Into the Lifeboats— Abandoning the Packet Ship John Rutledge
J
by Brian Murphy
ust after midnight on 20 February 1856, the first mate of the packet ship John Rutledge began scratching out quick log entries.
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It had been a punishing crossing from Liverpool. Storm after storm had pounded the Rutledge since it left the protection of the Irish coast for the open Atlantic. For days at a time, the hatches to the steerage compartments were shut. More than 120 emigrants—mostly Irish—were shut into a hellish twilight of swaying whale oil lamps, the sour stench of vomit, and the taut grip of fear. “4, morning, the same,” wrote the first mate, Samuel Atkinson, whose papers listed him as hailing from Philadelphia, but whose personal history was his own secret, as it was with many seamen sailing in the Atlantic packets. The John Rutledge, bound for New York, was now caught in the vise of the North Atlantic’s “Iceberg Alley,” the dangerous corridor off Newfoundland for bergs and US Mail Steamship Pacific, winner of the Blue Riband in 1850, engaged in a rescue at sea other ice floes carried south from Green- in 1852. The 281-foot steamship and her ship’s company in its entirety were lost at sea early land’s glaciers. Many veteran mariners were in 1856 somewhere between Liverpool and New York. saying that what they encountered in early 1856 was the worst ice they had seen in generations, with towerStories of sea tragedies and heroic rescues were a staple of ing icebergs and smaller, but still fearsome, fragments known mid-19th century New England culture. Rarely, however, did curiously as growlers. both intertwine with such drama as during that winter in the North Atlantic sea lanes. In the span of eight weeks in 1856, four well-known vessels were lost at sea—the Rutledge, the “8, steady breeze, and the ship making more headway. steamship Pacific, and two clipper ships, the Driver and the Passed some very large ice-bergs. At 9, the I ….” Ocean Queen. All told, more than 830 souls were lost before The ship’s log ends there. Atkinson never wrote another word. March was out. Among the dead that year were two Cape Cod captains. Asa Eldridge of Yarmouth Port went down with SS Pacific. The veteran sea captain had achieved celebrity status at the helm of the steampowered yacht North Star, belonging to tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, on a European cruise for Vanderbilt and his guests in 1853. The next year, Eldridge broke a transAtlantic speed record in command of the clipper ship Red Jacket. Alexander Kelley (sometimes mistakenly spelled Kelly) of the John Rutledge was on his first run in command of the ship on its return trip from Europe.
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“Midnight, light winds and the ship making very little headway through ice.”
“The Departure” — Immigrants wave farewell to crowds on dock. Published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 1856. SEA HISTORY 165, WINTER 2018–19