The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (98 page)

This proved a lamentable oversight and although other shipwrecks would cost more lives,
the loss of the
Arctic
in 1854 became for more than half a century the benchmark against which all shipwrecks were measured. When the
Titanic
sank in 1912, the
New York Post
observed that “
Ocean tragedies have been numerous and sensational in the intervening decades but … to parallel the present week’s story … one would have to go back to the story of the ill-fated
Arctic
.” Steaming westbound about fifty miles south of Newfoundland in patchy fog, the
Arctic
had collided with the
Vesta,
a French iron-
hulled auxiliary steamer en route from St. Pierre to France. The immediate assumption aboard both ships was that the smaller
Vesta
was doomed, and the
Arctic
’s captain,
James C. Luce, sent his first mate to offer assistance. When informed that water was pouring into his ship’s uncompartmentalized hull, however, he abandoned the French steamer and his lifeboat to race for Newfoundland, but the rising water extinguished the boiler fires and the engines and pumps fell silent.

The
Arctic
exceeded the requirements of the safety regulations set forth in the
Steamboat Law of 1852, which stipulated that vessels over 1,500 tons carry six lifeboats, including at least one of metal construction. All six of the
Arctic
’s were
Francis Metallic Lifeboats fitted with watertight compartments. As would prove the case with the
Titanic,
what was wanted was quantity not quality. The mate’s lifeboat having been abandoned, there were only five boats
for the ship’s company, more than three hundred of whom died. In the meantime, after watching in horror as the American superliner paddled into the fog, taking with it some ten feet of his ship’s bow, the
Vesta
’s captain found that the remainder of the iron hull had withstood the collision relatively well. Shoring up the foremost of the ship’s three
watertight bulkheads, he reached Newfoundland, and after extensive repairs the
Vesta
returned to France.

The loss of life aboard the
Arctic
was horrendous by any standard. That she was the pride of the American merchant marine heightened the tragedy. But what fixed the infamy of the
Arctic
in the public imagination were reports of the crew’s appalling behavior: sixty-one of the eighty-six survivors were members of the ship’s company. The
New York Daily Times
observed, “
One in view of their conduct, can scarcely help deploring their escape as much as the loss of the dead.” More shocking still, the survivors included not one woman or child—not even Collins’s wife and two children (Collins himself was not on board)—a fact memorialized by editorialists, ministers, and others of the day, most hauntingly
Walt Whitman, who wrote

Despite ample precedent, no charges seem to have been filed against the
Arctic
’s crew, but public indignation animated congressional opponents of the mail subsidy, who could now point to the fatal extravagance of its beneficiaries. As one congressman asserted, “
If [the Collins Line] had spent in lifeboats for that vessel the money which they spent in gingerbread ornaments and decorations, there might have been hundreds of valuable lives saved.”

The tragedy was followed by widespread calls for reform. The fate of the sturdy
Vesta
(aptly named for the virgin goddess of hearth and home) made it clear that iron hulls with watertight compartments were more likely to survive a collision than uncompartmentalized wooden hulls. That western shipwrights did not incorporate compartmentalization into their construction principles prior to this seems inexplicable. The concept was known and employed in Chinese ships from a very early date, and in the eighteenth century
Benjamin Franklin, among others, proposed building hulls in emulation of “
the well known practice of the Chinese, to divide the hold of a great ship into a number of separate chambers by partitions tight caulked … so that, if a leak
should spring in one of them, the others are not affected by it; and, though that chamber should fill to a level with the sea, it would not be sufficient to sink the vessel.” Franklin believed that whatever additional cost this might entail would be offset by reduced insurance rates “and by a higher price taken of passengers, who would rather prefer going in such a vessel.” In a pamphlet called
Steam-Lanes Across the Atlantic
(1855), superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury included these among a number of improvements suggested in the wake of the disaster:

The last recommendation fit Maury’s interests well. An analysis of Cunard and Collins Line logbooks showed that their ships sailed within a band about three hundred miles wide. After consulting the extensive oceanographic data held by his office,
Maury recommended that westbound steamers keep to a northerly lane twenty to twenty-five miles wide, and that eastbound steamers use a more southerly lane of fifteen to twenty miles in width. These lanes would reduce the likelihood of steamers colliding with one another and lessen the likelihood of collision between steamers and sailing ships, whose “public-spirited ship-masters” were enjoined to avoid the steamer lanes to the extent possible. The New York
Board of Underwriters published Maury’s recommendations and he mapped the steam lanes in that year’s edition of his
Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts
. Although the
U.S. Navy and many shipping lines required that their captains follow these lanes, compliance was voluntary. The benefits, however, could not be ignored and several subsequent accidents were attributed to ships not being in their proper lane. In 1889, the steam lane issue was debated at a conference in Washington convened “
to decide the momentous question of fixed routes for steamers crossing the Atlantic,” but Maury’s plan was not adopted until a meeting of the International Maritime Conference in 1900, forty-six years after the
Arctic
’s loss.

Serving as they did the elite markets of northwest Europe and the eastern United States, the transatlantic subsidies are the best known, but subsidies supported other shipping routes, too. The United States used them to
encourage trade to the
Caribbean and on the west coast of North America. At the same time the Collins Line subsidy was let, the
Sloo Line received one for service to the east coast of
Panama via
Charleston and
Savannah, and
W. H. Aspinwall’s Pacific Mail Steamship Company received one for its service from the west coast of Panama to San Diego, Monterey,
San Francisco, and Astoria. Aspinwall’s timing was exceptional, for the discovery of gold in California the following year ignited a mass migration to the west coast. While steamship operators benefited enormously from the unexpected windfall, the majority of the seventy-five thousand “forty-niners” who embarked for California did so in
more than 750 sailing ships that sailed from east coast ports to San Francisco via Cape Horn, most of them nonstop. Although the distance from New York or
Boston to the Golden Gate is
more than thirteen thousand miles via the Horn (and some ships actually covered more than twenty thousand miles in search of favorable winds) compared with less than three thousand miles overland, an ordinary sailing ship could cover the longer distance in less than six months, and clippers could make the passage in four months or less. By comparison, the transcontinental journey along the
Oregon Trail from
Independence, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon, took six months, and that was in addition to the time, effort, and expense required to reach Missouri. These factors had kept the numbers of westward migrants small, and in the years 1843–45 only four or five thousand settlers had set out for the Pacific Northwest. The explosive growth of the American population in California, which had seceded from
Mexico in 1846, led to its admission as a state in 1850. Thanks to its strong maritime connections with the east coast, California is the only one of the lower forty-eight states apart from
Louisiana that did not initially border another of the United States.

Maury’s recommendation that steamships follow prescribed shipping lanes across several thousand miles of open ocean was a natural extension of his earlier research into how to plot faster sailing times across the world’s oceans, which in turn drew on advances in the study of the oceans that began making real headway in the late 1700s. In the early centuries of European overseas expansion, a nation’s knowledge of safe and efficient routes comprised a jealously guarded body of trade secrets. The institutionalization of state-sponsored surveys intended for the broad dissemination of hydrographic knowledge proceeded slowly in the eighteenth century, but even without formal organization, substantial advances were made. In 1768
Benjamin Franklin was asked, in his capacity as deputy postmaster of the American colonies, to
explain why passages from the colonies to England took less time than those to North America. With the help of his cousin, a
Nantucket ship captain, Franklin described “
the
Gulph Stream
, a strong Current so called which comes out of the Gulph of Florida, passing northeasterly running at the rate of 4, 3½, 3 and 2½ Miles an Hour,” and which retards westbound ships and speeds eastbound ones. The post office published a chart showing the
Gulf Stream, and Franklin refined the chart by observations made on three trans
atlantic crossings between 1775 and 1785. A decade after Franklin’s initial research into the Gulf Stream, the
East India Company surveyor
George Rennell mapped the Agulhas current along the southern coast of
East Africa, and after the turn of the century
Alexander von Humboldt measured the northward-flowing Peruvian current, which was soon named for him.

Benjamin Franklin’s Gulf Stream map, which shows the width, strength, and course of the warm-water current as it flows between the truncated Florida peninsula and the Bahamas, along the coast of the United States to the vicinity of Cape Hatteras and Chesapeake Bay, where it branches off in a more easterly direction south of the major fishing banks below Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This French copy of an original by Franklin’s cousin Timothy Folger was drawn and published by George Louis Le Rouge circa 1780–83. Franklin intended for copies to be given to all French ships supplying arms to the Americans during the Revolution. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

This search for order in the chaos of the deep manifested itself in other ways. The first director of the Admiralty’s Hydrographical Office (1795), Admiral Francis Beaufort, established a table that categorized winds by their speed and provided descriptions of the wind’s effects on the water so that its force could be determined without an anemometer. The Beaufort scale allowed for the
transmissibility of reliable information about wind speeds. The practical application for this was anticipated by Alexander Dalrymple, who as hydrographer of the East India Company had undertaken
“the very useful work of examining the Journals of the [company’s] Ships, for improving the Charts in the Navigation of the East Indies.” Maury revolutionized this process by designing an “abstract log” in which captains could note the direction and speed of the wind and current, magnetic variation, and ocean temperature on a daily basis. Compiling data from thousands of voyages, the Depot of Charts and Instruments produced a series of
Wind and Current Charts
showing the prevailing winds and currents for every month of the year,
“to generalize the experience of the mariner in such a manner that each may have before him, at a glance, the experience of all” and so plot the optimal course to his destination. First published in 1848, Maury’s charts had a staggering effect on sailing times and shipping costs. The average time for the passage from New York to San Francisco fell from 188 days to 145 days in 1851 and 136 days four years later. The release of Maury’s charts coincided with the development of the clipper ship, but a report in 1854 estimated that use of the charts worldwide was saving the British merchant marine
ten million dollars per year, and Maury deserves most of the credit.