The country has been saddened this week by two great
accidents. On Tuesday, at 1.30 a.m., a special train from Plymouth, which was conveying forty-seven passengers by the Cape steamer ' Norham Castle' to London, ran into a goods-train standing on the line at Norton Fitzwarren, junction near Taunton. The engines were locked, the carriages were piled on one another to a height of 30 ft., the coals from the furnace set fire to the woodwork, and ten passengers were killed, besides eight more dangerously injured. One man, a. Negro preacher named Titus, had his head cut off. The cause of the accident was a momentary aberration on the part of the signalman at Norton, who acknowledges that he forgot the goods-train, and signalled " Line clear,"—another instance of the impossibility, when human beings are part of the machinery, of making precautions absolute. The second calamity, also on Tuesday, the loss of H.M.'s cruiser 'Serpent' (1,770 tons and 4,500 horse-power), was attended with far greater loss of life. She struck on a rock on the Spanish coast 20 miles north of Cape Finisterre, and of 176 officers and men on board—not 276, as at first reported—only two seamen and a servant escaped by swimming. The cause of the catastrophe is unknown, but it is suspected that the masses of iron in the Galician Mountains had disturbed the Serpent's' compasses, an incident which has been noticed before upon this coast.
Previous page
