From 1838, when the Sirius crossed the ocean, till 1879, one hundred and forty-four steamers, counting all classes, were lost in the transatlantic trade. The first was the President, which disappeared mysteriously in 1841. During the thirteen years following only one life was lost by the wreck of an Atlantic steamer, that steamer being the Cunarder Columbia, which went ashore in 1843. In 1854, however, the City of Glasgow sailed with about four hundred and eighty souls on board, and was never seen or heard from again; and in the same year the Collins line steamer Arctic, one of the fastest and finest vessels then afloat, was sunk in collision with the steamer Vesta during a dense fog, off Cape Race, and five hundred and sixty-two persons perished. Two years later the Pacific, of the same line, went to sea with one hundred and eighty-six persons on board, and was never heard from again. Between 1857 and 1864 the Allan line lost no fewer than nine steamers. In 1858 the Hamburg-American steamer Austria was burned at sea, with a loss of four hundred and seventy-one lives; in 1870 the City of Boston left port with over two hundred persons on board, never more to be heard from. On a dark night in April, 1873, the White Star steamer Atlantic ran ashore near Sambro, and five hundred and sixty lives were lost—some by drowning and some by freezing in the rigging into which they had scrambled, or upon the ice-bound shore upon which they were cast. Note must be made also of the wreck of the German steamer Schiller on the Scilly Rocks, by which two hundred lives were lost; of the running ashore in the North Sea of the North German Lloyd steamer Deutschland, by which one hundred and fifty-seven lives were lost; of the sinking through collision of the Hamburg-American steamer Pomerania, by which over fifty lives were lost; of a similar disaster to the Cimbria, of the same line, by which eighty-four were lost; and of yet another collision, which sent the beautiful Ville du Havre, of the French line, to the bottom of the English Channel, with two hundred and thirty of her passengers and crew.
[Illustration: Lighthouse, Atlantic City, N. J.]
Of the one hundred and forty-four vessels lost up to 1879, more than one-half were wrecked. Twenty-four never reached the ports for which they sailed, their fate still being unknown; ten were burned at sea; eight were sunk in collisions, and three were sunk by ice.