THE TRAGEDY ON THE THAMES.
THERE was nothing, 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 horror. 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 as the most experienced men ; the destruction was sudden, yet not sudden 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 devastating epidemics like the plague or 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 joy- MS 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 sur-
vivor escaped, to find himself alone. Men had taken ut 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 mother, wife, sister, and children ; another his sweetheart, torn from his shoulders as he swam on, bearing her ; another, three sisters ; another, three young children ; another, his mother and aunt. A man lost "all his friends," and probably uses the word in its Scotch sense, as an 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 every- body belonging to him, and is conscious of that, and that only. In one strangely pathetic case, a man swam ashore bear- ing, 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 affec- tion, 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 fighting, struggling, choking dread which precede 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 the river, usually from a great height, the struggle, and then death.
The horror of the catastrophe is, we think, increased by the spontaneity, so to speak, which is a marked feature in it. There must, of course, be rigid inquiry, but we do not see, after reading all the evidence, that anybody was to blame, un- less it be the Board of Trade, for allowing such a rule of the road in a crowded water-street like the Thames. The old rule was that a steamer going down should go by one bank, and a steamer going up by the other, but the new rule—made we presume, for sufficient reason—allows crossing and passing, according to a rather complicated code of signals by lights. The 'Princess Alice,' therefore, crossed just as the ' Bywell Castle' was passing, and after a moment's "dodging," such as happens when two passengers meet in the Strand, the Bywell Castle's' steel prow touched the side of the 'Princess Alice,' which was crushed in by the tap like a bandbox. No precaution short of suspending night traffic would altogether prevent such accidents, for neither vessel was going much faster than a man's walk, and you cannot decree that two vessels colliding shall be of equal height and weight, while if they are very unequal, one will go down. Much has been said of the saloon steamer's overcrowded state, but overcrowding had nothing to do with her destruction ; and much also of her weakness, but how can that be helped ? The Princess Alice' was strong enough for anything she had to do. We cannot build river pleasure-boats with a view to their surviving smart taps from steel colliers, and under any other form of danger she was just as able to get along as a stronger boat, which, more- over, would only have been forced down bodily. A contrivance which would keep such a vessel afloat even when full of water is perhaps possible, and is highly to be desired ; but none such has been used yet, and no blame attaches to any one for the want of it. As to the usual talk about the absence of boats, and the " evident mismanagement somewhere," because so many were drowned in so narrow a river, it is talk merely. Boats are of no use when a ship is cloven open, for they can neither be lowered nor filled ; nor if they could, would they carry a sixth part of the passengers. If the boats could be lowered in one second, it would take many minutes to fill two, and bring others up to the ladders, already full of a swarming, panic- stricken crowd. The narrowness of the liver is no help, except to swimmers. A non-swimmer, man or woman, cannot advance a yard in deep water, and would be drowned in a ditch thirty feet wide,—a catastrophe which has occurred in the Lea often enough. As to rescue from without, everybody in the neighbourhood, including the Captain of the Bywell Castle,' did what they could, and some few, mostly swimmers, were saved ; but for all the women and children, and most of the men, human aid, except from swimmers, was hopeless. There was no time. Not one in ten of the women and children, dragged down as they were by their clothes, ever drew breath after the first plunge, while for men who cannot swim the interval of chance never reaches three full minutes. Unless men of exceptional nerve, they have not an idea how to keep afloat, throwing up their arms instinctively as if to clutch— the writer once saw eighty human beings drowned in a river in less than two minutes—a movement which takes them down ; and once under the water, the struggle does not last a hundred and fifty seconds. Once out of the ship or boat, all is over for non-swimmers ; and it is to keep them in, not to rescue them when out, that attention should be directed. We greatly fear that when all has been done that can be done, there will still be horrors, and even dramatic horrors. A per-centage of those who go afloat will be drowned, and modern civilisa- tion, by encouraging men to travel in huge groups, by trainfuls instead of coachfuls, and steamerfuls instead of boatfuls, en- sures that the per-centage shall be made up in huge calamities appalling to the imagination. The world was not made by Socialists, nor is the safety of its masses one of its apparent ends. Every one is sentenced, and most will die in pain. Man is bound to do what he can, but when he has done it, he will have to acknowledge that catastrophes still enter into the scheme of God's mysterious providence for him. If Dr. Richardson's Hygeia had been built in Hungary, it would on Thursday last have been destroyed, like any odorous and unsanitary southern village. In the midst of a terrific storm, a water-spout, containing probably thousands of tons, burst directly over Miskolcz, and blasted away its thousand houses as instantaneously and finally as if it had been a thousand-ton shell,—nor would all the wit of man ex- hausted on making Miskolez safe have modified the catastrophe one jot. There are and will be catastrophes in which the lesson is not effort, or foresight, or precaution, but endurance ; and of such, we fear, is the lamentable fate of the Princess Alice.'
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