Ville du Havre
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The Ville du Havre was originally named Napoléon III. Christened passenger ship of the French shipping company Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), which as a transatlantic liner carried passengers , freight and mail from Le Havre to New York between 1866 and 1873 . On November 22, 1873, the Ville du Havre in the North Atlantic collided with the Scottish clipper Loch Earn , broke apart and went under within twelve minutes. 226 of the 313 people on board drowned. Along with La Bourgogne, its downfall was one of the greatest tragedies in French civil steam shipping in the 19th century.
The ship
The steamship Ville du Havre was built under the name Napoléon III. in the traditional Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. Ltd. in the London borough of Leamouth, west of the area where the River Lea meets the Thames . Its operator was the French shipping company Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (also known as the French Line ), founded in 1861 . The shipping company was based in Paris , but the home port of their ships was Le Havre . The ship got its name from this city.
The Napoléon III. was launched on November 2, 1865 as a 3,376 GRT paddle steamer . The ship was made of iron , had two side paddle wheels and was originally 111.5 m long and 13.9 m wide. It was equipped with machinery from the London-based machine manufacturer Ravenshill & Salked. The achievable speed was 11.5 knots and the load capacity was 5,100 tons. It had two chimneys and two masts . The passenger accommodations were designed for 170 passengers in the first class, 100 passengers in the second class and 50 passengers in the third class. On April 26, 1866, Napoléon III. in Le Havre on her maiden voyage to New York City via Brest . On this route, the steamer made five Atlantic crossings by August 30, 1869. The shipping company was disappointed that the ship only reached a relatively low cruising speed.
On September 16, 1871, the Napoléon III. to Great Britain , where she underwent major renovations at the Andrew Leslie & Company shipyard in Hebburn on the River Tyne in northern England. The hull was lengthened to 128.5 m, which also increased the volume of the ship from the original 3,376 GRT to 3,950 GRT. It was also fitted with a single screw , fitted with low pressure steam engines from Maudsley, Field & Company of London, and its paddle wheels were removed. A third mast was also added. In the course of the renovation, the ship was named Ville du Havre . On March 8, 1873, the modernized ship was returned to its owners. After passing new test drives, the Ville du Havre resumed its passenger service on the Le Havre – Brest – New York route on March 29, 1873.
Downfall
On Saturday, November 15, 1873, the Ville du Havre left the port of New York for another crossing to Le Havre. There were 172 crew members and 141 passengers on board, a total of 313 people. Captain Marino Surmont was in command. One week after sailing , on Saturday, November 22, 1873, around 2 a.m., the ship collided with the sailing ship Loch Earn about 680 miles northwest of the Azores . The Loch Earn was a 1248 GRT, three-masted iron clipper of the Scottish shipping company Loch Line (Glasgow), which was under the command of Captain William Robertson with 85 passengers and crew on the way from London to New York. The Ville du Havre was sailing at full steam at a speed of 12 knots and had all sails set.
Captain Robertson on the Loch Earn had first sighted the brightly lit Ville du Havre . Realizing she was way too close, he struck the ship's bell and threw the rudder to starboard . But it was already too late for an evasive maneuver; the bow of Loch Earn rammed with full force the starboard side of the Ville du Havre ¸ which trembled heavily. The noise and vibration woke the passengers, who were confused and went on deck. Captain Surmont tried to calm the situation down and declared that there was no danger. In fact, the Ville de Havre was almost divided in two and quickly sank over the bow. When this was realized, panic broke out.
A fight began for life jackets and places in the lifeboats , but these had only recently been freshly painted and thus stuck to their cleats on the deck. Only a few of them could be resolved. The rear mast fell on a lifeboat occupied by around 40 people and already floating in the water, killing almost all of the occupants. Shortly afterwards, the foremast hit the upper deck, killing even more people. There wasn't much time to leave the ship. Twelve minutes after the collision, the Ville du Havre broke in half and sank. 111 crew members and 115 passengers died.
Captain Robertson on board the Loch Earn tried everything to help the wrecked shipwrecked ship. He launched boats and took 87 survivors on board his ship. The rescue attempts continued until 10 a.m. Around 3 p.m. on the same day, the survivors of the Ville du Havre were taken over by the American cargo steamer Tremountain under the command of Captain Urquhart and brought to Cardiff . There the rescued were initially housed in the Royal Hospital. The Loch Earn was badly damaged by her dented bow, but continued her voyage nonetheless. It was not until November 28 that the crew and passengers had to leave the ship as it began to sink. The castaways were picked up by the ship British Queen and brought to Plymouth .
Passengers
Among the passengers was Rufus Wheeler Peckham , New York State Supreme Court Justice and Congressman for New York with his second wife Mary. Both were on their way to the south of France, where the ailing Peckham was supposed to recover. Both were killed in the sinking. His last surviving words were: "Woman, we must die, let us die bravely." The French cartoonist Victor Collodion and his wife Françoise, who had only been married for four months, were among the fatalities.
Also on board were Anna Larsen Spafford, wife of prominent Chicago lawyer and real estate agent Horatio Gates Spafford, and her four daughters. Anna was the only one who survived. Horatio Spafford was inspired - among other strokes of fate - to write the text of the hymn It Is Well with My Soul .
The eyewitness account of the 17-year-old survivor Madeleine Curtis Mixter (1856-1915), who lost her parents and grandfather in the sinking, later became the essay A Sad Tale Must be Told: Madeleine Curtis Mixter's Account of the Loss of the Ville du Havre processed, which appeared in 1997 in the academic marine journal American Neptune (Volume 57, Issue 3, pages 229-236).
literature
- Charles Neider. Great Shipwrecks and Castaways: First Hand Accounts of Disasters at Sea . Harper and Brothers Publishers (New York), 1952
- William Henry Flayhart. Perils of the Atlantic: Steamship Disasters, 1850 to the Present . WW Norton & Company (New York), 2003
Web links
- The downfall of the Ville du Havre in detail
- Brief summary of technical data and the sinking ( PDF file; 14 kB)
- LOSS OF THE VILLE DU HAVRE (report in the New York Times of December 2, 1873)
- LATEST NEWS BY CABLE (report in the New York Times, December 8, 1873)
- Link to an early picture of the Ville du Havre (still with side wheels)
- the hymn It Is Well With My Soul
- Information on the Spafford family