LOSS OF STEAMER AND FIFTYFIVE LIVES.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 456, 23 January 1869, Page 3

LOSS OF STEAMER AND FIFTYFIVE LIVES.

It seems, from the Chicago papers, that the ill-fated boat Hippocampus left Benton harbor, a little port near St. Joseph, Michigan, about half-past 10 o'clock on Monday night, having on board about fifty-five living souls all told, with a cargo of fruit and sundries, sufficiently heavy to fill the main and hurricane decks, and to cause the boat herself to settle down in the water. She was towed down the canal by the tug, Daisy Lee. The men on the tug remarked that the Hippocampus was heavily laden, and saw that she rolled somewhat unsteadily. But over head the sky was clear, the day had been fair and calm, and no one had a suspicion of a terrible fate toward which the unfortunate passengers and crew, was then so surely moving. As if it had been a warning, the Hippocampus,after reaching St. Joseph ran aground. A tow-line was made fast to her stern, after considerable detention the boat was drawn off, her head was ptrt right, and she slowly and steadily proceeded on the voyage of death. The rest is a blank, and the page will probably never be filled. A few hours of peaceful incident and quiet, the story of whose moments will never be told, and then the certainty of the occurrence of a terrible calamity. This is the conclusion to which the disappearance of a precious cargo and a few broken disjointed pieces of wreck inevitably point. But the intervening moments, the two short hours that preluded an eternity, it is probable that

no survivor will ever be spared to say how they came and went. The presumption is that the fate was that of a vessel top-heavy, overwhelmed and sunk in the waves by a tierce squall; that those on board, thrown into the sea, after battling for a short moment of agony with ineffectual effort, went down, one by one, till the last cry was ! stilled. Failing to arrive at Chicago in time, the steamer Dunbar was out to search for her, and steamed down to St Joseph and back without seeing a vestige of anything belonging to the missing craft. On renewiug the search, however, the Benton fell in with pieces of the boat, furniture, and fruit which formed her cargo. At length the news came that the Hippocampus lay wrecked about twenty miles southwest from St. Joseph, but not one of all the souls on board was discovered. The most natural supposition is that the boat carrying nearly twenty tons more cargo than on auy previous trip, and with the entire weight of her cargo disposed of on or about her main deck, was capsized in a squall. If th- disaster occurred in this manner she must have sunk immediately, and the fate of the passengers was a speedy one.