[Illustration: Eddystone Lighthouse, English Channel.
The Baltic was feeling her way up the Channel, and was supposed to be two or three miles off-shore. The creaming of the breakers, flowing and dissolving over the ledges like puffs of steam, gave the first hint of danger, and before the warning was of avail, the dark shape, darker than the fog, sprang upon the dimmed vision of those on deck—a precipice that seemed to be toppling over them. “Good God! It is the South Stack!” a voice cried out, and there was no thought but of doom. The bells in the engine-room and wheel-house pealed, and the reversal of the screw sent the latherings surging toward the bow. A moment of panic among the passengers; a scurrying of figures on the bridge; the resonant, pistol-like snap of bending iron plates; a sudden resistance to progress suddenly withdrawn—a confusion of ideas, a murmur of relief, comparative tranquillity again. The hundredth chance was in favor of the Baltic, and backing into deep water, she proceeded on her way to Liverpool.
The three accidents described were without serious consequences, but in most cases the same difficulty of fog and mistaken reckoning ends in disaster. No less than five large steamers of the Guion line have been wrecked between Fastnet and Liverpool—the Chicago, the Colorado, the Montana, the Dakota, and the Idaho—representing a value of fully two and a half million dollars, without cargo. The Cunard line lost the Tripoli on the Irish coast, north of Queenstown, and the City of New York (the first Inman ship of that name) came to grief on Daunt’s Rock, near Roche’s Point. The City of Brussels, of the same line, had nearly completed her voyage and was lying off the Liverpool bar, waiting for the weather to clear, the captain acting with the utmost prudence, when an insufficiently manned and badly managed steamer, the Kirby Hall, ran her down and sank her. Account is taken here only of the passenger steamers of the well-known lines; the record would be much expanded if it included the disasters to freight lines, and to those uncared-for ocean tramps which when they go down often yield a better profit to their unscrupulous owners, through insurance money, than they do by carrying cargo while afloat.