Shi s Afire at Sea
by Fraser and Jourdan Houston
Burning of the Packet Ship Boston, 1830 by Fitz H enry Lane (wa tercolor, 19.5 x 27 inches) earing the cry "Fire!" is alarming no marrer where you are, but fire aboa rd a ship at sea, where the only place to escape the Hames is the open ocean, is especially terrifying. In the Age of Sail, wooden ships carrying huge spreads of canvas and rigged with tarred fiber and wire rope were particularly vulnerable, not to mention their sometimes-flammable cargo sto red below decks. A burning ship is double jeopardy, for one must first survive the fire and then the sea. In the nineteenth century, th ree M assachuserrs vessels lost to fire are notable because each doomed ship happened to have a Bos ton artist aboard, and their recollectio ns of their fiery escapes h ave contributed to these disasters' historical record in a visually meaningful way. After su rvivin g the burning of the packet Boston off C harleston, South Caro28
Jina, in 1830, portraitist Samuel Stillman Osgood (1808-1895) went to G louces ter, Massachusem , to work with a yo ung Fitz H enry Lane to produce a painting of the disaster; Lane, of course, would later emerge as on e of the centu ry's premier m arine painters. In 1848, Nathaniel Southwo rth, a reserved artist of miniature portraits, no t only escaped the conflagration of the packet Ocean M onarch off Liverpool, but he also helped salvage the captain's reputation. Finally, in 1870, when the Boston barque Sunbeam burst into flames and exploded off the coast of Chile, a nineteen-year-old seama n-a "sh ip's boy"-fo rgo t little. Later, Marshall Johnson wo uld commit his experience to canvas in a detailed work that has only lately re-emerged. Johnson's painting and a solitary lerrer together document a concatenation of harrowing and nearmi raculous events.
The three Boston artists whose ships were consumed by fire were awa re that their contemporaries were no strangers to disaster at sea. O sgood knew of the fa te of the Boston-trained artist Nathan Negus (18011825), who achieved success and acclaim as a portrait painter but died yo ung fro m trauma after shipwreck. In May of 1825, Neg us was sailing from Alabama to M assachusetts when his ship was lost at sea and he fo und himself adri ft for nearly a month in the G ulf of M exico. Sufferin g from consumption, Neg us arrived home in early July, only to die within days of his return. Boston, 1830 Osgood h ad traveled to Charleston after spending part of a decade at sea as "a common sailor" (his words). 1 In the late 1820s, he painted portraits across New England, setting up rooms in state capitols and en-
SEA HISTORY 150, SPRJNG 201 5