The Tragedy on the Thames.

Thames Star, Volume IX, Issue 3040, 12 November 1878, Page 1

The Tragedy on the Thames.

There is nothing; (says the Spectator), or very little, of human perversity in the catastrophe which destroyed the Princess Alice, a Thames pleasure steamer, on Tuesday; but with that exception, the tragedy included almost every element of horrcr. Its victims were multitudinous, as England counts multitudes; they were in a majority women and children, as helpless in presence of this particular danger as babies in arms, yet as conscious of it an the most experienced men; the destruction was sodden, yet not suddou enough to exclude for the destroyed an agony of terror; there was a chance for. each, yet a chance of the faintest sort; there was darkness, which always adds to dread; and there was for survivors often the last extremity of mental suffering. In this last respect, indeed, the tragedy stands among accidental tragedies separate and pre-eminent. We cannot remember a case in which the special horror that attends devasting epidemics like the plague of cholera, the horror of " extermination," of losing all that are dear at one blow, of standing in a moment alone on earth, was ever added in such measure to the customary horrors of shipwreck. The Princess Alice was full not only of holiday-makers—in itself a circumstance of pain, because' the revulsion from joyous content to imminent dread'of death must have been so rapid and so terrible—but of holiday-making families, of whole households, of groups of relatives, kinsfolk, or friends, out of which in repeated instances, only one unhappy survivor escaped, to find himself alone. Men had taken out their wives, mothers, children—even the babies—and.sweethearts, to enjoy the sail in the fine, calm weather. One man lost his wife and eight children; another, his wife and four children; another, his sweetheart, torn from his shoulders as be swam on, bearing her; another, three sisters; another, three young children ; another, his mother and aunt. JL man lost " all his friends," and probably uses the word in its Scotch sense, as au equivalent for relatives. A governess lost all her charges,, six young girls, of Queen's College, and was saved herself. A girl of eighteen, lost father and mother, and went temporarily mad; and in two cases at least it is believed that a child of four has. lost everybody belonging to him, and in consoious of that, and that only. In one strangely pathetic case a man swam ashore, bearing as he thought, his wife, only to discover on landing that he had saved a stranger. It was for the passengers by this boat as it is-when a pestilence .strikes a town; there was death for the victims, and there is for the survivors no visible life left, no affection, no protection; no property, nothing but one terrible, burning sense of want of all. This is the special horror of the catastrophe, which was a bad one in itself, as heart-rending to hear of as any wreck at sea, with this aggravation for the sufferers, that they had neither warning nor preparation, not even that fatigue and loss of vitality which sometimes diminish the final pain of shipwreck ; but were hurled from a position of careless ease out into the deep water, to endure those two minutes of fightiug, struggling, choking dread which preced drowning, and make up the true terror of that mode of death. To be drowned in the Thames, on a calm autumn evening, on a pleasure party, in sight of the shore, yet helpless,—it is the saddest of fates ; and it fell on Tuesday on hundreds at once, on entire families out in search of a day's ease, on scores upon scores of wives and girls and children and little babies, killed before even they knew that danger was upon them. There was the grinding crash, which struck none of the inexperienced as serious the rush up the deck, rising momently into the air; the fall forward into ihe river, usually from a great height, the struggle, and then death.