“Women and Children First”: Popular Mythology and Disaster at Sea, 1840-1860

B. R. Burg

In January of 1852, the Birkenhead, a fully loaded transport carrying British troops and over two dozen of their family members from Cork to Capetown struck an uncharted rock near the African coast. The few lifeboats she carried were sufficient to save only a fraction of those on board. In an atmosphere of calm and military discipline, wives and children were loaded into three small boats that then pulled away from the doomed vessel. The captain next ordered all to abandon ship and swim for the boats. The army officers countermanded the order, knowing that if hundreds of soldiers and marines swam for the three small craft and tried to board them, they would be swamped and all would drown. Not more than three men ignored orders and jumped into the sea. The remaining hundreds stood fast. Shortly after the boats were safely away, the Birkenhead slipped off the rock and plunged to the bottom as the cargo of iron-disci- plined troops stood at attention on her deck.’ One of the officers who survived the ordeal, a Lieutenant Lucas of the 73rd Regiment, described the scene on the ill-fated ship before she went under. His measured and understated prose conveys the sense of discipline and duty that prevailed in the face of what appeared to be certain death for most of those who participated in the events he described:2

The ship was now rolling her yardarms in the sea, and it was no light matter to keep one’s legs. It is not easy to imagine a more painful task than that of getting the wretched women into the boats. This was in several cases done by main force. Tearing them from their husbands, they were carried to the bulwarks and dropped over the ship’s side into the arms of the boat’s crew. The whole of the women and children, thirty in all were safely stowed in the boats, when they shoved off.

Lucas concluded his testimony by thanking God that it could “seldom be said that Englishmen have left women and children to perish and saved their own lives!”3 The heroism of the men was widely celebrated

in the popular press at the time of the sinking, and in due course Rudyard Kipling paid tribute to the courage of the ship’s marines in “A Soldier an’ Sailor Too.” Referring to them as Jollies, he wrote:

To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all

Is nothing so bad when you’ve cover to’ and, an’ leave an’

But to stand an’ be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn’

An’ they done it, the Jollies-’Er Majesty’s Jollies-sol-

about,

likin’ to shout;

tough bullet to chew,

dier and sailor too!4

Three-quarters of a century after the sinking of the Birkenhead, maritime historian J. G. Lockhart evoked an aura of high drama to explain the signifi- cance of what happened in 1852:

The men who died ... established a law which has become embodied in the unwritten maritime code of all civilized nations. Once and for all on that January night, it was laid down that ... when the alarm has been given and the ship is sinking and the boats are being lowered, the women and children on board must first be ~ a v e d . ~

Lt. Lucas indicated in his account that even in the years before the Birkenhead went down, Englishmen customarily, if not invariably, had stood aside and let women and children be rescued first. Lockhart made no judgment on the conduct of mariners before 1852.6 He only claimed that after the Birkenhead disaster, rescuing “women and children first” became one of the laws of the sea, immutable and timeless, compara- ble to other seemingly irrefutable nautical truths such as “port is left, starboard is right.”

The certainty that women and children would be saved first was particularly comforting in the mid- nineteenth century when increasing numbers of afflu- ent passengers were being transported over the

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Atlantic each year in gigantic steamers, and thousands of emigrants were carried in equally large sailing ships to new lives in North America or Australia. Seagoing travelers and the general public were very much aware of the grim dimensions of the tragedies when ships of such size went down.

The steam power that brought about the fastest of these ocean crossings was also what drove the effi- cient rotary presses that replaced hand printing by the 1830s. As the price of newspapers and magazines plummeted, the proliferation of popular reading matter brought the horrifying details of every mar- itime disaster to an ever-widening readership on both sides of the Atlantic. Periodicals at 5d per copy came within the price range of the burgeoning literate classes in England, and the same was true in America where issues of the New-York Daily Times sold for only two cents.’ Writers, printers, and publishers dis- covered early on that the more ghastly the tales that filled their pages, the more copies of their newspapers would be sold.

The first of the large-scale catastrophes to create intense popular interest was the loss of the steam- powered liner President. At the time of her launching in 1840, only two years after passenger steamers regu- larly began traversing the Atlantic, she was one of the largest ships afloat. On an eastward Atlantic run the next year, she sailed into an exceptionally fierce North Atlantic storm-the same storm later described by passengers who experienced it while westward bound on the opulent steam packet British Queen. Those sailing on board the Queen were fortunate. Their ship sustained minor damage and was easily repaired at Halifax. The President disappeared without a trace.8 For weeks and even months after the ship’s scheduled arrival date, the Times and other British newspapers carried stories of purported sightings, false notices of her arrival at one port or another, and speculation that the storm forced her to put in for repairs in the Bahamas, the Azores, or elsewhere.

Since there were no survivors from the President, readers of the popular prints were spared accounts of boats being swamped, travelers sinking beneath the waves “never to rise again” and children screaming in terror as towering waves washed their mothers into the frigid, roiling sea. It was only a matter of time, however, before such narratives became a standard feature of reportage on major maritime disasters.

Two years after the President vanished, the Royal Steam Packet Company’s paddle-wheel driven Solway went down off the coast of Spain. In the pre-dawn darkness of April 7, 1843, the ship struck a submerged

rock within sight of land, and sank only twenty min- utes after the collision. There were many survivors, and several eye-witness accounts were published. It is difficult to obtain a clear picture of what took place in the confusion. During the first moments after the col- lision, all of the female passengers evidently escaped from their berths below and reached the Solway’s deck. It seems likely they brought their children on deck with them. According to the testimony of two survivors, the ship’s captain endeavored to get women and children into the boats before “the ship gave one plunge and went down.” The number of them who died indicate his efforts were unsuccessful. One of the Solway’s boats that got free from the sinking steamer carried seven women. Unfortunately, those seven may have been the sum of adult female survivors. The exact total is not certain because the roster of those rescued is muddled at several points. The number of the women who lived through the disaster, in any case, was no more than nine. Between three and six women died as did four of the ten juveniles on board. The proportion of surviving male passengers was slightly higher than that of the females. Thirteen of them lived through the disaster. Nine men died. In all, of the forty-five passengers and their servants who sailed from Corunna on the Solway as many as twenty-eight may have survived the wreck.

The rapidity with which the ship sank and the sur- vival of almost two of every three passengers suggests that abandoning ship went more smoothly than could have been expected on that dark spring night in 1843, but in fact the opposite seems to have been the case. In the fateful twenty minutes between the time the Solway struck the rock and when she sank, four boats were actually launched. One moved off carrying only two men. A second boat was almost swamped, packed as it was to the gunwales with over fifty people, the majority of whom were crewmen and officers of the Solway. The captain may have worked to ensure the safety of women and children, but his sense of duty apparently was not shared by those manning the ship. Crewmembers who lived through the disaster included seven of the ten officers and eleven of the nineteen stewards. Of the fifty-one engineers, fire- men, coal heavers, and seamen on board, every man survived. When the rush to the boats began, it was led by sailors fending for themselves.’ The passengers were in large measure left on their own.

Atlantic disasters that followed indicate that the behavior of the Solway’s crew was in no way unusual. The only striking feature of the ship’s evacuation was the high ratio of passengers, male, female, and juve- nile, who survived. In later sinkings, the percentages

“Women and Children First” . 3

of crewmen saved remained high, but the proportion of passengers who lived to tell of their experiences declined precipitously. This is well-illustrated with the wrecks of the General Steam Navigation Company’s ship, Munchester, in 1844, and the New York- Liverpool packet, Stephen Whitney, three years later. Details of the Munchester disaster are few, but avail- able data indicate all passengers were lost, while seven of the twenty-member crew were saved. After the 1,934-ton Stephen Whitney, carrying cheese, apples, and general cargo, went down with consider- able loss of life, a reporter quoted an “intelligent” American survivor named William Smith, who claimed only eighteen people were rescued. Since fif- teen of the twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-man crew survived, Smith’s statement indicates only three of the 110 passengers lived through the ordeal. Other testi- mony suggests as many as six more passengers may have been rescued, but it is seems likely that all of the twenty females and three children on board were among the over one hundred passengers lost in the tragedy.’”

Because the Munchester and the Stephen Whitney went down at sea leaving only small numbers of sur- vivors as witnesses, published accounts of the sink- ings were few and brief. Metropolitan newspapers carried only a handful of narratives on the tragedies, then moved on to cover other stories. There was little about sinkings at sea to keep local interest at a high pitch or to provide material to sustain a continuous flow of articles. There were no testimonies from townsmen who aided in rescues, no cargo was to be salvaged, and no bodies washed up on nearby beaches.

The Ocean Monarch disaster in 1848 was of an entirely different character. The ship, carrying a crew of forty-three and almost 350 emigrants, caught fire and “went down at her anchors” just off Liverpool on August 27. Several ships were nearby, and their crews rescued many people. One of the steamers close at hand, the Alfonso, saved 160 lives. Numerous wit- nesses provided descriptions of the event, and news- papers were quick to get their accounts into print. The coverage began with publication of the horrifying details of the catastrophe on the day the ship sank, and continued for two weeks until the final story appeared describing a last body that washed ashore clad in a plaid dress, ankle-strap shoes, and a shirt with horn buttons at the neck and wrist.

Despite the many letters and news stories about the sinking of the Ocean Monarch, the precise unfold- ing of events remains obscure. Although the ship evi- dently carried six boats, only two were launched.

They contained both crewmen and passengers, but there is no information on the ratios of crewmen to passengers or males to females in either of them. Comparison of the lists containing names of those who lived through the calamity with lists of those who did not indicates that in the scramble for survival no sustained effort was made to secure the safety of women and children. The totals given in the Times for passengers and crew saved and lost do not correlate exactly, but despite small differences in numbers, a pattern is clear. Of the passengers on board the Ocean Monarch, sixty percent of the women and slightly less than half of the male passengers died. Half of the chil- dren also died in the sinking. The proportion of sur- vivors among the crew was quite different. The manner in which totals were reported again makes it impossible to obtain exact figures, but it appears the captain and all but one of the crew were rescued. Not surprisingly, the single drowned crewmember was a stewardess.“

Although none of the accounts of the Oceun Monarch’s sinking contain any details of events on deck of the burning ship or how the evacuations of passengers and crew went forward, some idea of what might have happened, judging from the figures on survivors, might be gleaned from two other ship- wrecks that occurred at about the same time. Like the Ocean Monarch, the Hunna and the St. John were emigrant ships. The Hunnu, carrying a crew of thir- teen and with two hundred passengers, departed from Newry for Quebec in the spring of 1849. While cross- ing the north Atlantic, she struck an iceberg, and when it became clear she was sinking, the captain along with the first and second officers lowered a boat, clambered into it, and rowed away to watch their ship go down. The emigrants along with the remainder of the crew, managed to climb onto the iceberg before the Hanna sank. As many as fifty or sixty people drowned or froze to death before a passing ship took the survivors from the ice.’*

A similar sequence of events occurred when the brig Sr. John struck a rock some months later. The crew and all of the officers except the first mate took to the jolly boat, leaving the passengers to fend for themselves. Of the 165 persons on board only twenty were saved, and the crew may have been numbered among that twenty. In a comparable incident, the cap- tain and crew of the Ann of Limerick abandoned ship when she appeared to be sinking, leaving passengers to their fate. In this case, the departure was too precip- itous. The Ann did not go down, and all passengers were later taken off by a passing ve~se1.l~

4 . Journal of American Culture

At the midpoint of the century the Atlantic was being mastered by technology. By then, the Times was carrying stories headed “From America by Electric Telegraph,” and steamers were regularly making the crossing in ten days.14 As ocean-going ships expanded their carrying capacity and grew in number, maritime disasters of increasing magnitude became even more common. Newspapers carried ever more frequent accounts of death at sea, and their coverage helped draw the attention of governments in Britain and America to the problem. Measures to institute mar- itime inspection programs were discussed, demands for augmenting the number of lifeboats were made, and operators of unsafe vessels were deno~nced.’~

Despite the popular clamor, few improvements in safety were mandated, and reports of tragedies contin- ued. When the passenger steamer Atlantic failed to arrive in England on schedule in early 1850, there was terrible apprehension. After she at last sailed into port, the relief of the English nation was palpable. One London theater manager halted the performance to relay the news, and when he finished the audience burst into applause. The same sense of relief pervaded New York. Evening “extras” proclaimed the good tid- ings, men stopped in the streets to tell each other of the ship’s safe arrival, and crowds gathered under gas lanterns to listen as the joyous details were read out.’‘

In early summer of 1850, newspapers reported another major wreck, that of the Liverpool-Glasgow steamer, Orion. She sank off Glasgow in about seven minutes after striking a rock. One of the survivors tes- tified that the crewmembers were little help, charging that the “seamen were too much terrified to do any- thing, but some jumped overboard and others ran up the shrouds.”17 The terror-induced survival strategies of the sailors worked well. There were approximately 160 passengers and forty crewmen on the Orion. The forty-three who lost their lives included only four of the crew: the ship’s carpenter, an apprentice boy, a cabin steward, and, of course, a stewardess. The remaining thirty-nine dead were all passengers. Of the drowned passengers identified, there were seven adult males, six adult females and nine children. Available information indicates that the Orion’s male passengers were not conspicuously more enthusiastic about saving women and children than were the crewmen. While the dead included an almost equal number of men and women, male survivors outnumbered surviv- ing females by a ratio of three to one. Only one child lived through the disaster.’*

The Birkenhead was lost in 1852, only two years after the Orion went down, and from this one event, and the extraordinary example it provided, the myth

that women and children are to be saved first gained wide currency. Still, the example of the Birkenhead heroes had little influence on other mariners. Later in the same year another emigrant ship went down, and the pattern of survival was similar to that which had occurred in previous sinkings. The American packet, St. George, caught fire on a voyage from Liverpool to New York in November of 1852. The ship burned slowly enough so that another American ship, the Orlando, could take passengers from the blazing wreckage. Unfortunately, heavy seas meant that no boat could get close to the foundering ship, and pas- sengers had to leap into the sea and be picked up. Only a small number could be transported back to the Orlando on each boat trip, but some seventy passen- gers were rescued in this manner. Many women and children, fearing to throw themselves into the freezing sea and await a hoped-for rescue, were not taken off, and they were lost with the ship. The passenger lists of the dead and of the survivors do not include infor- mation on children, but almost all on both lists can be identified by sex. The number of male survivors out- numbered the females by 44 to 24. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances of the sinking, drowned females outnumbered drowned males by 29 to nine- teen. Neither is it surprising that every one of the twenty-five-member crew survived. How this came to pass was explained by George Grant Cousins, a Londoner employed on the St. George:

The larboard boat was got out ... and I imagined at the time that the captain intended sending off some of the passen- gers. I was certainly taken by surprise on looking over the ship’s side, to see the two boats some 400 or 500 yards from the vessel, making for the Orlando containing Captain Bairnson and all the crew, with the exception of five hands .... At the time Captain Bairnson and his officers took to the boats the passengers were crowding the main rigging, expecting to be taken in them, but none were allowed to g0.19

It was on the half-a-dozen rescue trips from the Orlando that the five remaining crewmen were saved. Cousins continued his story with an account of his own rescue:

I, with another seaman, left in the fifth trip that day. We were the last of the crew. I would not have left as I did, but the captain and all the officers and men, having abandoned the ship, I was at a loss to imagine their reasons in so acting. There was no one left behind who knew how to manage the ship. Her wheel was lashed, and she was rolling fearfully-at times she was almost on her beam ends.20

“Women and Children First’’ . 5

Seaman Cousins later said he could not “explain more than [he had] why he and the crew so quickly left the ship,” but the probable reason, whether he was aware of it or not, was that the St. George carried a cargo of naphtha and other petroleum products. The officers, knowing the potential for explosion, decided to leave as expeditiously as possible, then consider their options for aiding the hapless passengers. Once safely ensconced on the Orlando, Captain Bairnson remained there, never returning on any of the boat trips to assess the predicament of his doomed ship.2’

The magnitude of the maritime tragedies contin- ued to grow in proportion to the increasing size of the vessels. The Tuyleur was one of the largest and finest of the mid-century emigrant ships. Designed espe- cially for the Liverpool-Australia run, she was built of iron, displaced over 2,000 tons, and may have been carrying over six hundred passengers and crew when she went down off the Irish coast in the winter of 1854. Over two hundred persons were saved from the wreck of the Tuyleur, but among them were only three women and two children, one of whom was “an infant of nine months with no one to claim it.”22 Almost sixty of the seventy member crew were among those who survived. The captain, too, lived through the disaster. At some point in the confusion that attended the sink- ing he abandoned ship and swam a~hore.~’

When huge, tall-masted emigrant ships like the Tuyleur sank or disappeared, the loss of life was gener- ally comparable to that in steamship disasters, but public interest in wrecks of sailing vessels was always less than when major steamers went down. The loss of the paddle-wheel-driven Arctic in 1854 captured the public imagination in a way that no shipwreck was to do until the Rtunic’s sinking almost sixty years later. In 1850, the newly-launched Arctic joined the steamer fleet of the Collins line, an American company whose ships were famed for fast transatlantic crossings. The Arctic was no ordinary ship. When the 284-foot behe- moth was under construction at the East River Ship Yard in New York, she was already known as one of the most expensive and sumptuous liners ever built, costing the then prodigious sum of $700,000. No less a person- age than Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy certified the 2,794-ton ship as a steamer of the “first class.”24 She was forty-five feet, eight inches across her main deck, seventy-two feet across at her paddle boxes, and from keel to deck she was as high as a five-story building. The 62’ X 30’ dining room was brilliantly illuminated by Carcel lamps, while the parlor walls of rosewood and satinwood were decorated with crests of the States of the Union. An observer described some of the appointments:

Magnificent mirrors, stained glass, silver plate, costly car- pets, marble centre tables and pier tables, luxurious sofas and arm-chairs, and a profusion of rich gilding give an air of almost Oriental magnificence .... When this saloon is brjl- liantly lighted in the evening it is gorgeous in the extreme.25

The Arctic sailed from England in late September and was expected in New York during the first few days of October, but when she failed to arrive on time none were worried. The public, by 1854, had become used to the late arrival of steamships. They were often delayed by inclement weather or mechanical difficul- ties. In this instance, concern was allayed by Edward K. Collins, the ship’s owner, who speculated that she had probably broken a shaft. The famed Collins liner, Atlantic, had been twenty days missing, people recalled, when she turned up in Liverpool after her engines failed at sea and she could not gain against strong headwinds using only

On October 10, newspapers first carried tentative stories of the Arctic sinking, but it was not confirmed until the 11 th that she had collided with the Vesta and gone down off Cape Race almost two weeks earlier with heavy loss of life.*’ As word of the tragedy spread, “the general mournful excitement and agita- tion ... stopped all the workings of Wall Street ... and kept brokers and lawyers and businessmen of all sorts around the newspaper offices and telegraphs all day long.”28 Details of the collision between the Arctic and the Vestu trickled in to frantic New Yorkers over the next scveral days. Newspaper extras, public announcements, and the arrival of more news by tele- graph from Nova Scotia filled in details of the colli- sion and sinking. When a clear picture of events emerged over the next several days, New Yorkers were aghast at what had happened. Of approximately four hundred persons on board the Arctic, only eighty- six survived. Those rescued included six of the offi- cers (numbered among them was the Captain, James C. Luce), fifty-five crewmen, and twenty-five male passengers. It was clear from surviving testimony that scant effort had been made to secure the safety of those traveling on board the Arctic. Not one woman or child lived through the ordeal.

As if to compound the affront to human decency inherent in the abandonment of the Arctic’s women and children, the New York Tribune explained to its readers that the loss to the Collins line was slight, due to insurance on the ship and cargo. On October 11, the New-Yurk Daily Times carried a first-hand account of the sinking by passenger George H. Burns, who described how all of the officers except the captain and the third mate left the ship while passengers were

6 - journal of American Culture

busy working the pumps. Three days later, the New York Express denounced the cowardice of the crew, contrasting them unfavorably with the heroes of the Birkenhead sinking two years earlier, and the New York Herald of October 22 carried a poem of over one hundred lines on the disaster.2y The anonymous author lauded the captain but railed against the craven sailors who allowed the women and children to be lost:

Crowding across the deck, they seize the boats; The mothers we revere are thrust away- The wives we love repulsed-the girls adored Are pushed apart-the child may vainly pray With pleading tongue for succor. As Bereft Of noble feeling and of manly pride, They fill the boats, push off, and women left To death, the cowards stem the heaving tide.

That woman bore and nursed them-that her blood Runs pulsing through their arteries, even yet? Are men like these our brethren? Are they framed As we are? Have they hearts, or merely bone And soulless reservoirs of life, that hold No more feelings than the insentient stone?lo

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Sunday after the news broke, the sinking was the chief topic for sermons everywhere in the city. At least one pulpit orator made the obvious comparison between the noble ship and ignoble crew. Another clergyman, the celebrated Henry Ward Beecher, saw the ramifications of class in the event. “In the morning the waiters served the titled and rich,” he explained, “In the evening the lusty strength of the engineer was a greater title than money and coronets.” He went on to attack the Collins Line and shipping interests gen- erally, proclaiming that “all the monstrous and infidel legislation of our country for the last five years has had its root and sap, in the supposed interests of mon- eyed circles .... Nay, God is striking thundering strokes at the wealth of the whole c~mmunity.”~’

In due course, the furor over the loss of the Arctic and the fate of her passengers subsided. There was enough blame to go around. The crew was universally denounced for cowardice, and although editorial opin- ion generally supported Captain Luce, his reputation was severely tarnished. The company, too, received some of the blame. Congressman William S . Barry of Mississippi observed from the floor of the House of Representatives on February 16, 1855, that “If [the Collins Line] had spent in lifeboats for the vessel the money which they spent in gingerbread ornaments and decorations, there might have been hundreds of valuable lives saved.”32

A month after the Arctic went down, another mar- itime disaster was described by reporter Elias Smith from on board the “Newes Yacht of the Associated Press.” The New Era, loaded with German and Dutch emigrants and sailing from Bremen to New York was driven aground on the New Jersey coast. The ferocity of the storm prevented nearby vessels from taking passengers off the beleaguered ship, but Smith reported that “From the fact that ... the ship’s boat was lying on the beach, we judged the officers and crew, or most of them, must have been landed or thrown ashore in her.” The reporter’s judgment was undoubt- edly correct. The accounts that appeared in the New- York Daily Times on November 14 and 16, 1854, indi- cate the loss of 220 emigrants, while 163 of their company were saved. Of the crew of eighty-four, only two were lost, a steward and the physician.

Even more large-scale disasters were reported in the Atlantic during 1856, due to weather and colli- sions, but none of the ships involved were capacious passenger steamers or emigrant ships. Out of approxi- mately fifty-two crewmen on board the St. Denis, the Ocean Home, and the Lyonnaise, a total of thirty- seven survived. This fortunate sixty-three percent included one captain, four mates, one engineer, nine stokers, and thirty-seven others whose occupations were not specified. The passengers did not fare as well. Only 12.8 percent, or sixteen out of 125, lived through the sinkings. No information is available on the proportions of males, females, and juveniles among them. What is known is that no more than three females

One of the great maritime disasters of the period in terms of loss-of-life was the burning of the iron- hulled, screw steamer Austria. The fire began with an accident below decks, when the captain and the sur- geon decided the steerage needed fumigation. The hot tar used for this purpose was accidentally set ablaze. Flames and dense smoke spread rapidly and created general panic among the passengers and the poorly- trained crew.” The captain apparently tried to escape in the first boat that was launched, lost his footing, and fell into the sea. He grabbed hold of a line, but the ship was still steaming forward and he could not keep his grip. He let go and disappeared. Other ship’s offi- cers were more fortunate. Of the forty-man crew, only seventeen escaped death, but the survivors included the lst, 2nd, and 3rd officers, along with the quarter- master and the boatswain. Other members of the Austria’s crew who lived through the tragedy were an assistant engineer, a steward, five sailors, four fire- men, and a cook. It was assumed by those on board that most of the coal heavers, firemen, and engineers

“Women and Children First” ’ 7

were trapped below decks by the rapid spread of the fire, and died of asphyxiation or were incinerated.

There may have been as many as 600 passengers on board the ship, but only seventy-one of this number, sixty-five men and six women, survived. Of the over four hundred dead who can be classified by sex or age, there were approximately 252 men, 11 1 women and seventy children.

It appears from the testimony of survivors that the rapid envelopment of the Austria by smoke and flames created panic among both passengers and crew. Boats were swamped, the helmsman deserted his post, the captain attempted to flee, and many were forced by the fire to jump into the sea with no chance of being picked by the one boat successfully launched and carrying the 1st officer and probably other mem- bers of the crew. Most passengers who survived did so, presumably, by clinging to debris until another ship at last arrived upon the scene and rescued them.35

In another passenger ship disaster eight months after the loss of the Austria, the New York-bound Pomona, sailing from Liverpool, struck a rock and quickly went down. Information on events on board the bark immediately after the accident are scanty. Evidently, the captain and 1st officer remained calm, but after most of the boats were swamped attempting to lower them, threats from the two officers were insufficient to avert panic among the sailors. Some of them attempted to escape in the longboat, beating away passengers who tried to go with them, and they were almost successful in reaching safety. They were upset before reaching shore, and all but two were drowned. The cutter also got away from the Pomona and reached safety with three passengers and eighteen crewmen. Those who died, mostly Irish emigrants, included 159 males, 190 females, and thirty-nine chil- dren.’6

If there had ever been intentions of taking care of women, children, or passengers on board either the blazing Austria or the foundering Pomona, such notions were quickly abandoned as it became clear there was little time left before the vessels sank.

Women and children were not abandoned in every sinking during the decades between 1840 and 1860. Great care was taken to secure their safety when the Petrea, the Indian, the Mastiff and the Northerner were lost. In the case of the Indian, women, as well as all cabin passengers, were evacuated before the cargo of emigrant German steerage passengers was taken off. When the Mastifs burned, there was ample time to rescue the one woman on board (the captain’s wife), all of the passengers, their luggage, 175 Chinese

laborers, and most of the ship’s compliment of dogs, pigs, pigeons and chickens. Only a cow and a large hog remained after the last boat pulled away from the burning hulk.37

The most famous sinking where the women and children were saved was that of the Central America, a paddle-wheel steamer carrying many passengers and a large cargo of gold bullion. The ship apparently began to leak badly off Cape Hatteras, and through the incompetence of the engineers, and perhaps even the ineptitude of the captain, the engines were flooded and the pumps could not be run. The situation hardly seemed grave in the hours after the leak was discov- ered, and there was no attempt to hail the schooner El Dorado when she sailed past the Central America shortly after the disaster began taking shape. Meanwhile, the sea was not battering the Central America in a particularly brutal fashion, and it was far from certain the ship was doomed. It was only after the passage of many hours that the situation seemed to warrant loading as many as seventy-two women and children into boats and transferring them to nearby vessels. Still, the male passengers and crew continued bailing and working hand pumps without untoward concern. At least some of the sailors manning the boats that took off women and children may have been more prescient than the officers or male passen- gers who remained on board. They refused to return to the Central America to evacuate more people once they were safe on board other vessels. Yet for the most part, the situation seemed well in-hand. No attempts were made to construct rafts or jettison buoyant mate- rials, although according to the testimony of one sur- vivor, the sea was calm enough so that many could have survived on wooden doors set afloat or on board jerry-built rafts. The bailing continued until about an hour before the ship went down, indicating there was hope among those on board almost until the very end. The final totals for the Central America were 182 saved and 232 lost.’8

In each of the sinkings where women and children were evacuated, the situations were critically different than in disasters where they were abandoned. The “women and children first” axiom held true only where there was a presumption that all would eventu- ally be rescued and when ample time was available to effect their evacuation first and then save male pas- sengers and crewmembers. When officers, crewmem- bers, and male passengers were faced with the stark choice between saving their own lives or the lives of women and children, there was no hesitation. They moved decisively. In almost all such cases, it was “every man for himself.”

8 Journal of American Culture

The popular notion that “women and children first” was a law of the sea continues to be widely held, but with the level of safety attained by modem ocean liners, it is no longer put to the test. The reasons for the popularity of the notion in the first decades of expanding steam travel and burgeoning trans-oceanic emigration are more difficult to fathom. Evidence that males generally looked after themselves in times of maritime crises was widely disseminated, and the accuracy of such evidence was confirmed again and again by news reports of losses at sea. Perhaps the very horrors described in popular accounts of such tragedies induced a measure of denial among the read- ing public. They could not believe that huge ships, machines so marvelous and fascinating, so emblem- atic of humanity’s progress, could produce the ghastly scenes that denied the very concept of proper male conduct. This was an age of Victorian romanticism. The reading public on both sides of the Atlantic rev- eled in tales of nobility, heroism, and knightly valor garnered from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Tennyson, from popular fiction, and from other similarly oriented sources. White women in the southern United States were deified, and their slave- holding husbands, brothers, and beaus fought duels over points of manly honor. Could true Englishmen or red-blooded Americans really abandon women and children, and think only of saving themselves? The answer was a clear “yes,” but technology, progress, and romanticized idealism demanded the opposite be held true. Popular notions required women and chil- dren be saved first, even if most often they were not saved at all. Chivalry demanded no less.

Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1995 Oxford meeting of the Popular Culture Association. The author wishes to thank Gary Zaro for invaluable help with the research.

Notes

IJ. G. Lockhart, Peril ofthe Sea (London: Philip Allan, 1924) 257-58, 262-65; Karen Kamuda, “‘Women and Children First’: The Legacy of the Titanic,’’ The Titanic Comrnurutor 17 (Feb.-April 1994): 10-12.

zLockhart, 265. 3L~~khar t , 267. 4Rudyard Kipling, “Soldier an’ Sailor Too,” i n

Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973): 434-35.

jLockhart, 265.

‘In addition to the 30 women and children, 163 men also survived. Almost 450 men perished in the wreck (Lockhart, 27 1).

’The New-York Dairy Times, founded in 1851, was the precursor to the New York Times. The word “Daily” was dropped from the title on September 14, 1857. The price was printed on the masthead.

8Frank Staff, The Transatlantic Mail (London: A. Coles, 1956): 56, 65, 85; Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the U.S. in 1841 (Boston: D. S. King, 1842; reprint, New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969): 2. The British Queen was then the largest ship in the world according to the Times [London], where she was described as being 275 feet in length, displacing almost 2,000 tons, and having 300 berths (13 July 1838).

’Times [London] I8 Apr. 1843. “‘Times [London] 24, 25 June 1844; 15, 16, 17, 19

“Staff, 86; Times [London] 29, 30, 31 Aug. 1848. ”Times [London] 29 May 1849. ’3Boston Evening Journal 8 Oct. 1849; Times [London]

28,29 Oct. 1849. Henry David Thoreau provided a descrip- tion of the scene on the beach after the St. John’s sinking off Cape Cod (New York: Norton, 1951): 14-23. There are numerous instances of crewmembers abandoning passen- gers entirely. One of the most notorious occurred when the Flora Temple foundered. She was bringing 850 Chinese from Macao to Havana when it became clear she was sink- ing. The entire crew took the boats, leaving their vessel to sink with her cargo of migrants. They later justified their actions, explaining that they abandoned ship hurriedly in fear of a revolt by their passengers, who had already mur- dered one sailor. They explained, additionally, that with the few boats available and because they were three hundred miles from the nearest land, the vast majority of the Chinese could not have been saved in any case (New-York Times 6 Feb. 1860). For a fictional account of a similar abandonment of Asian passengers, see Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

I4The news was telegraphed from Liverpool to London. The information came from America to Britain in the usual way, by ship.

I5In England, statistics were by the middle of the cen- tury being used to gain some idea of the dangers facing Atlantic travelers. A House of Commons report placed the number of emigrant vessels that sailed from United Kingdom ports during the period from 1847 to 1851 at 7,129. Of those, 44 were wrecked, and 1,043 passengers died. The chances of any passenger being in a wreck were 1:162. The chances of surviving a crossing on an emigrant ship were far better. Only 1:1,432 passengers died in wrecks during the period. The National Institution for Preservation of Life from Shipwreck claimed that in 1853 there had been nearly eight hundred shipwrecks with a loss

Nov. 1847; Liverpool Albion 16 Nov. 1848.

“Women and Children First” 9

of 870 lives, but neither survey reported the wrecks by type of ship or compared death rates of passengers and crewmen (Times [London] 2 1 Apr. I 852; 16 May 1854).

“Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (London: Macmillan, 19 13): 290; “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Dec. 1854: 1 19.

”Times [London] 27 June 1850. I8Times [London] 21 June 1850. “Times [London] 18 Jan. 1853. 2oTimes [London] 18 Jan. 1853. *ITimes [London] 18 Jan. 1853. 22Times [London] 24 Jan. 1854. 23Times [London] 24,25,30 Jan.; 7 Feb. 1854. 24A. Crosby Brown, Women and Children Last: The

L o s s of the Arctic (New York: Putnam, 1961): 16-17, 26, 27; Times [London] 24 Nov. 1853.

2SJohn S. C. Abbot, “Ocean Life,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine June 1852: 62.

”Brown, 153-55. 2 7 B r ~ ~ n , 120, 163. 28Quoted from Brown, 153. 2’Brown, 152-53, 190, 219-23, 243-46; Edward W.

Sloan, “The Machine at Sea: Early Transatlantic Travel,” in The Atlantic World of Robert G. Albion, ed. Benjamin

Labaree (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1975): 138-39. MHerald [New York] 22 Oct. 1854. ”Quoted from Brown, 187. 32Quoted from Brown, 181. ”New-York Daily Times 17 Jan.; 19 Sept.; 15, 17, 26

Nov. 1856. ’‘Te~tim~ny later recorded from crewmen who sur-

vived indicated the captain acted bravely, and that it was only the large number of terrorized passengers who pre- vented boats being lowered in a timely fashion (New-York Times 27 Oct. 1858), but a preponderance of survivors’ accounts makes this seem unlikely.

’5New-York Times 20, 27,28, 29, 30 Sept.; 2, 5,23 Oct. 1858.

‘6New-York Times 19,21 May 1859. 37New-York Times 21 Apr.; 28 Nov. 1858, 11 Feb.

1860; Charles Francis Adams, Richard Henry Dana: A Biography, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890) 182- 85.

38New-York Times, 18, 19, 21, 22 Sept.; 30 Oct.; 7 Dec. 1857; 7 Jan. 1858.

B. R. Burg is a member of the History Department at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287.