Edam (ship, 1881)
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The Edam (I) was a passenger ship put into service in 1881 by the Dutch shipping company Holland-America Line , which was used as a transatlantic liner on the North Atlantic and carried passengers , freight and mail from Rotterdam to New York . After only eleven months in service, the Edam sank on September 21, 1882 after colliding with a British cargo ship off Sandy Hook at the entrance to New York Harbor . Two people were killed. It was the first loss of a ship for the Holland America Line.
The ship
The 2,950 GRT steamship Edam was built by A. McMillan & Sons Ltd. built in Dumbarton , Scotland , and launched on the River Clyde on August 11, 1881 . The iron- built ship was 100.61 m long, 11.81 m wide and had two masts , a chimney and a single propeller . She was the sister ship of the Amsterdam (I) (2,949 GRT), also built by McMillan , which entered service in March 1880 and ran aground off Sable Island on July 30, 1884 (three dead).
She was the first ship of the shipping company with this name (more followed in 1883 and 1921). The ship could carry 70 passengers in first and 652 in second class. The ship was propelled by a two-cylinder compound steam engine from David Rowan & Company from Port Glasgow , which produced an output of 1500 PSi ("indicated horsepower") and enabled a cruising speed of 10 knots.
On October 29, 1881, the Edam left Rotterdam on her maiden voyage to New York . On April 8, 1882, she drove for the first time from Amsterdam to New York.
Downfall
On Thursday evening, September 21, 1882, the Edam was with 54 crew members and 21 passengers on the return voyage from New York to Europe. The command was the 32-year-old captain Jan Hendrik Willemszoon Taat, who had also been on the bridge of the sister ship Amsterdam . There was thick fog in the region that evening, which is nothing unusual for New York Bay . The cargo ship Lepanto (I) (2,310 GRT) of the British Wilson Line, which had left Hull for New York on September 5, under the command of Captain Rogers , approached in the same fog bank .
Captain Rogers noted in his log that the sea was calm that evening and that at around 9 p.m. you got into the fog. He slowed his ship down and let the foghorn sound. On board the Edam , the Lepanto's foghorn could be heard for the first time at around 9 p.m. but the lookout of the Edam could not judge from which direction the signal was coming. Visual contact could only be established immediately before the collision, which occurred at 9:15 p.m. about 390 nautical miles from New York. The bow of the Lepanto penetrated the Edam's engine room , where the two machinists Yan van Geyt and Nicholas Leyendecker were killed. The bow then detached itself from the resulting hole in the hull of the Edam and rammed the ship passing in front of it two more times.
On board the Edam , Captain Taat quickly realized that there was no rescue for his ship. He immediately ordered the disembarkation and all remaining passengers and crew left the Edam in the lifeboats before the steamer sank 30 minutes after the collision. It then took over an hour for the survivors and the Lepanto to find each other in the thick fog.
Holland-America Line filed a lawsuit against Wilson Line and the Lepanto captain on August 23, 1884 , but the court ultimately blamed the accident on Captain Taat von der Edam . Taat later took over command of WA Scholten (2,529 GRT), which was also lost in a collision in November 1887. This time he was not among the survivors. The Lepanto sank on January 6, 1898 off the Isle of Wight, also due to a collision.