Ships were lost during these dark voyages, and said to have had a bad habit of sinking in calm weather, but the official explanation was that they went down because of the negligence of their crews, and that they were lost to a large extent through incompetence or carelessness. There were many cases of the crew deserting before the ship was wrecked, and deserting in the open boats before the ship sank, making for the nearest port in their small boats with the crew of their ship. In an average of some four hundred cases, the total loss of life was some two thousand five hundred men. The most numerous part of these wrecks was in the neighborhood of the Azores, where they usually went down in heavy weather on the night of a full moon. The ships in most cases sailed from these islands, were under the command of merchant captains, and the men, women, and children who drowned were mostly of British subjects. Here is a list of twenty-five of these great disasters.
The names of the ships are not always given; but when they are, the dates are the dates of the arrival at the United States.
1. San Francisco, Sept. 9, 1790, in lat. 40 degrees 46 min. S., long. 69 degrees 12 min. W.
2. Aurora, Sept. 14, 1795, lat. 41 degrees 23 min. S., long. 58 degrees 43 min. W.
3. Pensacola, April 9, 1797, lat. 37 degrees 24 min. S., long. 21 degrees 36 min. W.
4. St. Agathe, Sept. 4, 1797, lat. 38 degrees 6 min. S., long. 34 degrees 34 min. W.
5. Friendship, Sept. 7, 1800, in lat. 40 degrees 59 min. S., long. 72 degrees 12 min. W.
6. Union, Sept. 5, 1800, in lat. 36 degrees 30 min. S., long. 46 degrees 24 min. W.
7. Silesia, Aug. 31, 1801, lat. 35 degrees 18 min. S., long. 55 degrees 47 min. W.
8. Minerva, July 20, 1802, in lat. 34 degrees 35 min. S., long. 45 degrees 54 min. W.
9. Sirius, Sept. 3, 1805, in lat. 35 degrees 37 min. S., long. 28 degrees 18 min. W.
10. Concord, Oct. 9, 1807, in lat. 37 degrees 30 min. S., long. 11 degrees 30 min. W.
11. Medusa, Nov. 4, 1811, in lat. 36 degrees 12 min. S., long. 24 degrees 12 min. W.
12. Cumberland, Nov. 17, 1811, in lat. 34 degrees 56 min. S., long. 12 degrees 45 min. W.
13. Essex, Oct. 21, 1811, in lat. 30 degrees 30 min. S., long. 28 degrees 5 min. W.
14. Courier, Nov. 19, 1811, in lat. 33 degrees 20 min. S., long. 9 degrees 17 min. W.
15. London, Dec. 3, 1811, in lat. 28 degrees 16 min. S., long. 2 degrees 6 min. W.
16. Essex, May 7, 1812, in lat. 32 degrees 36 min. S., long. 29 degrees 34 min. W.
17. Marquis of Wellington, March 26, 1812, in lat. 39 degrees 54 min. S., long. 17 degrees 24 min. W.
18. London, July 28, 1812, in lat. 37 degrees 38 min. S., long. 9 degrees 15 min. W.
19. Essex, Aug. 25, 1812, in lat. 38 degrees 6 min. S., long. 29 degrees 13 min. W.
20. Sir John Franklin, Feb. 13, 1814, in lat. 54 degrees 48 min. S., long. 83 degrees 44 min. W.
21. Albion, Nov. 2, 1814, in lat. 40 degrees 13 min. S., long. 16 degrees 44 min. W.
22. Tremendous, Nov. 9, 1814, in lat. 38 degrees 43 min. S., long. 16 degrees 32 min. W.
23. Tartar, Nov. 16, 1814, in lat. 36 degrees 6 min. S., long. 9 degrees 51 min. W.
24. St. Lawrence, May 7, 1815, in lat. 45 degrees 26 min. S., long. 10 degrees 26 min. W.
25. Waterloo, July 26, 1815, in lat. 44 degrees 15 min. S., long. 46 degrees 3 min. W.
No man can read the list of names in this catastrophe without a sense of their awful reality. What a spectacle these people made as they went on board in their small boats, rowing or sailing out from shore to bring their lives to the rescue! Every one will look at the list with that painful realization, and perhaps ask himself if his family was not among those lost, in some of these terrible scenes. On the whole, though the loss of life was so large, we must consider that it was the result of the policy of the English, as it had been for a long time a law of Nature. What is there unusual in these wrecks? Why do the poor passengers and crew die so in the course of every large commercial voyage? And as to that, consider their chances of life. A ship with seventy or eighty passengers is the home of two or three hundred people, and is going to load and unload hundreds of times, perhaps even hundreds of times at sea, and as this happens, the chance is constant of putting some little creature into the ocean, where he is as helpless as a chicken with its head cut off. When men were poor enough, when they had to provide for their own families, nobody thought much about such things, as there was neither the time nor the necessity for thinking.
The ship was the floating home. These people had no home, and, like migrating birds who pass the summer in the country, or even on the sea, they left all their old friends to die. Every year there was a great exodus, and as they grew poorer and poorer, their homes became more and more miserable, and their health was ruined by bad food and bad air. The result of all this was that more and more took to seafaring, and it became a calling of necessity. They knew the ropes in their old life, and now, when cast upon the sea of life, they knew nothing, and they never learned, and how could they, when they were always going back to that ship which was not a home, because it was not their home, but to which they were tied by the most merciless law of Nature?
That is what I was thinking about, while I was lying in my berth in the fore-cabin of the St. John, listening to the sound of the waves as they rolled lazily under the bottom of the ship. We had a nice enough supper at eight bells, for the Captain would not allow us to light a fire in the galley, though I wanted to cook some of my stuff. We had to do without wood, and I used to boil my pot by pouring boiling water in it out of the scuttle. I managed to cook an omelet, and also a piece of salt pork, and I had my biscuit. I was in a mood for singing songs, and I was greatly pleased with the captain's "Home, Sweet Home," and I was delighted with my supper. I ate with a relish, and the bread and butter were such as I have not tasted since I left Boston. It seemed to me the bread was lighter and better. How good every thing was to me, who had come so far without seeing a decent meal for four months!
The man at the wheel, Thomas, had a nice voice, and he sang in the quiet of the fore-cabin. It was "Sweet Home," and I noticed the time. It was a quarter of an hour past ten o'clock. Now I was lying on my sea-chest in a berth in the cabin, where I could not sleep, because I would have known it by my feelings, if I had been asleep. But in the cabin we lay down in a bunk, and this night I had taken the middle one, near where a little round window was. I looked about and noticed the strange faces of the men, in the steerage, and I tried to sleep but could not. The ship was very still in the calm, and the wheel clanked softly in the calm, and there was the sound of the wind among the shrouds, but that was all. I had a feeling of loneliness, and could not sleep. How differently from my sleeping on the hard floor of a forecastle! On such a night the loneliness of the sea is no more than that of the wilderness, and the feeling of the ship was much the same as that which one experiences on the prairies. I had to get up and walk up and down to keep myself from going crazy.
"I am sick of it," I said to myself; "oh, how I wish I were on shore, and free from all
