FIRST TITANIC
An awesome ship’s maiden voyage. A catalogue of blunders. And a blood curdling disaster. A gripping new book tells the forgotten story of the...
AS Her iron hull sliced through the heaving ocean, the crew on the deck of the vast ship strained to see what lay ahead through the gloom. Suddenly there was a shout of alarm followed by a sickening thud that shook the vessel from bow to stern.
The passengers, many still in their nightclothes, rushed on deck to find the mighty ship awash with water and sinking fast in the wintry seas.
As women prostrated themselves on the deck, screaming and begging for help, fathers frantically strapped terrified children onto their backs while others plunged back down the hatchways to retrieve loved ones and possessions.
Amid the screaming and confusion, people fought over the few life jackets. Within hours the sea would be strewn with corpses, as the ‘truly splendid vessel’ disappeared beneath the waves.
Hailed as faster, bigger and safer than any vessel of her kind, the 230ft-long ship — the largest merchant vessel in Britain at that time and pride of the White Star Line — had set out amid great fanfare on her maiden voyage, under a reliable, experienced captain, only to founder after a terrifying collision with Nature at its most implacable and deadly. The story may sound familiar, but this tragic ship was not the Titanic, but rMS Tayleur, which sank 160 years ago this month.
The disaster, in which 360 of the 650 people on board died, has been all but forgotten. But now a gripping new book, The Sinking Of rMS Tayleur by Gill Hoffs, vividly tells the story of the Tayleur’s demise and reveals a compelling theory behind what caused this supposedly ‘perfect’ ship to sink.
In January 1854, the catastrophe shook Victorian Britain, overturning cherished assumptions about the courage and chivalry of Britons. poignantly, many of the victims were young, setting out for a new life in Australia, carrying with them their hopes for the future and their life savings.
The launch of the ship was dogged by bad omens. Charles Tayleur, head of the engineering works that built her and after whom she was named, was absent, mourning his wife’s death.
A more striking non-appearance was that of the captain, John Noble who, only hours before, tumbled 25ft from the forecastle into the ship’s hold. Although he appeared unhurt, he was badly shaken.
Another captain had to steer the Tayleur from Warrington, where she was built, down the Mersey to Liverpool, whence she was bound for Melbourne.
So Noble had no opportunity to get a feel for how the ship handled. When he did finally come on board, hours before departure, he was deeply concerned by what he found.
The Tayleur’s innovative design was untested — incredibly, it was not customary for ships to undergo sea trials before their maiden voyage. The enormous ship was powered purely by sail, yet her three masts were further apart than normal, making her unbalanced and difficult to handle. The rudder was also too small for a ship of her size, which would make it difficult to change direction.
And the three compasses all gave different readings because the iron hull interfered with their functioning.
Yet because of the public excitement about the new ship, Captain Noble was under pressure from his employers to set sail as soon as possible.
As the Tayleur cleaved through the grey waters of the Mersey on the morning of January 19, he could only hope that his misgivings were unfounded.
When the ship emerged into the Irish Sea, some of the passengers began to feel worried, too. Several of the 70-strong crew were absent from their posts, hungover or still drunk from their last night ashore.
More than half were totally inexperienced. Several were foreign and could not understand english. Captain Noble confided to a passenger that ‘of the whole crew he could muster only 15 sailors’.
passengers with seafaring experience had to help them reef — or pull in — the sails because they clearly had no idea how to: one sail had torn in the strong wind. A worried Noble stayed awake all through that first stormy night with the sails ‘flapping and beating in a frightening manner’.
Meanwhile, the ropes controlling the sails were so new and stiff that they kept jamming. The sails themselves were equally unresponsive. With the compasses still giving different readings, Noble tried to work out his position using the sun and a sextant, but it was too foggy.
As day gave way to night again, Noble anxiously tried to determine their location. Unable to do so, he kept heading what he hoped was south, but some of the more nautically experienced passengers were worried that he was in fact heading west, towards Ireland, rather than down the channel of the Irish Sea.
Some of them urged Noble to change direction, but he refused. On they sailed through ever rougher seas, the Tayleur heaving and pitching in massive waves, hurling the terrified passengers against walls and tables as the decks became slippery with vomit.
At 11am on the morning of Saturday, January 21, a sailor cried out: ‘Land-ho on the lee bow.’ Those on deck looked in horror to see forbidding black rocks looming through the fog, less than a mile away.
DeSperATeLY, Captain Noble tried to turn the ship, but the wind and strong tide pushed and pulled her inexorably towards the rocks.
The crew hauled frantically on the ropes to reef the sails in, but the ropes jammed. Two seamen hauled hard on the wheel, but as Captain Noble had feared, the rudder was too small to turn the ship. Onwards she raced.
Frightened passengers scrambled up onto the slippery deck. The Captain shouted orders through a speaking trumpet, urging male passengers to help the hapless crew, but over the roaring wind and the screams of the passengers few heard him. A steerage passenger, John ryder, felt that the Captain had lost control of the ship and ‘the crew were worse than women’.
As the Tayleur hurtled towards the ragged shore of the Isle of Lambay, five miles off Ireland’s coast, Noble ordered both anchors to be dropped,
hoping they would act as brakes and swing the ship away. But the anchor chains snapped ‘like glass’ and the ship ploughed on at a sickening speed.
Captain Noble now took a desperate gamble. Rather than trying to slow the ship by hacking down the sails, he aimed her prow as best he could so that she would hit the jagged rocks side on, to give the passengers a chance to climb onto them.
Then, with a horrifying jolt that shook her ‘from stem to stern’, the Tayleur struck the rocks. She rose on a wave, then struck again and again. Then she began to sink, stern first.
A scene of horrible confusion and terror ensued. There was no attempt to lower the lifeboats in such rough seas: there were not enough, anyway.
The crew appeared ‘ utterly paralysed, unable to do anything to save life’, a surviving passenger recalled. A steward even wrestled a life jacket away from a passenger to save himself.
Passengers rushed on deck only to be swept away by gigantic waves that crashed over it. Water flooded the first-class cabins, where many had clustered in terror. They were either drowned or crushed to death.
The Tayleur lay a few tantalising feet from a large rock protruding from the water, at the edge of a small creek. The first man to try jumping onto the rock smashed his head against it and was drowned. Then a Welsh miner got onto it, with the end of a rope in his grasp. He tied it around an outcrop and 15 people used it to cross to safety.
However, desperate to save themselves, people crowded onto the rope all at once, and it snapped. Ten fell to their deaths before the horrified eyes of the passengers on deck. Someone rigged up a spar — one of the long wooden poles that support the mast and rigging — as a makeshift bridge. But again too many people crowded on and it broke, sending them hurtling into the freezing sea.
ONe woman on deck begged for help, crying: ‘I have £3,000 [£176,000 today] in my stays and I will give any man £200 who will take me on shore.’ A young bank clerk agreed to help her, but she rushed off in a panic and vanished.
For security during the long voyage, many other women had also sewn their life’s savings into their underwear — only for the weight of the money, together with their many layers of heavy clothing, including petticoats, underskirts and the hoops that held out their full skirts, to drag them down when they entered the sea.
Sarah Carby, whose sweetheart Samuel had returned to marry her after serving ten years as a convict in Australia for stealing mutton, before making his fortune there, had 200 gold sovereigns sewn into her clothing, but she left them in their cabin, coming on deck wearing only a nightdress. It probably saved her life.
Rebecca Chasey, a Bristol dressmaker, also wearing a nightdress, made it to the rocks, only to see her husband and baby son drown as they tried to join her.
As the ship sank further into the water, people used ropes to climb down the hull, but the rough seas dashed them against it, or onto the rocks. A survivor remembered the agony of watching women and children battered and drowned within reach of the shore. Children’s bodies bobbed around the rocks.
It was not a case of ‘women and children first’, but of every man for himself. A passenger saw a woman ‘hanging on the middle of the rope for some time by her two hands, but those pushing to get on shore soon sent her to her doom’. Several other women were shoved off and drowned this way.
As the stern tipped further into the water, among those still clinging to its slanting deck were the ship’s surgeon, 29- year- old Scotsman Robert Cunningham, with his wife Susan and their two sons, Henry and George, aged four and one.
Clasping baby George to his chest he inched his way along another slippery spar acting as a bridge to the rocks. He was halfway to the shore when the ship lurched and Cunningham tumbled into the waves. He resurfaced, but had lost baby George. His distraught wife was watching from deck. Cunningham made it back and strapped their surviving child to his back. He tried again, but Henry, too, fell and was lost. Once more, Cunningham went back, this time for Susan, but as they reached the rocks a heavy wave swept her from his grasp. The courageous doctor tried to save another woman from the water, but she panicked and pulled him down, drowning them both.
An elderly German man noticed a baby lying abandoned on the deck. Holding its dress in his teeth, he managed to scramble onto the rocks, battered and with one broken arm, but with the baby still alive.
Last to leave the wreck were Captain Noble and his first mate. The mate drowned, but Noble struggled onto the rocks. He watched his ship disappear beneath the waves with only the rigging remaining visible, and one man still clinging to the top of the mast (he was rescued after 14 hours).
BOdIeS floated around the rigging and washed onto the beach, mutilated beyond recognition by the rocks, some missing limbs or even heads, clothes torn from their bodies by the rocks.
All but three of the 100 women aboard, and all but three of the 70 children, had died.
The parents of the nine-monthold baby saved by the German had drowned. He was dubbed the ‘Ocean Child’, and the Press eventually traced his maternal grandmother, who adopted him. He seemed to embody a glimmer of hope amid the tales of cowardice and misery — but he died two months later of dysentery.
There were four inquiries into the disaster. Captain Noble was blamed for not having taken soundings measuring the depth of the water, to establish his position when the compasses failed.
No one considered the possibility that Noble’s judgment was affected, not only by going 48 hours without sleep before the sinking as he struggled to lead his incompetent crew, but by his fall from the forecastle two weeks before.
The new book’s author, psychologist Gill Hoffs, believes the accident may have caused him a traumatic brain injury which, combined with stress and exhaustion, could have clouded his thinking.
This might account for his fatal decision to turn the ship broadside on to the rocks, causing her hull to be more badly damaged than had she hit head on, and for his failure to organise an orderly evacuation of the stricken ship.
But the White Star Line was more harshly criticised for hurrying the vessel out to sea without ensuring its safety, and for equipping it with a defective rudder and compasses.
The company was eventually declared bankrupt and its name taken by another shipping firm, owned by Thomas Ismay whose son, J. Bruce, six decades later, launched the mighty RMS Titanic into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.
THE Sinking Of RMS Tayleur: The Lost Story Of The Victorian Titanic by Gill Hoffs is published by Pen & Sword at £19.99. To order a copy at £16.99 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157.