NOTABLE WRECKS. 285 



which befell the City of Boston and the Pacific, the former of which left Liverpool on the 

 23rd of January, 1856, with 186; while the City of Boston had 191 persons on board when 

 she sailed from Halifax, N.S., on January 26, 1870. Who amongst the living- does not 

 remember that black-letter day when news arrived in England of the capsizing of the Captain 

 off Cape Finisterre on September 7, 1870, with Captain Burgoyne and a complement of 

 500 all told, which remains the greatest calamity that has yet befallen the British Navy. 



The army, however, suffered a loss nearly as appalling in the foundering of the 

 BirJcenkead off the Cape of Good Hope, where a contingent, made up from the 12th Lancers, 

 23rd and 92nd Foot, helped to make up the 438 lives destroyed on that occasion, 

 February 26, 1852. Nor were the greatest horrors entirely occasioned by the unruly 

 elements and the sometimes pitiless sea, for added to these ever-impending dangers was the 

 incombatable enemy fire. The most heart-rending on record of these marine conflagrations 

 was that which destroyed the S.S. Austria on its way from Hamburg to New York, U.S., 

 on September 23, 1858. By this fire, out of 528 passengers and crew, 461 were either 

 burnt to death or drowned ; how many met the more horrible death of burning can never 

 be known, nor is it well for the mind to dwell upon the painful subject. Going back a little 

 farther we find the record of the burning of the Ocean Monarch in Abergele Bay, August 24, 

 ]848 A with loss of 178 lives. Then we have the S.S. London, which went down in the 

 Bay of Biscay on January 11, 1866, carrying down with her to a wateiy grave 239 out 

 of a complement of 258. The wrecks of the Atlantic and the Royal Charter are conspicuous 

 in the black list : the latter, an Australian clipper ship, was smashed to pieces on 

 the coast of Anglesea on October 26, 1859, when, while some forty people or so managed 

 to get on shore, 459 of men, women, and children, were added to the ocean sepulchre. 

 The Atlantic, of the White Star Line, struck on a sunken rock off Nova Scotia, April 1, 1873, 

 and 481 out of 931 were lost. The Annie Jane, of Liverpool, swells the death-roll by 393, by 

 being driven on shore at Barra Island, one of the Hebrides, on September 29, 1853 ; while 

 the Pomona, another emigrant ship, through carelessness in the reckoning, went ashore on 

 the Wexford coast on April 28, 1859, losing 386 lives. And this sad list only represents 

 the more prominent cases which occurred during thirty years. 



Although the chief outward and visible sign of usefulness of the Seamen's Hospital 

 Society exists no longer on the Thames, many of our readers knew the old Dreadnought well. 

 She was the largest floating hospital in the world, and no other ship housed so cosmopolitan a 

 crew as could be found among her 200 patients. Dysentery, scurvy, hepatic diseases in 

 most varieties, and typhoid, were among the medical specialities to be seen on board, and 

 it is probable that Budd gained much of his experience of enteric fever from this ship, 

 which received annually from sixty to seventy cases of the disease. The surgical practice 

 was equally useful, and we believe that the first resection (that of the shoulder) in London 

 was performed by Busk on the Dreadnought. A large number of men, now teaching in 

 our schools, gleaned useful knowledge here, and (an important matter in surgery) learnt how 

 to do little things well. Although in maintaining a necessary and constant communication 

 with the shore, there were the usual perils of water, including a strong current, a crowded 

 stream, ice, &c., no person engaged directly or indirectly in the business of the ship 



