LOSS OF THE "PRINCESS ALICE." 283 



combined to make the day one of real and innocent pleasure. How true is it * 

 that danger is never so near as when we deem it farthest off. It was eight o' clock 

 in the evening 1 when the Princess Alice hove in sight off Woolwich Arsenal, with her 

 living freight of gladsome excursionists. The song that comes when toil ceases, the 

 careless laugh and harmless jest were going round; eager eyes watched the dim lights 

 of home glinting through the purple September twilight, and no whispered thought 

 of peril dulled the harmony of the day, when a large steam collier, the Bywell Castle, 

 loomed darkly in the gloom. 



Those who feared the least and knew the most from experience were the first to see the 

 danger the danger that, in the time, no human skill or ingenuity could avert. The Princess 

 Alice, steaming on at good speed, had attained an impetus, and, together with the adverse 

 tide and confined space, defeated the ready efforts of the commanders of both vessels, and 

 the collision came. There was no time to think no time to act ; there was a fearful cracking 

 and tearing, during which it seemed that the Bywell Castle would walk right through the 

 ill-fated pleasure-boat, and in that dread and awe-inspiring moment the startled eye saw its 

 fate, and the happy heart was stilled in horror. Only five minutes from the time the vessels 

 struck, and all that was then the Princess Alice lay cradled in the mud at the bottom of the 

 Thames. 



Save for the few who clambered on to the Bywell Castle, and the proportionately 

 fewer who could swim ashore, the entire human freight was hurled into the black and foetid 

 river, or carried down in the cabins and saloon of the submerged sepulchre. How terribly 

 was this proved when the wreck was i-aised ! The unfortunate passengers were found packed 

 together at the foot of the companion ladders with no time to move hand or foot, with no 

 air to breathe, stifled where they stood. 



Collisions amongst iron ships have been so painfully frequent of late years that it 

 is impossible to conjecture what may be the result of this wholesale loss of life in the future. 

 It is doubtful, however, whether any previous accident ever equalled in its harrowing 

 results the loss of the Princess Alice. Excepting the fatal accident to the Grosser Kurfiirst, 

 the running down of the Northfleet off Dungeness by the Spanish steamer Murillo, comes 

 next in horror to the cutting in two of the Princess Alice. This terrible affair, and the 

 heartless conduct of the commander of the Spanish steamer, will make the night of the 

 22nd of January, 1873, ever memorable in the dark annals of the sea; 293 persons 

 went down with the ill-fated passenger ship. A sad case was that of the Lady Elgin, run 

 into by a schooner on Lake Michigan on September 8th, 1860. The Lady Elgin was an 

 excursion steamer with 400 souls on board ; she sank within fifteen minutes of the collision 

 and with the loss of 287 people. Then, again, in 1854, in this fatal month of September, 

 on the 27th, the Arctic, a ship of the Collins line, came into collision with the screw steamer 

 Vesta in a fog. This time the scene of the tragic disaster was the coast of Newfoundland ; 

 out of a list of 368 all told, 323 were lost, among whom were the Due de Grammont and 

 the Due de Guynes. In the same year we have to record the loss of the City of Glasyoin 

 with 480 persons on board ; and the Lady Nugent, a British transport, which carried 

 reinforcements for the army at Rangoon ; the total loss in this case was 400. Neither of 

 these ships was ever heard of after leaving port; a fate as terrible and mysterious as that 



