on 27th June 1849
On the 22nd of June Louisa sailed from Halifax on board the RMS Europa to join William in England. She had with her, her two month old child, William. The Europa was one of a class of four new paddle steamers that had been built in Scotland for the Cunard shipping line to carry the mails between Britain and North America. They provided a weekly service between the ports of Liverpool in England and Halifax, in Canada, and Boston or New York in the United States. Their service speed was 10 knots and the passage from Liverpool to Halifax took on average about ten days. Apart from carrying the mail they had accommodation for 140 1st Class passengers. The fare was £35 [£2600 in today’s (2006) money] [PAGE3721].
On Wednesday 27th, five days later, the Europa was half way across the Atlantic. It was a warm but foggy day with visibility of only a ship’s length. At about 3:30 pm, with the passengers relaxing on the upper deck, the peaceful scene was disturbed by a cry from the lookout reporting a sail ahead. The Europa’s helm was put hard a port and her engines stopped, but it was too late and she struck a sailing ship amidships tearing a large hole in her side. The vessel was the Charles Bartlett an American barque from Plymouth Conn. carrying emigrants and a cargo of heavy metals from London to New York. The doomed vessel, many of whose passengers had also been on the upper deck, sank within four minutes. Of the 176 crew and passengers on board, only 43 survived, 33 of which reached safety by climbing directly from the Charles Bartlett on to forecastle of the Europa.
After spending an hour searching for more survivors the Europa hoisted her boats and continued her passage.Click here [PAGE3722] and here [PAGE3723] for further details of this disaster.
We must now turn to the situation on board the Europa during its five day passage to Liverpool. Of the 176 souls on board the Charles Bartlett, 14 were members of the crew and 162 were passengers. Of the passengers, 40 were women and 36 children. A list of survivors [PAGE3724], compiled on board the Europa shows, that 12 were crew and 31 were passengers. Amongst the surviving passengers there were no children, and only one woman, who was travelling to America to join her husband. Amongst the survivors, only three of them had lost members of their immediate family, the most tragic case being a Dutch merchant who lost his wife and six children. In short the vast majority of the survivors were males travelling on their own. This fact spared the passengers of the Europa the difficult task of having to deal with a large number of cases of tragic bereavement. The small number of survivors and their backgrounds also prevented another potential problem from arising. Inevitably one might have expected the passengers of the two ships to have come from different parts of the social spectrum, but in fact the list shows that the majority of them were skilled craftsmen and merchants, whom the wealthy passengers of the Europa would have found it easier to mix with.
During the passage to Liverpool the passengers of the Europa took two initiatives. They collected the sum of £352 5s 0d (£26,000 in today’s money) for the relief of the survivors and they rather presumptuously appointed a committee to investigate the cause of the collision. In its report the committee summed its findings as follows “The undersigned having weighed all the circumstances of this painful and unparalled disaster, whereby about 136 souls found an untimely grave, feel bound to report that no blame can be attached to either party. We feel that everything was done by the commander, officers, and crew of the Europa to prevent the lamentable disaster, and everything tried after its occurrence to save lives and to minister to the comforts of the survivors.”
Not surprisingly this disaster was fully covered by the press of the day and a particularly dramatic version of events appeared in the The Times. We also have two contemporary accounts of the disaster, one from Captain Bartlett and another from Mr R.B. Forbes, [PAGE3723] a passenger from Boston, who showed great bravery while attempting to rescue survivors and was also responsible for compiling the list of survivors.
For those who have a special interest in early transatlantic liners there is a detailed account of a less eventful voyage in a similar vessel nearly seven years later in the Calcutta section of Williams’s diaries. See [PAGE4120]