"Death on the Ocean Wave in the 19th Century " Topic

"The British merchant fleet was the lifeblood of its Empire in the nineteenth century. It was trade that gave the Empire stability, power and growth, and merchant ships were needed to transport the goods that allowed this to happen. This meant that there was plenty of work for seamen, but life at sea could be a dangerous business since there were few safety regulations.

Shipwrecks were common, and the loss of the SS London in 1866 is a good example of a notorious mid-Victorian shipping disaster. One of my earliest connections with this tragedy was finding a slip of paper in an old encyclopedia that carried the autograph of one of the London's survivors: John King. He was credited with providing great leadership during the ship's final moments by ensuring that a boat got away with a few survivors. King also took responsibility for steering this boat, even though the tiller was broken and he had to improvise with a makeshift scrap of wood to keep the boat heading into the waves without turning over.

A remarkable thing about the autographed piece of paper is that John King wrote down the names of two other ships he'd been wrecked in as well: the Alma in 1861 and the Duncan Dunbar in 1865. The Alma was dashed onto jagged rocks off the coast of Australia, where the crew became trapped in their sinking ship. The local lifeboatmen got a rope aboard and King and 23 colleagues had to work their way along it, hand over hand, with the raging sea and sharp rocks beneath them. They only just made it because the Alma was soon torn apart and dispersed over ten miles of beach…"
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