Thursday 13 September 2018

We Have All Heard Of Famous Shipwrecks,

Titanic, Lusitania, The Mary Rose,


my battleship Bismark that sank in Millers pond, (that's another story!), but there are so many almost unknown ones, which is why The Tragedy of the Seas; or, Sorrow on the Ocean, Lake, and River, from Shipwreck, Plague, Fire and Famine, is such a good read, the stories of almost all of the shipwrecks mention have sunk without trace, excuse the pun! the book is a compendium of thirty-seven nautical catastrophes that took place in bodies of water around the world between 1803 and 1840,We read of ships wrecked on coral reefs, capsized in hurricanes, and reduced to cinders after lightning strikes, here are just a couple that writer Charles Ellms mentions in the book published in 1841, 

the most fatal involves 116 starving passengers freezing to death on the barque Mexico after it was stranded off Long Island in January 1837, 

perhaps most extraordinary is the tale of a stray Japanese vessel carried diagonally across the immensity of the Pacific Ocean until by chance it reached the Sandwich Island 11,000 miles and eleven and a half months later. “For the last three months,” Ellms relates “they had been without water: they had a large supply of rice, it being the principal part of the cargo; and they allayed their thirst by washing their mouths and soaking their bodies in salt water.” there are 432 pages of fascinating reading in the book, enough for any Atlantic Crossing! 
Housed at: Internet Archive  
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