La Bourgogne
 The La Bourgogne in the port of Le Havre
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The La Bourgogne was a passenger ship of the French shipping company Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT) put into service in 1886 , which carried passengers , freight and mail from Le Havre to New York . She was the largest passenger ship of the shipping company until then . The luxury steamer, which was described as the "floating French palace", sank on July 4, 1898 after a collision with a British sailing ship off the coast of Nova Scotia (Canada). 565 people were killed. The sinking of La Bourgogne was the worst accident in the history of the CGT in peacetime as well as one of the greatest calamities in the history of French civil steamers .
The ship
La Bourgogne was the last in a series of four new transatlantic liners that the CGT put into service in succession for passenger service on the North Atlantic in 1886 . The other three were La Champagne with 7087 GRT, La Gascogne with 7071 GRT and La Bretagne with 6754 GRT. The four sister ships were named after regions in France and furnished by the Paris- based interior designer Jules Allard et Fils, one of the most popular interior designers of his time, who was particularly known for his extravagant fashion design .
La Bourgogne was built by the shipbuilding yard Société des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée (FCM), founded in 1853, on the Côte d'Azur . The ship was launched on October 8, 1885 and cast off on June 19, 1886 on its maiden voyage . The 150-meter-long steamship had two chimneys, a propeller and four masts .
In her 12 years of service, La Bourgogne promoted many well-known personalities, including the long-time bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Long Island , Rev. Abram Newkirk Littlejohn, and the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison . In March 1889 the missionary Franziska Xaviera Cabrini, canonized in 1946, traveled to the USA for the first time on board the La Bourgogne . On February 29, 1896, La Bourgogne rammed and sank the steamship Ailsa (1,830 GRT) of the British shipping company Atlas Steamship Line in thick fog in the port of New York . In the following year, 1897, the ship was modernized and rebuilt accordingly: New boilers were installed, modern quadruple expansion machines were installed and two of their masts were removed.
Downfall
On Saturday, July 2, 1898 at 10 a.m., the steamer left New York for another crossing to Le Havre. There were 730 people (508 passengers and 222 crew members) on board. Most of the passengers were French, but there were also a few US-Americans, Austrians, Italians and other nationalities among them. In addition, 1,000 tons of freight worth six million US dollars and 170 mail bags were on board. The command was the 44-year-old captain Antoine Charles Louis Deloncle, who had been the skipper of the CGT for five years and who was nicknamed "loup de mer" (sea wolf). He was considered very reliable and had already been in command of La Normandie , which was built in 1881 .
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On the night of July 3rd to 4th, La Bourgogne got caught in a fog bank at the Newfoundland Bank . The fog was so thick that it took the ship off course about 160 miles during the night. Captain Deloncle did not reduce the speed. In the early hours of July 4th, the ship was about 60 miles south of Sable Island on the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, when at around 5 a.m. the bow of a small sailing ship suddenly pierced the starboard side of the much larger steamer . It was the British freighter Cromartyshire (1,554 GRT) of the Shire Line (London), which transported 2000 tons of lime from Dunkirk to Philadelphia under the command of Captain Oscar Henderson . No one had noticed the Cromartyshire before on board the La Bourgogne . The collision was so violent that many lifeboats on the starboard side were destroyed and immense damage was caused in the engine room . The ship got flip side , taking water very quickly.
Panic broke out among the passengers who were roused from their sleep, and chaos and confusion reigned on the boat deck. Survivors later reported that some men from between decks fought their way to the boats with knives and revolvers . There were not enough lifeboats, and of the few that survived the collision , some were overfilled, hit full of water and capsized. One of the boats, which had mostly women and children on board, was crushed by one of the chimneys when it hit the water. Life jackets were not distributed and many passengers who could not swim drowned after jumping off the ship.
Captain Deloncle and his officers tried in vain to calm the passengers and get them off the ship safely. The captain initially tried to run the ship aground in order to save it, but it sank 40 minutes after the collision. 565 people were killed in the disaster, including 447 passengers and 118 crew members. 165 people survived (61 passengers and 104 crew members). Of the 125 women on board, Victoire Lacasse, wife of a French teacher living in Plainfield, New Jersey , was the only survivor. Captain Deloncle and almost all of the officers went down with the ship. Among the fatalities were the then famous Turkish wrestler Yusuf İsmail , the American painter De Scott Evans with three daughters, the linguist and Latin professor Edward Lorraine Walter , the American sculptor Emil H. Wuertz , the French painter Léon Pourtau , three members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Anna Price Dillon and Annie Dillon Oliver, wife and daughter of US judge John Forrest Dillon .
At that time, transatlantic ships were not yet equipped with wireless telegraphy , so it was not possible to call for help by radio. The rescued were taken on board by the Cromartyshire , which dropped some of its cargo to be lighter and to make way for the castaways . She remained buoyant, although her bow was almost severed. In the meantime, the Canadian Allan Line's Grecian passenger steamer had arrived at the scene of the accident and was taking the damaged sailing ship in rope to tow it to Halifax .
Web links
- The La Bourgogne passenger ship (technical and historical)
- The La Bourgogne in Norway Heritage
- The La Bourgogne in an online directory on emigrant ships ( Memento of 11 March 2012 at the Internet Archive )
- Short entry on RootsWeb
- Summary in "Lost Treasures of the Seven Seas - Forgotten Shipwrecks"
- Detailed report on the sinking including eyewitness reports
- THE BOURGOGNE DISASTER ( New York Times report of July 18, 1898)
See also
- Republic - sank off Nantucket in 1909after a ship collision
- Empress of Ireland - sank after a ship collision in the Saint Lawrence River in 1914
- Andrea Doria - sank after a ship collision off Nantucket in 1956
Individual evidence
- ^ Wreck Report for 'Cromartyshire' and 'La Bourgogne', 1898 , Canadian investigation report on the accident.