SYMHC Classics: S.S. Arctic

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. The ss Arctic sank on September twenty seventh, eighteen fifty four, or one hundred and seventy one years ago today on the day this episode is coming out. Our episode on this disaster is Today's Saturday Classic.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: Please excuse our pronouncing the word Newfoundland the way we were taught to pronounce it in school, which is also how it's listed as pronounced in American English dictionaries, rather than the way many Canadians have told us that it ought to be pronounced. This episode originally came out on January fifteenth, twenty fourteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:51
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fryed, I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: And if there's a thing we get lots of requests for, it is more maritime and ship yep. So we're going to head back to the ocean today. And this particular incident is often held in a particularly tragic light because it seems that in the sinking of this ship, which was the ss Arctic, the what we now today perceive as a rule of women and children first, and.

00:01:19
Speaker 1: The captain goes down to this ship. Those things did not hold true. None of the women or children aboard the vessel survived the sinking spoiler alert. And the captain did survive, even though he.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Did not expect to. Yeah, he did not abandon ship, but he did survive the ordeal. Yeah, we'll also talk about this whole women and children first idea. Yeah, end of the episode. Yeah, once we have all this context under our belts. Yeah, there's some cool modern statistical analysis that's been done as well as some research on sort of where that concept came from, and it puts things in an interesting light I think when we talk about shipwrecks. Yeah, so we're gonna start was talking about the SS Arctic and it was completed in eighteen fifty and by every account, it was a really glorious ship. She was the third of four Atlantic steamers and the Colins Fleet, and they were recognized as just the finest of their time when they were introduced. The other ships were the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Baltic.

00:02:18
Speaker 1: And the Pride of the Collins Line of New York, which was founded by Edward Knightcollins. The Arctic was a wooden hull paddelwheel steamer that was designed to carry both cargo a small amount and up to two hundred passengers, although the passenger space was expanded to accommodate two hundred and eighty passengers in eighteen fifty one. And it was two hundred and eighty five feet long, which is about eighty seven meters, and it weighed in at two eight hundred and fifty six tons.

00:02:48
Speaker 2: Although it launched on January twenty first, eighteen fifty its maiden voyage didn't happen until October twenty seventh of that year.

00:02:55
Speaker 1: And like her three sister ships, the Arctic could maintain a speed of twelve knot, which was really fast for the time, and in February of eighteen fifty two, the Arctic set a record for the fastest eastbound crossing of the Atlantic, hitting a speed of more than thirteen knots and sustaining it for a while. When the Arctic started its career, it was part of a lucrative contract that the Collins Line had with the United States Government to be a mail runner between America and Great Britain, and in addition to their income from mail service, they competed with the well established Canard line, which came out of Britain for passenger service. Yeah, and initially the Colins line did very well against Kinnard. Their ships were really big and beautiful, they were brand new. They could run several knots faster than the Cunard fleet. But the cost of ongoing maintenance of this advanced machinery that was in the Colin ships did draw off some of their competitive edge and sometimes it would put their ships out of rotation while they were being serviced. So when you see sort of a business analysis of the situation, it's Collins arrived on the scene and initially stole a lot of business from Kunard, and then it kind of leveled out as it became apparent that, you know, they couldn't always be running all of the ships, and it did cost a lot, so their initial wide profit margin shrank a little bit as it had to be allocated into just maintaining the fleet.

00:04:21
Speaker 2: On Wednesday, September twentieth, eighteen fifty four, the SS Arctic departed from Liverpool on what would it be its last voyage. On board were two hundred and thirty three passengers and one hundred and fifty or so crew members. The captain was James C. Loose and on September twenty seventh, so a week into the voyage, the ship entered into a thick fog while it was approaching the Grand Banks, which is southeast of Newfoundland, Canada. Also in the fog was the French vessel Vesta, which was headed for grand Ville, France. When the Vesta was spotted, they sounded the alarm, but both ships traveling at full speed and it was just too late.

00:05:02
Speaker 1: A collision was unavoidable at that point. And while it may sound incredibly reckless for a ship to be running a head full in dicey visibility, it was actually policy at this time in the Collins line to run through a fog as quickly as possible so that they could clear the visual obstruction in the shortest possible time. Yes, this policy was as unwise as it sounds, though it was not uncommon for ships to do this at the time because the Vesta was doing a similar thing. So I feel like it's important to mention that this was not a poor judgment call on the captain's part. That was just standard operating procedure right to get into fog and gun it. It does in sort of a Hindenburg kind of a situation. Yeah, in hindsight, what a poor idea. Both of the ships were damaged in the collision, and initially it was believed that the Vesta, in spite of having this eye iron hull, had been damaged much worse. This belief was so pervasive that the passengers and the crew of the Vesta started traveling to the Arctic. But it became quickly apparent that the Arctic was sinking and was not going to help anybody in the situation, and the Arctic's wooden hull had been basically annihilated by the iron hull of the Vesta. There were multiple holes, and the ship quickly took on water, and the speed of the ocean rushing in through these multiple large holes caused a panic aboard the Arctic. The captain directed the crew to point the ship toward the closest land, which was Cape Race, and they started to accelerate toward it, but they took on more and more water and started to sink faster. Within four hours, the ship's furnaces were taking on water and that just stopped the steamer dead. And meanwhile, the panicked crewmen did not follow the captain's orders to prioritize the lives of the women and children and instead dead, many of them jumped into the lifeboats themselves.

00:07:03
Speaker 2: The first attempts to launch the lifeboats resulted in those boats being destroyed and the men aboard were lost. Subsequent boats did launch successfully, but most of them were lost at sea. A large raft that was assembled from the wreckage started out with nearly eighty passengers. All but one of them were eventually swept into the water, and only two of the lifeboats reached Newfoundland, carrying a total of forty five men, and two thirds of those men were I think it's thirty one men and fourteen as the numbers. Two thirds were crew members and only fourteen were passengers. Captain Luce had tried to save his unconscious son, although as the ship continued to break apart, he was hit in the head by a piece of debris and killed. The captain managed to scramble aboard a paddle box and use it as a raft, and he and two other men were eventually we picked up by the Cambria. The Cambria was captained by John Russell, and it picked them up on September twenty ninth, so all one hundred and nine of the women and children that were aboard were killed, as well as one hundred and forty nine male passengers and ninety two crew members. And then I think we should have a note on these numbers, because the actual number of deceased fluctuates a good bit amongst accounts, you'll see anywhere from two eighty five to three fifty one listed, So the counts, even in women and children, passengers, and crews, should not be taken as absolute. Some passengers managed to make it to the Vesta and they would have been theoretically reported, and others were picked up adrift in the water, but they there wasn't always a clear line of record as to what had happened to everybody. So even like the captain's account, which we'll get to in a bit, he lists the two hundred and thirty three passengers, but their historical accounts will list different ones. So just keep that in mind that there's some sponginess to the math on this whole thing.

00:09:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:09:07
Speaker 2: Well, and at the point that he was rescued, he'd been in the water for a couple of days. Yeah, so we cannot imagine his mental state, although based on his description, which we'll get too shortly. It was an extremely rough experience as you would imagine, also aboard the ship during this wreck, where E. K. Collins's wife and his children and they, naturally, based on those numbers that we just said, did not survive. The Vesta did manage to make port in Saint John's three days after the collision, and accounts of the time kind of talked about the great skill of her captain at managing to take that damage ship into port. But before we get to the next little bit of business and how this affected the Collins line, would you like to take a moment and talk about our sponsors.

00:09:54
Speaker 1: Let's do that.

00:10:05
Speaker 2: So let's get back to what happened once people realized the death toll.

00:10:12
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, as news of this horrible incident reached news outlets and the shore, the disproportionate amount of the crew survivors versus passenger caused a major scandal on both sides of the Atlantic, and it really really set in motion what was eventually the financial ruin of the Collins line.

00:10:37
Speaker 2: While the American Maritime Company had initially been a huge threat to the established Quneard line of Britain, the Singing of the Arctic, followed by the disappearance of the Pacific during a voyage in eighteen fifty six, meant that the Collins line was basically finished, despite attempts to revive their reputation with a new and larger vessel named the Adriatic. They went and bank just a few years after the Pacific was lost, and.

00:11:03
Speaker 1: As a point of interest, the Kunard line is still in business today. They did quite well for themselves and survived. And now we get to Captain Luce's account of what happened. So on October fourteenth of eighteen fifty four in Quebec, the captain wrote a letter to E. K. Collins to describe the incident and notify him of his family member's deaths. And the letter begins with Dear sir, it becomes my painful duty to inform you of the total loss of the Arctic under my command, with many lives, and I fear among them must be included your own wife, daughter and son, of whom I took a last leave the moment the ship was going down, without ever expecting to see the light of another day. To give you an account of the heartrending scene. He goes on to say that about fifteen minutes after leaving the deck at noon, he heard hard starboard called out from the officers of the deck, and immediately after the crash, Loose himself believed that the primary goal that he and the crew should focus on should be the rescue of the people aboard the Vesta. They really did think that the Vesta was the one that was going to go down, and his account says that his first officer took six men and one of the boats with the intent that they were going over to the Vesta to collect people to bring back to the Arctic. He also describes the general state of panic and the abandonment of the women and children. He writes, finding the leak gaining on us very fast, notwithstanding all our very powerful efforts to keep her free, I resolved to get the boats ready and as many ladies and children placed in them as possible. But no sooner had the attempt been made than the firemen and others rushed into them in spite of opposition. Seeing this state of things, I ordered the boats astern to be kept in readiness until order could be restored. When, to my dismay, I saw them cut the ropes in the bow and soon disappear as stern in the fog. Another boat was broken down by the persons rushing at the davits, and many were precipitated into the sea and drowned. This occurred while I had been engaged in setting the starboard guard boat ready and placed the second officer in charge, when the same fearful scene is what the first boat was being enacted. Men leaping from the top of the rail twenty feet, pushing and maiming those who were in the boat. So quite clearly not exactly noble or chivalrous behavior. And this is a quick side note. When we reference firemen in this instance you probably know by context, but they mean the people that are working in the steam engine area, not firemen in the modern sense of people that deal with fires. One of his officers, who was a mister Dorian, did try to get a boat filled with women and children loaded, but when an alarm sounded signaling that the ship was sinking, the boat was really hastily shoved off with no oars or other safety equipment. Yeah, it sounds like he tried to keep the oars out of the boat on purpose, so that these gentlemen that were rushing the boats and just trying to take them would not be as tempted to. But as a consequence, those oars got left behind when the boat was shoved off without sort of a proper check, and Luce describes the sinking, and he says, in an instant, about a quarter to five pm, the ship went down, carrying every soul on board with her. I soon found myself on a surface after a brief struggling, with my own helpless child in my arms. And when again I felt myself impelled downwards to a great depth, And before I reached the surface a second time, had nearly perished and lost the hold of my child. As I again struggled to the surface of the water, a most awful and heartrending scene presented itself to my view. Over two hundred men, women and children struggling together amidst pieces of wreck of every kind, calling on each other for help and imploring God to assist them. Such an appalling scene, May God preserve me from ever witnessing again.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: LuSE goes on to give an account of losing his son and watching the others die slowly around him during the days of drift, And it's truly harrowing.

00:15:08
Speaker 1: It really is. It's so it's one of those letters that's clearly written from the point of view of a man who is trying to do his job and write a report and is clearly messed up by the whole thing. And it should be noted that he captained nine other vessels before taking his position on the Arctic, and he had lost only two of them, which was actually quite a good record. He was considered to be a really skillful navigator and a very able captain. And according to his obituary, when he returned to his hometown of Yonkers, New York after this incident, he quote found two long lines of citizens formed through which he walked, receiving warm congratulations and hearty welcome.

00:15:46
Speaker 2: He then went on to work for more than two decades as an inspector for the Great Western Marine Insurance Company, and he died in July eighteen seventy nine of heart disease. He was seventy nine years old. And we're going to pause one more moment and take another word from a sponsor, and then we're going to talk about some modern analysis of this stuff. Yeah, so, now let's look at this whole idea of women and children first. Yeah, that's one of those things where it's a good question to ask where it came from and sort of how that happened. And it's in an interesting coda to this issue. There was a study that was performed by the Uppsala University in Sweden and it was published in July of twenty twelve, and it suggested that women and children actually have the least likelihood of survival in a maritime disaster. This study was co authored by two economists, Mikhail Ellender and Oscar Erickson, and they analyzed data from eighteen shipwrecks that happened between eighteen fifty two and twenty eleven. They only included the instance that involved at least one hundred people with at least five percent surviving and at least five percent dying, and these statistics took into account the fates of more than fifteen thousand people from thirty countries. Yeah, and those numbers kind of gave me a bit of a jolt at first, and like, fifteen thousand people, but it's only eighteen shipwrecks, and when you're thinking about it in the context of a shipwreck like this, where it's roughly three hundred ish people. That seems impossible math, But then when you think about the more modern ones right, Cruise liners, for example, can carry anywhere between two to six thousand people depending on their size, so that kind of makes up for those what seems like a big number gap maybe on first look. And the Titanic, which was included in this study, had three times more women survive the incident than men, but this turned out to be the exception rather than the rule. A similar outlier was the HMS Birkenhead, which sank in eighteen fifty two, and in fact, the Women and Children First Rule is sometimes referred to as the Birkenhead drill because that ship, sinking off the coast of South Africa is usually recognized as the first time that order was ever given. So all of the women and children that had been aboard the Birkenhead did actually survive, while many soldiers just stood there silently, sinking with the ship into shark infested waters. According to Ellender and Ericsson's findings, women were only half as likely to survive a shipwreck as men. Crew members had an eighteen point seven percent greater chance of survival than passengers, and only seven out of sixteen captains actually went down with the ship and their data set. And furthermore, women had the worst survival rates on British vessels, even though the women and Children first Order is documented as having been given much more frequently on British ships than other vessels. Yeah, and today people look at it as sort of a Victorian British sensibility in particular.

00:19:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:19:02
Speaker 2: Prior to this research, there had been a theory that selfish behavior would more likely erupt on fast sinking ships, while a slower sinking would allow people who were involved to stay calmer and exhibit more socially accepted behavior patterns.

00:19:17
Speaker 1: But Elsinder and Erickson found that it was actually the captain's behavior rather than a time sensitive situation, that tended to determine the crew's behavior. So in only five of those eighteen sinkings that they studied was the women and Children first order issued by a captain. Ellender frames this information as an insight into human behavior. He says, although maritime disasters are tragic events, they can contribute to our understanding of how people behave under extreme stress and when it is a matter of life and death. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where it's easy to kind of vilify people or kind of judge them for their behavior. But I I don't know how I would react in such a moment. I don't think you know until you're in it. Yeah, well, as you've undergone very specific like emergency style training, right. Well, in their particular study looks generally at the question of men and women, but not some of the other factors that influence who makes it off the ship and who doesn't. Like on the Titanic, for example, first class women and children had a pretty astounding survival rate, but women and children in steerage did not so much. Yeah, so it was not quite so much women and children first as it was rich women and children first when it came to in the Titanic in particular, I kind of after I read your notes, I kind of went down this rabbit hole of the whole idea of women and children first and where it comes from and what it means today when since when it first came about was in the eighteen fifties, and that was a very different time in terms of gender relation and relations and sort of the perception of women as both whether women were perceived as weak or strong and whether women were perceived as like actual autonomous people or objects. Right, So I kind of went down a crazy rabbit hole of that, and it reminded me in a way of how I've traveled by ship several times in the past few years, and we always have a safety drill, and the safety drill is always about getting everyone off the ship. It's about like every person knowing where they need to go to get on a lifeboat, and every ship having enough lifeboat accommodations for every person on the ship to make it off safely. Yep.

00:21:37
Speaker 2: And the only real reference to children that has come up in the ships that I have been on has been that for the parents, if their children are not with them, the parents are to go to their lifeboat station and their children will be brought to them by crew, because all the children have to have little wristbands or whatever on saying this is my lifeboat station. So it's like there are still special accommodations for children, but other accommodations seem to be based on actual threats to people's safety, people who may have a mobility impairment that need to be assisted with getting off the ship, and not so much based on gender or class yeah, and it is also a very different time in terms of now this is kind of always referenced as part of the Titanic's legacy. Now there are enough lifeboats for everyone. They did that on purpose, yes, whereas there were not. That was not standard operating procedure for a very long time, right, So it did become a matter of who do we save? And there have been some interesting discussions if you kind of trawl around the internet and like maritime interest boards at all, where discussions will come up of well, women and children are less likely just physically to survive something like hypothermia adrift at sea than men might. So in saying women and children first, are we in fact doing everyone to die? It's into a very interesting arena of discussion and can get very heated very quickly. So you are not ready for very grown up angry talk. Don't visit those boards. No, it definitely does seem to come from a sense of like chivalry. Yeah, and what we might classify today is benevolent sexism, which I don't think we've talked about that on this podcast, but we have on our prior podcast before talked about the idea that there's sometimes sexism is intended, yeah, to be benevolent, even though it doesn't really play out that way when you follow it to its logical end. So it's framed that way rather than any kind of practical sense of actually ensuring the survivability of the group.

00:23:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, it gets into very interesting stuff and I like that there. The study that was done in Sweden to analyze all of this covered such a nice wide range of you know, eighteen fifties to modern day cruise ships, right, because that's a pretty wide For example, now we have enough boats for everybody. But even so they're finding that still, yeah, men have better survival right.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: Well, the differences between first class and what used to be called steerage are much different now.

00:24:13
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so that's today's maritime story. Uh, we'll have more, I'm sure, but everybody loves a good shipwreck tale and it did. This one is interesting to me because it did bring up so many interesting questions about, uh, how people handle panic and fear and yeah, I can't judge anybody. I don't I don't know what I would do.

00:24:41
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.