On Wednesday, September 27, 1854, at 4:45 p.m. the steamship Arctic, the largest, fastest, and grandest liner of her day, was lost in the North Atlantic. Out of her 233 passengers and 150 crew, only 86 survived. Most of those were crewmen.
"The public mind was altogether unprepared for the shock," said an editorial in the New York Herald, noting that she was long overdue on October 10 when word of the tragedy reached New York, but "...no one thought that so stout and good a ship had met with any disaster."
"The loss of the Arctic...has sent a thrill of grief to every community over the wide embrace of this entire Continent," said a writer in the Nautical Magazine of October 1854. That grief rapidly turned to anger as reports of the great ship's final four and one half hours became known. Her captain, said Harper's Monthly Magazine, "seems to have lost all command over his crew, most of whom indeed abandoned their duty, seized the boats, and sought to save themselves, regardless of others..."
Wrote an editor of the New York Daily Times, "In view of their conduct, one can scarcely help deploring their escape as much as the loss of the dead."
Slowly, news of the disaster spread to other parts of the country. In Washington and Annapolis, the family of twenty-two year old Stewart Holland clung to the hope that he would be among the survivors. A final accounting did not come until October 16, nearly three weeks after the ship went down.
"My son is not lost; I will not give him up," said Isaac Holland at his post in Washington as assistant sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate. In Annapolis, the young man's uncle and namesake, Henry Stewart Holland, shared the same hope. The boy was like a son. His mother died when Stewart was just five, and growing up, he spent as much time in Annapolis as Washington. When he was ten, his father sent him to live with his uncle and aunt when he enrolled Stewart in St. John's Grammar School. Young Annapolis cousins, Hollands and Sands, who had been his schoolmates and playmates, were shaken by the news. Stewart was well-liked, although he'd been spending less and less time in Annapolis since he went away to sea aboard the Collins liner Arctic.
Stewart was between voyages on July 14, 1853 when the first U.S. World's Fair opened at New York in a Crystal Palace Exposition modeled on London's Great Exhibition of 1851. On August 4, he wrote to a cousin in Annapolis, "I have been in New York 4 weeks and will sail on Saturday the 6th of August. I believe we will take over the ministers to France and England. We had a great day here that the Crystal Palace was open. I have not been inside yet and do not intend to go till I return....I had one good spell of sea sickness and I do not think I will have any more."
A touch of seasickness was a small price to pay for the privilege of a job aboard a Collins liner. The early 1850s were a glorious time for America's merchant marine. Entrepreneur and ship owner, Edward Knight Collins, backed by the prominent Brown family of New York bankers and subsidized by Congress, had built four magnificent ocean liners, the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Baltic. With them, Collins regained for the United States the supremacy of the seas, lost when the great American clipper ships succumbed to competition from ships of steam, most particularly Britain's Cunard Line.
Collins' giant wooden side-paddle steamers were more than 280 feet long, the largest craft on the ocean. They were designed to "sweep the Cunarders from the sea," and looked like they might do so. Their captains were the best and came to be known for their daring, breaking one speed record after another, and paring the crossing time to a little under ten days. They carried more freight and more passengers and in greater luxury and comfort than hitherto dreamed possible.
Passengers enjoyed such innovations as steam heat, a barber shop, and a level of cuisine previously found only ashore, and only in the finest of European restaurants. They were accommodated in luxurious staterooms, and whiled away their time in magnificently appointed public rooms. The exploits of Collins liners attracted national attention. Choosing one of the Collins ships to cross the Atlantic was akin to an act of patriotism. Indeed, the Arctic was dubbed "Pride of the Nation."
Little wonder that Stewart Holland sought his future aboard such a ship, and with the full encouragement of family and friends. Well, perhaps not all friends. Before signing aboard the Arctic, Stewart was a student engineer in the shop at the Washington Navy Yard. His decision to leave in the spring of 1852 apparently did not sit well with his friend, William Sanger, who expressed his feelings in a poem.
"On the second day of April, I was deserted by a friend, Who went away to New York A helping hand to lend On board one of those large steamers That plough the Atlantic's main That is, they run to Liverpool And then run back again. If I were only with him now, On board of that great boat, I'd be so very happy That I'd give away my coat. If he should happen to get hurt, When far away from me, I would then be desperate And go right out to sea. He was a friend of mine And I say it with great pride If he had what I had not He'd always with me divide."
The little scrap of verse had taken on grim meaning by the time Stewart's youngest sister Eliza shared it with her cousin Susie Sands in Annapolis four years later. By then, Stewart Holland was a national figure, a hero, one of very few created by the tragic events of September 27, 1854.
The Arctic was one week out of Liverpool on Wednesday, September 27. Known for record-breaking times, the ship was due in New York in another three days. She was running at top speed, near thirteen knots. As usual, her captain James Luce entertained a full complement of illustrious passengers, including the wife, nineteen-year-old daughter, and fifteen-year-old son of the line's owner Edward Knight Collins, and several daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren of James Brown, also an owner. Finally, Captain Luce had with him on the voyage his eleven year old son Willie. Crippled from birth, the boy was along for his health.
The passengers couldn't have asked for better weather during the first seven days at sea. They spent the better part of every day sunning on the decks, and weren't pleased on the morning of their 7th day out, when the Arctic drove into a bank of heavy fog 60 miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland. The sea picked up a chop and took on a thick murky look. As the temperature of the air plummeted to a damp and bone-chilling 40 degrees, the passengers hurried below to seek out the dry warmth of their staterooms or the Grand Saloon.
On the bridge, Captain Luce and his officers were unconcerned. The fog off Newfoundland was nothing unusual. Luce set lookouts and ordered his officers to maintain their course and speed. It was 12 noon. In the same fog bank, another vessel's captain reached the same decision. The 250 ton, iron-hulled steamer Vesta continued to plow doggedly through the soup.
In the engineers' mess room aboard the Arctic, the messboy was putting lunch on the table for those who had just come off watch. Stewart Holland was among those preparing to sit down to the midday meal when they heard the bell in the machine room signal to stop the engines and then almost immediately clanged again to order full speed astern.
Whoever actually cried the first alarm at 12:15 p.m., the lookout on the tiny Vesta undoubtedly experienced the greatest fear at seeing the 2,856-ton leviathan bearing down upon his ship from out of the mists.
So great was the difference in the ships' sizes that not a one of the Arctic's engineers in their mess room felt the impact when the Vesta struck their ship, but the sudden order to stop told them something was wrong. Within minutes, the engineers on duty in the engine room below discovered water rising in the bilges. It continued to rise at alarming speed and soon was sloshing over the shoes of the firemen tending the lower furnaces. On the bridge, Captain Luce sent men forward to check on the damage, but his main concern was the condition of the smaller vessel which he could see had lost a large portion of her bow. Assuming his ship had suffered less than the Vesta in the collision, Luce cirled the smaller vessel and ordered the first mate and six men to launch a boat and go to her aid.
Aboard the Vesta, several men were injured and one killed. Panicked, thirteen of her passengers, most of them French fishermen, put a lifeboat over. While the damage to the Vesta was considerable, the steamer, with her iron hull and watertight bulkheads, was still seaworthy. Her captain rallied his crew and passengers and got her underway again. Figuring the Arctic could take care of herself and would pick up the men who had so foolishly deserted his ship, he set the Vesta's course for Newfoundland, leaving the Arctic behind in the fog.
Both ships' captains were gravely mistaken in their assumptions about the larger ship's strength. Not only was the Arctic's hull of wood, she had no watertight bulkheads. Like a battering ram, the iron-hulled Vesta had pierced the giant ship three times, about sixty feet aft of her stem. Mattresses, canvas sails, nothing would stop the flow of water pouring in at the rate of 1,000 gallons a second.
By 12:30 p.m., Luce had realized the danger, but too late. Full speed ahead, he told the chief engineer. If they could keep the paddle wheels turning, and the ship afloat, maybe they could reach Newfoundland or at least get close enough for help to reach them before the ship went down.
There was no time to pick up his first officer and the men in the Arctic's lifeboat, and as she picked up speed, the ship ran too close to the Vesta's boat. The giant wheel crushed the little boat. One fisherman out of the thirteen aboard was able to jump free and was pulled up onto the deck of the Arctic. The men in the Arctic's lifeboat were never seen again. The Vesta made it safely to St. John, Newfoundland three days later.
The Arctic's forward motion only increased the flow of water filling the ship from stem to stern. At 12:45 p.m., the water drowned the fires in the lower furnace, engulfing the firemen in clouds of burning steam and smoke. They fled to the decks above, followed by most of the men tending the upper furnace. A single engineer and a handful of firemen remained to feed the fires that kept the steam up and the paddle wheels turning.
With one lifeboat gone, the Arctic was left with five to handle 233 passengers and some 150 crew. Neither custom nor law required a place in a lifeboat for every person aboard. Even if all six boats were available, and were loaded with care and discipline, they could have held, at most, 220 people. Discipline, however, was nonexistant. Defying their captain and ages old tradition, many of the crew and stronger male passengers ignored the pleas of terrified women and children and fought their way into the lifeboats.
A small number of women and children were put into the first boat to get away at around 1 p.m., but most of the places were taken up by male passengers and crew. The boat and its twenty-eight occupants disappeared without a trace. A second boat, with a dozen women and children and a few men was being lowered when a gang of firemen leapt aboard. The foreward tackle broke and all but two men and one woman were dumped into the sea and drowned. The dangling boat was quickly righted and launched with one male passenger and eighteen members of the crew aboard. This was followed by a third boat occupied by the ship's second mate and twenty-five other men.
The last man abandoned the engine rooms at 1:30 as the water drowned the fires in the upper furnace. Almost immediately, the steam pressure dropped, the paddle wheels stopped their labored churning, and the ship came to a shuddering halt. While attention was directed elsewhere, the chief engineer and about fifteen other engineers and firemen slipped away in a fourth boat, which, in the final accounting, was among the missing.
Most of the crew and all but one of the lifeboats were gone by 2:25. The third mate, Francis Dorian, was the only officer remaining to help the Captain in his efforts to save more of the passengers. Luce still hoped that some other ship would come to the Arctic's rescue, and when he happened upon Stewart Holland, he ordered the young man to station himself at the signal gun and fire it once a minute.
Three hours after the collision, Dorian, assisted by two passengers, a steward, and three firemen, began to build a raft out of the Arctic's spars, gratings, doors, and planks ripped from the ship. At one point, while searching for materials, Dorian passed through the Grand Saloon. The oppulence of the room was a mockery of the despair of those who had gathered there. Men lay sprawled across the plush sofas. Some had fainted; others had escaped the horror they faced by drinking themselves into a stupor. "The ladies were in little groups," Dorian later recalled, "clasped together, strangely quiet and resigned." They "exhibited the most admirable coolness and stared death in the face with a heroism which should have put to the blush the men who deserted and left them to their fate."
Out on the deck, Dorian found a scene no more heartening. "Everywhere were strong stout men, on their knees in prayer, or wandering stupified and deaf to all entreaties for help in saving themselves and others."
In the midst of all that, Dorian was surprised when he came upon Stewart Holland, still at the signal gun, firing once a minute as the Captain had ordered. "He must have had a good chance to get in the chief engineer's boat and be saved," said Dorian, "but he did not, it seems, make the slightest exertion to save himself whilst there was duty to be done on shipboard."
Later, Dorian ran into Holland pushing through the helpless throng that clogged the decks. His supply of gunpowder had run out and he was searching for the key to the storeroom. "Never mind the key!" said Dorian. "Take an ax and break open the door." Without a backward look, Holland was gone.
To work on the raft in the water, the men launched the last lifeboat. For a while Dorian maintained control of the boat, but, then at 4:35, word spread that the Arctic was about to go down. The last firemen, waiters, and sailors aboard rushed Dorian and the lifeboat. Luce tore the shirt off one sailor in trying unsuccessfully to keep him on the ship. "It was every man for himself," said the man later. "Life was as sweet to us as to others."
Thirty-one men filled and nearly swamped the boat. To prevent more from trying to get aboard, Dorian cut it loose. He and the others paddled with their hands to get clear of the ship and the raft, which someone also cut loose with seventy-two men and four women clinging to it.
On the ship 156 passengers and crew remained. Among them was James Luce who climbed with his son Willie to the top of the starboard paddle box, there to await the inevitable. It came at 4:45 p.m. when the bow of the Arctic rose skyward, and with a "fearful shriek," the great ship slid backward into the sea. Eighty feet away, Dorian watched from the lifeboat. To his amazement, he saw Stewart Holland "in the very act of firing as the vessel disappeared below the water." The screams and groans of the passengers were drowned by the wail of air rushing from the ship's funnel. She sank with a hiss of steam and then a gurgle and watery rumble as wreckage came bubbling to the surface.
Captain Luce, still holding his son, was dragged down with the ship, but then was spewed back up to the surface. Wrenched from his father's arms, Willie miraculously appeared a short distance away on the surface of the ocean. Luce very nearly had him in his grasp again when suddenly, the paddle box, which had been torn loose, breached beside them. The huge box grazed Luce but fell with its full weight upon the boy. Luce searched frantically for his child. All around him in the water, were people, crying to each other and to God for help. Men, women, children, it was hard to distinguish one from another, hard to tell the living from the dead floating amidst the wreckage. James Luce finally found his son, "a lifeless corpse on the surface of the waves." Stunned by the horror of it, he could do nothing else but save himself if he could.
The paddle box that had killed his son floated nearby, and Luce with eleven other men pulled himself up on it. The captain found a length of rope and tied it to a post protruding from the box to give himself something to hold onto to keep the waves from washing him away. The other men held onto him. Only Luce and two others remained when early Friday afternoon, September 29, they were sighted by the ship Cambria and picked up. In all, the Cambria rescued ten survivors and delivered them to Quebec on October 14. By then, the first two lifeboats to get away from the Arctic had reached Newfoundland. Also rescued were Francis Dorian, the rest of his lifeboat's occupants, and the sole survivor of the large raft. The cold and choppy seas had claimed the other seventy-five. Eighteen of the latter arrived in New York late Tuesday evening, October 10, two weeks after the Arctic went down. Until that time, the fate of the great Collins' liner was unknown.
Edward K. Collins was enroute from Washington to New York and heard the news at 4 a.m. on the eleventh as he got off the Jersey ferry. He did not learn for four days that he'd lost his wife and two children. The rest of New York awoke to the cries of newsboys with the first news of the disaster.
As sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate, Isaac Holland was probably in a position to receive the earliest reports to reach Washington. Francis Dorian, among the first survivors to arrive in the U.S., wrote to Isaac Holland to tell him of "the merits of your noble boy...His whole conduct can be accounted for by the simple word duty and nothing else...The right side of his face was black with powder...[but] when he spoke his countenance seemed lighted up with something like a quiet smile."
Isaac Holland consoled himself with that knowledge, saying, "...better a thousand times that he should perish in the manly discharge of his duty, than have saved a craven life of such cowardice and selfishness as marked the conduct of many of the crew."
Holland was not alone in his feelings about the Arctic's crew. Horror over the tragedy turned to anger when Americans learned that out of the 383 on board the liner only 86 were saved and seventy percent of those were members of the crew. Not a single woman or child survived.
William Sanger's poem, written two years before his friend Stewart Holland's death, was all but lost in the effusion of poetry that appeared after the loss of the Arctic. The literary outpouring was explained by one writer in the preface to a poem published in the New York Journal of Commerce.
"Amidst all the terrible incidents attendent upon the destruction of the Arctic, which we have been receiving these few days past, there is one that impresses us with a feeling of awe and admiration, and shows all the world that the age of heroes is not altogether gone by. We refer to the young man, Stewart Holland...While all around him were death and despair, in bold relief there he stood...with the calm determination of a true hero, discharging gun after gun, until the gallant ship went down beneath the waves.."
Despite the disgrace and tragedy of the Arctic's loss, the Collins Line's remaining three ships, the Atlantic, Pacific, and Baltic, continued to sail with full cargo holds and in 1855 carried a record 7,176 passengers. Encouraged by a new government subsidy, Collins ordered work to begin on a new steamship. The future looked bright until January 1856, when the Pacific left Liverpool with 150 passengers and was never heard from again. Several weeks later, broken pieces of furniture, ornamental doors, a lady's workbox, and other wreckage that could have come from a luxury liner were sighted on a field of floating ice and it was concluded that the steamer collided with an iceberg.
This second disaster, coupled with a downturn in the economy and a Congressional change of heart, marked the beginning of the end of the Collins Line. Even the launching of the Adriatic, larger, faster, and grander than her predecessors, could not save the business. This last ship built for the once glorious Collins Line made a single voyage in November 1857. The Atlantic and the Baltic each made one more crossing and, then, with the Adriatic, went out of service to be sold at auction in 1858 for a token payment of $50,000.
None would have predicted such an ignominious end to a line of ships whose launchings in 1850 were events on the order of the opening of the Crystal Palace which Stewart Holland witnessed in 1853. Collins' ships were the most magnificent vessels of their day, credited with breaking British domination of Atlantic commerce and restoring America's maritime prestige. Yet, in the end, the line was most often remembered for the loss of the Arctic, the cowardice of that ship's crew, and the apparent selfless devotion to duty of a young man named Stewart Holland.