She was one of the largest, most luxurious ocean liners of her time. Her parent company was American owned, and in fierce competition with the Cunard Line for mastery of the Atlantic passenger and mail service. But we are not talking about the White Star Line and her Olympic class ships. Rather the time is almost 60 years earlier. The company trying to best Cunard was the Collin’s Line, and the pride of their fleet were the wooden hulled, paddle wheel steamers Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic.

Arctic was the latest of the three super liners, towering three stories over the wharf and with a length of 284 feet. From her launch she was commanded by an ocean veteran with a lifetime of service at sea, Captain James C. Luce. October, 1850 was the date of Arctic’s maiden voyage, and she proved to be a triumph, capturing the imagination of the passengers and the press in equal measure. But in a mere four years all that would change and the name of Arctic would go down in history as one of the most horrible maritime shipwrecks, rivaling and even surpassing the Titanic disaster, if not in the number of lives lost, in the manner of those deaths.

The tragedy of the Arctic has been mostly lost to history, except for those with an abiding interest in the history of steamship service. Only one previous book has been written about the disaster. That book was aptly titled Women and Children Last. The Loss of the Steamship Arctic, and it was written by Alexander Crosby Brown in 1961.

David Shaw has done a masterful job of bringing the story of the Arctic to a modern audience, not only in retelling the story as effectively as Brown did in the 1960’s, but in expanding the amount of material covered as well. Brown pretty much focused his entire book on the disaster itself. But Shaw adds valuable new information that Brown did not cover. Of particular importance is the excellent overview of how the rivalries between the liner companies drove the shipping industry during this time in history.

Shaw opens the book with a chapter on Luce’s days captaining the Red Star sailing packet Constellation. Luce was a successful mariner who had spent his entire career in the sailing ships. Luce is introduced to us as a stern but fair master who championed against the unnecessarily brutal discipline found in many American sailing ships at that time.

Despite his expertise in sail, he saw that the future was going to be in steam. His promotion to the captain of one of Collin’s new paddle wheelers was a remarkable achievement, beating out a host of applicants with equal credentials.

The next several chapters cover the maiden voyage and early years of steaming on the Arctic, a time of great pressure on her captain to maintain a schedule and achieve the fastest crossings that could humanly be achieved. Luce rose to the challenge and was admired by his superiors and passengers alike.

Then came the September 1854 voyage that was to change everything. Racing home from the Old World to the New, the Arctic was plunging full steam through heavy fog. Aboard were over 400 people comprising passengers and crew. Included in the passenger list was Mary Ann Collins, the wife of the owner of the company. The Collins’ daughter and son were also aboard as was the wife and children of James Brown, the President of the company’s family. Finally Captain Luce’s young invalid son, Willie, was also traveling with his father for the first time.

All proceeded smoothly until the Arctic reached the heavy trafficked areas near the Grand Banks. Suddenly from out of the fog came the propeller driven sailing ship, the Vesta. There was a practically head on collision and the Vesta’s bow was crushed and broken away. At first, Luce’s main concern was for the other vessel, as she was seriously crippled. He even sent his first mate with one of the Arctic’s few lifeboats to go to the aid of the other ship.

But it quickly became apparent, that the real danger was to the Arctic. Vesta had smashed several large holes in the Arctic’s bow and the ocean was flooding in. Astonishing as it is to believe, Arctic had no watertight bulkheads; the entire ship was open from stem to stern. Once he realized the danger, Luce was forced to abandon his first mate and make a run for shallow waters, hoping to ground the ship before the flooding reached the boilers. But it was a futile effort and before long, as the ship sank lower and lower, water reached and quenched the fires. Now there was not only no power for the engines, but no power for the pumps either.

All that was left was to abandon ship, and here the story turns the darkest. Unlike their British counterparts aboard Titanic who so bravely attempted to rescue as many of the women and children as possible, the American sailors of Arctic ran completely amok. Despite Captain Luce’s continuing efforts to restore order and focus on saving the passengers, he was thwarted at every turn by desertion and mutiny. As a result almost the entire compliment of passengers was left to sink with the ship, as was Luce. In the end there were just 86 survivors, and only 22 of them were passengers. Not one of the women or children were saved.

Shaw tells the story in a historical narrative style format. It is a particularly dramatic form, at times even including what people said and what they felt. The author claims to have made up nothing, only retelling what was actually stated in the documents of the time. The result is a powerful book, riveting in description and detail.

Unfortunately, there was no formal investigation into the loss of the Arctic, a critical blow to the authenticity of the evidence given by survivors. Instead the author was dependent on the newspaper reports of the time, making all testimony second hand at best.

The disaster made front page news in the American and British papers for a month, so there was apparently an abundance of material. Shaw tried to corroborate events by finding more than one source for as many of the details as he could. He gives credit to the news organizations as he found that most accounts did agree with each other, at least in the broader details.

Still, if you have read a lot about the Titanic disaster, you know how random the accuracy of newspaper reports could be. A great deal of material that made it into the papers about the Titanic was so completely wrong that either the survivors were delusional, or the reporters were spicing up their articles to make them more sensational. Unless the reporters of the 1850’s were an entirely different breed, I expect that there were similar examples of reporter misconduct in the Arctic news accounts.

Given this impediment, the author has probably come up with as reasonably accurate an account of events as can ever be determined. I can without reservation recommend this book to anyone interested in maritime disasters.

With thanks to Mike Poirer for bringing this book to my attention.