Since 1879, the most memorable disasters, besides those already referred to, have been the burning at sea of the Egypt, of the National line, and the City of Montreal, of the Inman line, both without loss of life; the stranding of the State of Virginia, of the State line, on the quicksands of Sable Island, which quickly entombed her; the sinking of the State of Florida, of the same line, by collision with a sailing ship; the disappearance of the National line steamer Erin, which is supposed to have foundered at sea; and the sinking of the magnificent Cunarder Oregon in collision with a coal schooner, off Fire Island.
No line in existence has been wholly free from calamity; no line in existence has not at least one page in its history to tell of anxious crowds besieging its wharves and offices for news of a ship that has never come in.
One speculates in vain as to the end of those ships which, sailing from port in a seaworthy condition, have disappeared without leaving a survivor to record their fate. Was it fire that consumed, or ice that crushed, or seas that swallowed them? It may have been collision in a fog, or an explosion of the boilers, or the collapse of the engine, or the bursting on board of some tremendous wave from which recovery has been impossible. Possibly boats and rafts have been lowered, and when the ship herself has sunk, there has still been hope of reaching land; days of suffering; glimpses of passing ships that have failed to see; agony spun out, and death at the end. For all the patient waiting and listening of those ashore no whisper of the secret has come, and no fuller account can be written than the word “missing.”
The region of fogs on the Atlantic is also the region of ice; fog and ice together are a greater source of peril than fog alone is, even when a ship is making land. Under the latter condition there is the chance of hearing the warning voice of the “syren,” the reverberation of the signal gun, or the tolling of the fog-bell; steam “syrens,” guns, or explosives of some kind, and bells, are all used as auxiliaries to the lighthouses in overcoming, through the medium of sound, the difficulties which fog opposes against the transmission of light. The sounding machine comes into play, and by registering the depth of water, and bearing testimony to the character of the bottom, affords further protection to the navigator. But the shoals and islands of ice, which, with their outreaching, submerged spurs, come drifting down from the Arctic into the track of the transatlantic steamers, are unprovided with anything which might tell the ship bearing upon them in thick weather of their proximity. Sometimes they may be detected by the echo from the whistle or fog-horn, and by the rapid lowering of the temperature of the water in their vicinity. These signs cannot be always counted on, however. The whistle may be going every twenty or thirty seconds, and the quartermaster posted to the leeward with the little canvas bag and the thermometer with which the sea is tested for temperature; all due precaution may be taken, and yet no warning come of the ice that is ahead. On a clear night a berg rising above the horizon will have the effulgence of a star; on a clear day it will notch the horizon with its dazzling whiteness; in a fog it looms up in the gray like a shadow upon a shadow, and is invisible till the ship is close upon it.