Of all the disasters that afflicted the American shipping industry during the 19th Century, none was so financially devastating as the fire that swept through New York City’s business district during the night of December 16, 1835. In less than 24 hours, the conflagration destroyed 674 buildings —many of them the countinghouses and warehouses of merchants engaged in transatlantic trade.
The fire broke out shortly after 9 p. m., when a gas pipe exploded in a dry-goods warehouse. Although firemen reached the scene quickly, they were exhausted from having fought a large fire the night before. To make matters worse, temperatures had hov--ered below zero for more than a week, and hydrants were frozen solid. Water was obtained by cutting through the harbor ice, but it froze during its passage through the hoses, emerging with almost no pressure.
Whipped by high winds, the fire spread with horrifying rapidity. Soon clouds of smoke enveloped all of lower Manhattan, and the flames shot so high that their glow was visible up to 100 miles away.
Sailors fought frantically to protect their ships before the flames reached the docks. A quick-thinking shipmaster ran up and down the wharves, ordering seamen to get all sails below-decks so they would not be ignited by airborne embers. Fortunately, the East River channel had been kept open, and many ships were able to escape destruction by moving out into open waters. Only a few vessels caught fire, and their crews managed to extinguish the flames themselves.
Ashore, however, the scene was one of total chaos. As warehouses were threatened by fire, their proprietors heaved entire shipments of lace, indigo, silk, tea and other valuable commodities into the street. One group of merchants, having heaped all their goods in a spot that they thought safely distant from their warehouse, watched aghast as the warehouse ignited and shot a great tongue of wind-blown flame straight to their merchandise, turning it into a fiery mountain.
Nor was the fire the only destroyer. Mobs roamed the city’s streets, gathering up all the goods they could carry. During the nightlong saturnalia, members of the mob grew progressively more violent as they consumed thousands of bottles of looted liquor.
The next day, fire fighters finally managed to bring the conflagration under control by razing a number of buildings with gunpowder to create firebreaks. By that time, 52 acres of New York City’s business district had been reduced to ruins. Only two people had perished, but many thousands were left jobless. So enormous were the insurance claims brought by the victims that most underwriters could not hope to pay them off: They simply closed their doors for good. Many of the merchants who had made fortunes in the packet trade had lost everything— everything, that is, except the ships that would enable them to make fortunes again.
The Atlantic had another, subtler way of making known its destructive power. Occasionally (but fortunately not often) the marine columns in newspapers would print the dread phrase “went missing” next to a vessel’s name—meaning the ship had simply vanished on the high seas. There seemed to be no pattern to such incidents. Small vessels and large, eastbound and westbound—the ocean swallowed them without a trace. In the winter of 1826, a series of severe storms made for many slow crossings. By late March, no fewer than 13 packets were overdue in New York. During the first week of April, 12 of those ships arrived in port. The 336-ton Crisis was the unlucky 13th; she had been spotted twice by a British brig, the last time on March 18, when she had been nearing some ice fields, but no more was ever heard of her.
There were other bad winters in the next two decades, but no further disappearing acts until the 650-ton Red Star liner United States and the 729-ton Black Bailer England left Liverpool within a week of each other in November 1844. The England carried no passengers, the other ship only one; both had crews of 25 to 30 men. Though both ships for the most part had made the crossing in good time in the past, no one in New York was much concerned when they were a bit late in arriving this trip: After
Presented from calamity by the East Riv’er. residents of Brooklyn look on as flames erupt from Manhattan's business district.
All, the England had once taken 49 days for a westward passage, and the United States had a 54-day trip on her record. But as January passed with no sign of either vessel, alarm grew. In mid-February, another ship brought news of a tremendous gale that had left a London packet stripped of her spars and had nearly engulfed the strapping new packet John R. Skiddy. “Many of those who before had a hope,” wrote the New York Herald, “have ceased to cling to it.” But the Herald itself did not finally give the ships up for lost until March 7, when it reluctantly removed the names of the England and the United States from the list of “Packets to Arrive” and designated them as ships that “went missing.”
Although storms claimed more packets than any other type of disaster, no shipboard hazard was more dreaded than fire. On a foundering vessel, the ship’s boats offered hope of escape; but on a burning ship, passengers and crew were in double jeopardy, for the boats were as vulnerable to flames as the rest of the vessel. The worst ordeal of this type was suffered by the 1,301-ton Ocean Monarch on August 24, 1848.
That morning, the Ocean Monarch—the first of three ships to bear that name—set out on her fourth voyage from Liverpool to Boston. Her hold contained a varied cargo: iron, dry goods, salt, light merchandise and earthenware packed in crates stuffed with straw. Nearly 400 passengers were aboard, 322 of them emigrants in the steerage spaces.
Shortly after dawn, a steam tugboat towed the packet out into the Mersey on her way to open water at the estuary. At 8 a. m., the pilot and tug left the Ocean Monarch and the wind filled her sails. As the packet beat her way downchannel, she passed the 1,404-ton New World, the largest packet afloat, which was also sailing with a full complement of steerage passengers. “Many a time during the morning did we look out and view the Ocean Monarch,” recalled the Reverend S. Remington, a passenger aboard the New World, “not only on account of her beauty and symmetry, but because of her even match for the New World and the kind of competition there was between the two noble ships as to the speed of each. Evidently there was to be a trial between them this voyage, to determine which of the two could beat.”
But competition was soon foreclosed. Around noon, the Ocean Monarch’s steward told Captain lames Murdock that there was a fire in a ventilator in the afterpart of the ship, started by a steerage passenger who had wanted to cook a meal. Later, however, a crewman testified that he had seen another sailor go down into the hold with a lighted candle and return without it. Whatever the exact cause, it fast became irrelevant. When the captain went below, he found the main cabin full of smoke. He 'ordered his men to throw water over the flames, but the fire was already raging hopelessly out of control. Within five minutes, all of the after section was ablaze. Captain Murdock returned to the deck and ordered the helmsman to turn the vessel into the wind—an attempt to slow the spread of the fire by blowing the flames over the stern. Panicked passengers were scrambling up from below and pushing forward to escape the flames, smoke and heat. “Yells and screams of the most horrifying description were uttered,” Murdock later recounted. “My voice could not be heard, nor my orders obeyed.”
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