all the way from the Sunderland Peninsula over open ocean to an unknown and incredibly hot and hostile world, which, as all my Ausie listeners know, used to be called the Sahua land Mass. And since aboriginal artifacts in Australia have been dated as far back as sixty five thousand years, this suggests that we've been really good at open sea travel way longer than we originally thought possible, and it begs the question, how would they have even known that there was anything there to sail to? It had to be one of the top ten most frightening things that our ancestors collectively ever did. Fast forward to the Egyptians and Mesopotamians bombing up and down the Nile and Euphrates before the Pyramids were even built. Ancient Greeks, Romans, Medieval Europeans and Vikings went on to create larger, sturdier, and more seaworthy vessels, which led to the Age of Exploration of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, where explorers like Columbus and Magellan spread their mail, gaze and smallpox blankets all over the New World. Maritime empires from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries went on to build entire navies to speed up the job of obliterating people from their homelands. But the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century brought metal ships and steam power, and travel became more reliable, I mean awful, but reliable. We've known for a long time that sitting on a beach and staring at the ocean can provide a certain calm and other mental health benefits, but we've known for a much longer time than actually traveling. It has throughout history been one of the most regrettable single decisions a person could make. You gotta remember, we're also describing in an age before hygiene practices. In the close quarters of a ship, there was nowhere to avoid diseases like dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, smallpox, measles, and influenza. The quarters are just too close. And if you're like me, you probably always thought that the notion of burial at sea seemed weird, But when you really think about it, it was a hell of a lot better than sailing with diseased and putrefying corpses. Sounds depressing, and it was. It was awful and sad. Between the lack of contact with loved ones and the monotony of life on board a ship, it could really take a toll on mental health. It was bad enough that you might actually become excited at the prospect of an oncoming storm, bad enough to swamp or wreck your ship. Imagine surviving a storm so bad that the best minds of the day attributed the damage to a kraken or giant squid. We're going to spend our time today on the open ocean in the middle of the North Atlantic. The Northern Atlantic Ocean is not and has never been, anyone's favorite. The North Atlantic is widely known for surprising and unpredictable weather, up to and including nor'easters and hurricanes. It gets powerful winds, heavy rains, and waves big enough to capsize ships. The current world record wave height is sixty two point three feet, measured by a boy in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and the United Kingdom. Not to mention icebergs RMS Titanic anyone, The North Atlantic is home to all kinds of Arctic ice and dense fog, which is a problem when a lack of accurate navigation tools would lead ships to become lost or just run into things you could eat, even be boarded by pirates, which were a constant threat to ships in the North Atlantic. And what happens if something did go wrong? How were you going to let anyone know? Maybe shove a note in a bottle or tie a note to a seagull. Well. As time went on, better navigation technology and improved ship design and enhance safety measures gradually did make the North Atlantic travel feel safer. But the one thing you can never account for is people. And we'll come back to that. And I will warn you right now. We've done episodes where people got hurt. We've done episodes where people acted selfishly. This is an episode where both will happen. With Gusto, I think videos of Black Friday sales stampedes now quadruple the energy. Our story starts simply enough, with a little corporate rivalry. The Collins Line was an American shipping company started back in eighteen eighteen. They owned wooden hulled steam powered vessels that could across the Atlantic all the way from Liverpool to New York in just nine days and seventeen hours. With other liners, that same trip could take several weeks. The SS Arctic was the fastest passenger liner of its time and the largest of the Collins Line's fleet. She was two hundred and eighty four feet or eighty seven meters in length, weighing in at two thousand, eight hundred and fifty six tons, and instead of using sales, which it did have as a backup, she had two side lever steam engines, turning thirty five foot or ten meters tall paddle wheels about midway down the length of the ship. The engines generated a thousand horse power, which was enough to turn the wheels sixteen times a minute at full speed, and although as a rule older ships always felt a little rickety or haunted, the Arctic was built with luxury in mind. The New York Herald raved that the Arctic was the most stupendous vessel ever constructed in the United States or the world since the days of Noah. The Arctic offered luxurious accommodations never before seen on a steamship, spacious dining rooms, saloons, even staterooms. The Lady Salon was described as a gorgeous yet beautiful apartment filled with light, presenting as cheerful a scene as the heart could crave, and her furnishings and fittings gave her an air of almost oriental magnificence. The Arctic and her sister ships Atlantic, Pacific and Baltic were hailed for being plush and reliable, and gained a reputation as the most stylish way to cross the Atlantic. But it was an all caviaar in giant hoopskirts. In November of eighteen fifty three, she ran aground in Liverpool. In May of eighteen fifty four, she did it again off the coast of the Salty Islands in July of eighteen fifty four. Her engines were retrofitted with more modern and fuel efficient models, but they were so powerful that they actually strained and damaged her hull again at no small expense. Collins couldn't really afford any knocks to the reputation because the British Canard Line was constantly chomping at their tail. They were the first shipping line to begin regular transatlantic steamer services back in eighteen forty, with the blessings and subsidies from both the British government and the United States Post Office to carry mail between New York and Britain, and many Americans thought, why are we paying a British boat to carry us mail? US cash should only be spent on an American line. So mail service was opened up to a pitch situation and drum roll, please, the American Collins Line won, despite not actually having a single ship or a company, but with a contract in hand, they began building both. First, they started the company the New York and Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company. Back then, they would literally just name companies after the thing that it did. And this new company had been sending wooden paddle steamers on Transatlantic runs every two weeks ever since. Our story takes place September the twenty seventh, eighteen fifty four, of board the SS Arctic. The Arctic was speeding through thick fog about halfway through its journey from Liverpool to New York, and commanding the Arctic that day was Captain James C. Loose. He had been captaining the Arctic since it's made in voyage back in eighteen fifty. On September thirteenth, eighteen fifty four, the Arctic arrived in Liverpool after an uneventful trip. On board today are four hundred and eight souls, that's two hundred and thirty three passengers and one hundred and seventy five crew, including relatives of the owners. And do you know why they count souls? They used to consider different passengers more or less human and had different values. So body counts aboard ships might not exactly include crew or hoorror passengers or stolen passengers if you follow, or they may include animals. It sounds awful, and it used to cause a lot of confusion around nautical disasters. So eventually a system of just counting total souls was adopted and it made things a lot clearer. The practice later carried over to air travel and they still use it today. Passengers socialized, enjoying fine food while music was played, and as the ship entered the mid Atlantic it plowed through waves at thirteen knots or about fifteen miles or twenty four kilometers an hour. In between the dropping temperature and the fog, there really wasn't that much reason for anybody to be up on deck. At the same time, a tiny iron ship was leaving Newfounland for France. She was the SS Vesta, a French vessel responsible for transporting fishermen between the Grand Banks soft Newfoundlin and their homes back in France. And you think your commute sucks. She had over one hundred and fifty on board and weighed in around two hundred and fifty tons and stretched about half the length of the Arctic at one hundred and fifty two feet. She was, like I said, an iron vessel driven by propeller, which was all fairly new at the time, and now she found herself in the same vicinity as the Arctic. What's the worst that could happen? I'm not lying when I say I'm going to make a T shirt that says what's the worst that could happen? Just afternoon, out of the fog, the Arctic spotted a dark ship closing in on them fast. It was the Vesta. The crew only had moments to decide if this other ship was going to stop, continue, or turn to the left or to the right. The standard passing protocol for ships is always to pass on the right or starboard so that their left or port sides are always facing, but they had to make a decision real quick, so they decided turning left was the quickest way out of danger. But captain of the Vespa attempted to pass on the right, which basically put them right back into the path of the Arctic. Loose ordered, the Arctic's engine stopped, which sent engineers rushing up on deck to find out what was up. Remember, throwing the brakes on a ship doing thirteen knots does mean you're not going to be stopping anytime soon. The Vesta was pointed right at the turning Arctic and Captain Loose emerged on deck by the starboard paddle box, just in time to see the Vesta tear into the starboard bow of the Arctic just above the waterline. The metal bow of the Vesta stabbed through the Arctic's wooden hull into the crew quarters before snapping off, meanwhile inside, impaling a sailor right through the chest. With the exception of the sailor now sporting the headsize hole in his chest, the collision felt more like a bump than a disaster, and the forward momentum barely changed. The Arctic continued moving forward, violently crushing, twisting, and shredding the Vesta's bow and foremast, while also dislocating a bunch of its own hull plates. The Vesta then raked itself along the length of the Arctic before smashing into the forward part of the Arctic's paddle box. Those giant paddle wheels were covered with a protective frame called a garn, but we're just going to call it a box. From looking over the side, most of the damage appeared to be above the waterline, not bad, but on board, the poor Vesta passengers had been torn two pieces, and the forward end of the Vesta was said to be quote painted in blood, and the fishermen aboard screamed as their ship dipped at the front. The sea was pouring into an exposed cargo hold. The captain of the Vesta spun around to shout something, probably putin dumerd which is French for polych when he saw twelve men rowing away as hard as they could towards the Arctic in a stolen lifeboat. Dereliction of duty was a crime. Help boat left was a crime. I'm sure trying to leave Worley from work was a kind of crime back then, and this is why discipline at sea was critical and non negotiable, and because of that, shipboard punishments in the age of sail could be harsh and brutal. When Captain Luci heard men crying out for help through the fog, he ordered the engines to be started back up so that they could swing around for help. Chief Officer Gowerly and second Officer Ballum took command of two lifeboats. Gowerly was already rowing back to the Vesta, while Ballum somehow got both his thumbs stuck up his own butt while trying to figure out how the ropes work. And by this point all souls on board the Arctic were on deck, all staring at the damage over the railing, and because of this, the Arctic actually began to lean to starboard. In case you don't know, starboard means right, port means left. The bow is the front and the aft is the boat's But the boat was still chopping through the water, but at a slower pace. And not just that the paddle wheels they sounded different. It was slower and quieter because the paddles had been slowly dropping deeper and deeper into the water. Ballum still hadn't made it anywhere in his rescue boat, so Loose ordered him to inspect the bow, and what he feed was astounding. The bow of the Vesta had impaled itself into the side of the Arctic, tearing three holes in the side, and two of them were below the water line. The Arctic was performing rescue operations for another ailing vessel, only to suddenly realize that they themselves were an ailing vessel. It was now Captain Luc's turn to yell holly s before ordering the ship's pumps to start draining water. Then he ordered mattresses to be shoved into the holes, and the sails to be taken down and draped over to cover the holes from the outside. Okay, first, shoving a mattress into anything, let alone a hole pouring massive amounts of sea water sounds like the kind of thing you try on a Japanese game show. Unsuccessfully, and in trying to tark the hole from the outside, the canvas sales were completely ripped to shreds. So they looked at the hole, then they looked at the vesta, then they looked well squinted westwards towards Newfoundland. The fallin was still four hours away, but it was literally the Artic's only hope. So this is the time to point out that before nineteen twelve and the sinking and the Titanic ships never had enough lifeboats on board to mount a proper rescue of anything, let alone themselves. They had no chance but to gun it to shore and pray. They did call back to inform Galilee's boat, but they couldn't hear anything through the fog except for the sounds of French sadness, so off they went. They did tell themselves that Gowerlee would be fine, but they would never see him or his boat again. But they did get to see the stolen lifeboat from the Vesta. It was just pulling up beside them out of the fog as the Arctic was taking off the port bastards. See the thing about side mounted paddle wheels was this. You know how kids will sit there and spin their arms and say, I'm just spinning my arms and if you get hurt, it's your own fault. Well, the lifeboat slipped down the length of the ship until it was pulled under the ship's starboard paddle wheel, and it was torn to pieces, and all but one of the occupants was not just beaten to death and drowned, but torn completely apart. And not just torn completely apart, the bodies became stuck in the paddle wheel, just rotating and rotating until the force separated limb from body, which all fell apart and dislodged in an ongoing spray of blood and body parts like some kind of disgusting sprinkling. And this really set the tone, and that tone was panic. Passengers wiped the blood from their eyes and lost it. The ship was sinking towards the starboard bough front into the right but with the paddle wheels. Sinking lower and lower in the water, it became increasingly useless, making their escape slower and slower. The captain ordered the anchors dropped to free weight and all the people to move to the other side of the boat to try to correct the lean, while the ship's carpenter fashioned a kind of scaffolding over the side to try to plug the hole manually. Unfortunately, the Arctic did not have separate water tight If you've ever heard of that before, it's probably from the Titanic story, by sectioning off the interior of a ship into water type compartments. If a ship started taking on water, she'd really only flood one small part, but because the Arctic didn't have any water, simply float aft with the shifted weight. The ship did have automatic and manual pumps, but the automatic pumps had lost power, so passengers had been taking turns manning the hand pumps. The handpumps were sticky with blood from the blistered hands of rotating volunteers, and they did what they could, but the ship was still slowly sinking, and the boilers and stokers working the furnaces below attempted to flee, which makes sense, but they were persuaded to stay. Keeping the engines full of steam was everybody's best hope for survival. But when the water reached the furnaces, they were completely snuffed out, which made the ship shake violently and just limped forward loose ordered the lifeboats loaded, starting with women and children, and then the provisions, and then the ship's Butcher'd no idea. The quartermasters were ordered to arm themselves and keep the passengers away from the lifeboats until the crew was ready to have them loaded. I almost said the crew was ready to load them. Any who who's had this plan where he wanted to launch all the lifeboats at the same time so they could stay together after the ship had gone down. But as ideas go, this one turned out to be a terrible one. The butcher and other sailors from the crew quietly cut the lines and rowed off into the fog. This was unspeakably selfish and spoiler. They were never seen again. Still, this made the rest of the crew a little itchy. Did I say itchy? What I meant was rich with evil inspiration. Another lifeboat was prepared by second Officer Ballum, lowered to the water and rowed away less than half full and almost an entirely populated by crewmen. Loose's most loyal officer just bailed on him, choosing to road a new Foundland rather than saying goodbye. As another lifeboat was being loaded with women and children, the captain wanted to keep an eye on things and was attacked by one of his crew. I forgot to mention a huge group of this types broke open the liquor cabinet with their bare fists and drank themselves stupid. The sailor who attacked the captain had a knife, but the captain had a mallet, and so the captain proceeded to teach him why you do not bring a knife to a hammer fight. And while the captain was busy malleting drunks, the lifeboat's situation worsened. Another boat was prepared and filled with women and children again, but before it could launch, it was stormed by the crew. If there was any justice to be had, I can tell you that a lot of these men drunkenly tripped over themselves, stumbled off the ship, and drowned in the frigid waters. While the captain was distracted with other lifeboats, the Arctic's chief engineer gathered as friends together grabbed boxes of cigars and the ship's pistols, and quietly snuck away with another one of the boats. Oh and all these stolen boats floating around, not one of them picked up a single victim from the water. Five of the six lifeboats were already gone, and not one single woman or child had survived the boarding process. Mail passengers began loading the final aftport lifeboat with women and children, and this one got away. I'm just kidding. See, the crew came, and this time axes were involved. By the time they wrecked everything, all the women and children were already drowning below, every last one of them. The last of the Arctic steam had died off, all power was lost, and the ship drifted to a halt. That meant the steam powered pumps also ground to a halt, and the sea now freely filled the hull without resistance. The weight of the passengers shifted the free flowing water to the stern, and now she was going down in that direction instead. With all the boats gone, panicked but industrious passengers, with nothing better to do, began ripping the ship apart, the mass, the doors, whatever was available, but it was for a good enough reason they were building DIY floatation devices. And if you thought this was kind of an ugly story so far, okay, give me a second here at this point, let's take a moment for a psychographic recap, though striving to construct a means of escape. That was about a third of the souls aboard. We'll call them Team Resilience. Another third mostly women and children quietly prayed for salvation, and will call them Team Absolution. And the remaining third, well, you know that idea that if you have a barrel of wine and you add a single drop of feces, you now basically have a barrel of feces. Well, if there was ever a group of people more deserving of being clubbed to death and tied into a makeshift raft, it was this third. And we're going to call them Team Queef. These people looted everything. I have no idea what the point of looting anything on a sinking ship would be, except maybe life jackets, which they did. I mean, as long as you were going to hell anyways, showing off in full display what self interested human trash you are, why not double down and make it even more awful for those left on board with you? Of course, you don't just loot a life jacket. It's the kind of thing that you violently rip off people smaller or weaker than you, and not just looting. People brawled, they murdered, and they even sexually assaulted their fellow passengers. Imagine trying to stop some human piece of filth from sexually assaulting a woman in what is arguably her last moments of life, only to get stabbed in the stomach because they thought that you were trying to cut in line. And all the base displays of humanity we've seen on the show, I can't even think of a time that compares. But it wasn't all bad. It had been four hours since the Arctic started taking a water, and it was starting to lurch and roll. It dropped deeper and deeper into the sea, but not for lack of effort. A ship stewardess, a woman named Anna Downer, was still working one of the ship's hand pumps with blood running down her arms. Captain Loose thanked her and asked her to stop, but she said that as long as her arm still worked, she was going to stand by that pump and go down with the ship. Engineer Apprentice Stuart Hollard said the same thing. He was still firing the signal cannon in hopes that they might be heard, and he was famously quoted as having said that at least one man stood by his post. Fourth Officer Francis Dorrian stood loyally by defending the construction of a diy raft, at least until the drunken passengers took notice. You know that scene in the zombie movie where somebody's trying to stay real quiet, but then they step on a twig and that one zombie hears and spins around and screams, and then all the other zombies join in. Oh good, So you can picture when the drunken passengers trampled all those people still building the raft while trampled and bludgeoned with axes, and the raft broke free from the ship and fell apart. And that was the end of that. And now, with every means of escape exhausted, Captain Loose walked around, saying goodbye to his passengers and handing out life belts to children, before going to his son's cabin to wait for the end. The Arctic dropped by the stern, tearing apart the deckhouse, which threw the passengers into a heap against the funnel as her bow lifted into the air. Captain LuSE held his son in his arms and they were both pulled under in the water. They were separated, but when Luce finally struggled to the surface, he found his son and began swimming towards him. Scept the collision with the vesta before originally it loosened the starboard paddle box, which now broke away from the wreck, and then shot back up to the surface with enough force to kill several people, including Captain Luce's son. It also managed to clock the captain in the head quite badly, but he was able to climb on top of it, using it as a kind of a raft, and from there he had to watch in horror as those in the water slowly died. So ur on a cruise that goes bad and the crew gate drunk and they throw you overboard. Would you know what to do? They say that you don't drown by falling in water, you drown by staying there. And it is called on ironically but a little coldly, the swim that needs no towel. But drowning's not a joke. It is the third leading cause of unintentional injury and death worldwide, and it is preventable by understanding the different types of drowning. Yes, there are different types of drowning. By understanding the different types, we can help protect ourselves and others. First off, what's all that about different drownings? Wet, dry, secondary, and silent. Wet drowning is the most obvious kind. Water enters the lungs, which plugs up your ability to breathe until it's no longer an issue. In dry drowning, when a person is exposed to the water, their airways can spasm and close up, which prevents the water from entering the lungs. But then these airways can stay closed for several hours, which causes the victim to fall unconscious and die from lack of oxygen even on dry land. It's crazy, but it's a thing. It happens. Secondary drowning is kind of similar. A small amount of water enters your lungs and this creates inflammation and a build up a fluid, which both impair your breathing and it results in drowning even days after your exposure. But my least favorite is silent drowning. It's a kind of drowning by inattention. Most people call drowning the quiet death, because once you're beneath the surface, no one can hear you. That's true silent drowning. It lacks the kind of more obvious struggle and distress you would think from TV and movies. The victim may appear to be swimming perfectly normal before just slipping beneath the surface, and that's it. It happens with young children, it happens to people with weak swimming skills, and it happens to people who experience a medical issue in the water. Bill Bryson once wrote about Japanese tourists snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef by the hundreds on these giant vessels, and how everybody in and some just kind of stop moving. Just something about suddenly free floating high above a world of coral It triggers people's fear of heights and they end up having a heart attack. And having a heart attack underwater is one thousand percent less survivable than one survived surrounded by oxygen. Swimming lessons are the best and most obvious safety measure that anybody could possibly suggest. And then you get your water safety skills courses and you can learn CPR and different rescue techniques. Or you could just wear a life jacket. And I know people have it in their heads that they don't need them, or that they're not cool or anything, But would you oil moast a turkey without a fire extinguisher? Would you eat flaming soup with just your hands? Now, because it seems dumb, just take the help. And if you think that I ever go swimming anywhere without knowing about the currents or riptides or underwater risks, hell no, screw that noise. But today I am here for those people who find themselves away from shore alone and just left to their own. Knowing how to tread water is a thing everyone should know how to do. You live on a planet that is seventy percent covered in water, and water doesn't want you to live. So if you've never heard of treading it, you have no business being in water higher than your waist. It's described quite simply treading water. It's when you use nice smooth crisscross or scissoring motions with arms and legs to help maintain your buoyancy and keep you afloat. I'm kind of doing it here in my chair. And the trick is to do it without expending all your energy. While I have a backup technique that I can teach you that is so easy. The only prerequisite is lung ownership. The fact of the matter is most people float. That is, most people who can hold a breath are basically buoyant enough to stay above the water until they exhale. And the Navy teaches a version of this called drown proofing, great name. And all you have to do is lay flat, face down in the water and every ten seconds you lift your head and take a breath. Yeah, it's pretty boring, but it will work. You can do this on your back, but you will spend a lot more energy trying to hold your pose. Of course, the thing about trying not to use any energy in the water is that if the water is cold, you're inviting hypothermia. The cold water technique is imaginatively enough titled the help position, which is a real thing. It stands for the heat escape lessening posture. You cross your arms over your knees and you pull them up to your chest like you're hugging yourself. Think of how you would react if you just slipped into a freezing bed. Now I've never seen this actually performed while wearing a life jacket. And in the event that you didn't bring yours, you can perform a blended version with the breathing technique for continuous boyancy. But you're almost certainly going to start to roll awkwardly. There are actually things that you can do by taking off your pants and continuously tying them shut with air in the legs over your head as a flotation device. But no, no, what, but nothing. I just taught you an advanced form of combat water survival. I haven't done that before on this show. So just do it exactly how I explained by for the sake of argument, maybe practice it in the shallow end first. So what happened? Well, the ship was gone, but this story is not over. Why what else could happen? Well, the ship had been caught in very long and gently sloping waves, and that was until the wind picked up forty or fifty mile per hour or sixty five to eighty kilometer an hour winds, which is considered a gale. It basically describes wins about half as strong as a Category one hurricane. And they just happened to start battering the area, and as much as this has to stretch your disbelief, around the same time the sharks came. Of course they did not every ship wreck spends as much time dismembering so many in a paddle wheel slashed blood sprinkler, and the sharks had their pick and dragged off stragglers. Then the night fill the storm plus the sharks plus no more sun and the resulting drop in temperature made for a world record worthy awful night. About a dozen people had managed to climb aboard the paddle box, but by the time the sun rose there were only three, including that one Frenchman from the Vesta's lifeboat who hadn't been killed earlier. The Arctic only carried six lifeboats with a total capacity around one hundred and eighty, which means if not for the crew, they could have held almost every passenger, including all of the women and children. Notice I said passengers, which obviously had not sat right with the crew. I mean it was like someone had fired off and us versus them starter pistol. Passengers were left to fend for themselves, clinging to pieces of wreckage, but the frigid waters leached the heat from their bodies, making survival nearly impossible. The captain did go down with his ship, as tradition demanded, but the motion merely spat him back out, not his fault. The tradition of captains going down with their ships goes back to a time when captains had a stronger sense of personal responsibility. It was more about demonstrating leadership than some arbitrary rule that required captains to die. Abandoning a sinking ship when lives are still at risk is viewed as dereliction of duty. The most important difference between the two ships was that the Arctic was open in cavernous on the inside, allowing water to spread quickly and evenly, and the Vesta, even though it broke its own face off, was able to be saved from sinking because she had those water tight bulkheads. Yeah, I said, saved from sinking. Check this, believe it or not. The SS Vesta was miraculously able to limp all the way into the harbor at Newfoundland. Only two of the six lifeboats from the Arctic actually reached the shore. Survivors in the water had been picked up by the SS Lebanon and the SS Huron. The survivors of the Arctic who had distinguished themselves during the sinking, chose to go with a Lebanon straight to New York. The rest who knew they were going to get their teeth handed to them on dry land, stuck with a Huron heading to Canada. They were probably hoping they could somehow fly under the radar, maybe forge new identities in Quebec or something. But the paddle box with the three men on drifted for days, and worse, ships continued to sail through the area but no one noticed them. This is psychological torture for victims of stranding. Imagine watching a rescue plane arrive, cut across the sky and take zero notice of you, even dancing with your flaming clothes over your head. This is a low moment, and one of the survivors became so distraught they attempted but were stopped from committing suicide twice, and thankfully, two days later they were picked up by Captain Russell of the Canard steamer Cambria. Now, on a normal day, Cannard head office would have told them simply to drown the survivors, but the captain himself had survived sinking in a storm by the Pacific as one of Arctic's sister ships, so he was paying it forward. Meanwhile, back at shore, the Vesta didn't even know that the Arctic had sunk. They thought that this thing had selfishly hit them and just taken off, And news that it was a hit and run was already circulating, and Captain Luise was being portrayed as a supervillain. But as survivors to the Arctic were located, their version of the story started to change things kind of drastically, and Captain LuSE was hailed as a hero the crew not so much. Public outrage over the treatment of women and children aboard the Arctic resonated for decades, and this is where the familiar tradition of saying women and children first came from. Now you know. In all, more than three hundred people died. The eighty five survivors included sixty one of the crew and twenty four hungover male passengers. Not a single woman or child survived, including Mary Ann Collins, wife of the Collins Line founder Edward Knightcollins. She drowned along with two of their children, as well as member of his partner James Brown's family. Now Sometimes the inquiries into these things can be brutal and others can be a bit of a sham. But this was one of those occasions when no inquiry into the disaster was held at all. No one was called to account for their actions, which was most likely because the captain had been working under a deliberate excessive speed policy that would make politicians in Washington look bad, and mostly because they didn't really want to stop enforcing it. Proposals that lifeboat capacity on passenger carrying vessels should be increased to provide safety for every person on board were acknowledged and then ignored. Captain Luce was exonerated from blamed by the public, but he never returned to the sea. And how did Canard respond to the tragedy and overwhelming grief that fell over the country. Well, they had a parade and I'm not making that up, only a couple of days after the disaster in New York City. They wanted to celebrate the comparative safety of Canard brand lifeboats. Side note, the size of testicles needed to pull off such a callous display would not actually fit into a standard lifeboat. Years later, in eighteen seventy five, the SS Vesta sank off the coast of Spain, there would be no parade, And today the wreckage of the Arctic lay somewhere off the east coast of Newfoundland. But because she was a wooden ship, most of it would have disintegrated. The Collins Line did continue its transatlantic service, and they even hedged their back on their biggest boat yet, the Adriatic. It cost over a million dollars, and here's its story. She sailed one time, ran into a tugboat and ended up being sold at a ninety five percent discount for fifty thousand dollars. Labeled irreparable and abandoned anchored in a river, the Collins Line discontinued its transatlantic service with Maritimes losses, leading to its final closure in eighteen fifty eight. In Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, there is a large monument dedicated to the members of the Brown family who had perished aboard the ss Arctic. The monument featured a depiction of the sinking paddlewheel steamer carved in marble. In spite of all the changes made to nautical travel following this disaster, the desire to control the narrative and bury. The story made sure its memory did not not live long. Having enough lifeboats wouldn't actually come into law until after the disaster of the Titanic sixty years later. And remember Captain Russell of the Cambria, who saved members of the Arctic disaster after the Arctic's sister ship rescued him from his own disaster. Well, that boat was so desperate to follow Collin's rules that she ended up hitting an iceberg and sank, taking one hundred and forty one people with her. I'm not going to tangent into a whole side episode here, but on topic, I will point out that if you had been listening to this on Patreon, not only would you have heard it sooner and ad free, but this episode would be almost ten minutes longer. Let's see, we looked into how not to become a scurvy riddled corpse in an age before hygiene. We learned how many maggots or worms it would take to press into our porterhouse steak. There was the drunk driving death of the most isolated tree on Earth. We talked about the worst, most blood soaked maritime shipboard punishments, and the tragic comic clown show that was the Costa Concordia. If you are a regular listener, you should consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a bucker two, that would really help keep my dream alive. And I think that getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it. If you agree, you can find out more at Patreon dot com, slash funeral, Kazoo, and now I want to share a quick but heartfelt shut out to Ellen's stankfist. Callum Brun, Cora Carlson, Read Mayo, Aaron Valenzuela, Chris Montori, tell Jen and Stephanie for helping support me on Patreon, Welcome aboard, and I'm gonna say you can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. I have people say that they're nervous to write in because they think I'm whatever, but I'm not. I'm just a little slow, So please feel free. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell thousands of your friends. And I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot CAA. On the next episode, bring your belt and maybe a flamethrower. We are going to lighten things up a bit with our very first extinction level event. It's the Great Locust Disaster of eighteen seventy four. Talk soon, safety goggles off and thanks for listening.