"If you want to save your skin, son, you'd better get yourself on that bale."
"I... I can't swim," the boy stammered.
"Hang on. I'll bring it closer."
Smith slipped into the freezing water, swam over to the bale, and got on top of it. Using his hands, he tried to paddle the bale close enough to the stern for the boy to jump aboard, but he could not make enough headway to reach the boat. At last, he regained the burning steamboat, and unthinkingly climbed back on board. This time, he found himself amidships, near the starboard paddle wheel. There he found a dozen people still hanging onto different sections of the smoldering remains.
The flames had decreased to where the assengers were able to cling to p the side by standing on the chines, an extended rib of the hull made of solid timber running fore and aft to keep the boat from rolling.
Smith found himself clinging next to Engineer Hemstead; Job Sand, the headwaiter; Harry Reed, a deckhand; and another stoker, George Baum. All around the burned hulk they could see the sea filled with a blanket of debris, ashes, and dead bodies of all ages. Smith clenched his jaws as he stared at the appalling reality of the tragedy. He choked off the bile rising in his throat and looked down at the water below his feet that waited patiently to engulf them.
At three o'clock, seven hours after the fire was discovered, the smoldering remains of the steamboat slipped beneath the cold waters of the Sound, accompanied by a great hissing sound as the cold water surged through the cremated interior of the hull. Steam mingled with smoke to create a pall that was slowly carried away by wind, and soon the flotsam drifted away, leaving the grave of the Lexington shrouded and unmarked by a merciless sea.
As the hull sank from under them, Smith, along with four othersHarry Reed; George Baum; the actor and comedian Henry Finn; and the boy who had taken Smith's place on the rudder-struggled onto a large piece of the paddle-wheel guard that had ripped away and bobbed to the surface after the ship sank. Like Manchester and Hillard before him, Smith also did his best to keep the others alive on the paddlewheel guard. He shook and massaged them, and tried to force them to exercise, but overcome by the cold, the living had reached the limit of their endurance. They died one by one and rolled into the water.
Smith, a tough drinker and brawler when ashore, stared at the devil and shook his fist.
The unnatural glare of the fire across the dark water was seen from the Long Island and Connecticut shores. The flames shot up in huge columns, lighting the water for miles around.
William Sidney Mount, an artist of some renown for his paintings of Long Island country settings, witnessed the calamity and described how local mariners struggled to sail through pack ice clogging ports and inlets. Fishermen, thinking they might rescue victims while the steamboat was only two miles away, set out from their harbor in the bitter cold. But just when they thought they were within hailing distance of the flaming wreck, the winds and the tides shifted, sweeping the Lexington back into the middle of the Sound. Defeated by the whims of nature, the intrepid fishermen had no choice but to return home, the water being too rough for them to venture into the Sound.
Captain William Tiffell, of the sloop Improvement, sighted the burning pyre, but failed to offer assistance, claiming that he thought the steamer had her boats, and he was afraid that if he stopped he would lose the tide coming into the harbor. Like Captain Stanley Lord of the California seventy-two years later, who was accused of standing by while the Titanic sank, Terrell was denounced as a cruel and heartless man. Because of his alleged indifference to the suffering of the passengers on the Lexington, he came within an inch of having his master's papers revoked. But later studies showed that he was a good twelve miles distant and facing a contrary wind. Investigators considered it doubtful that he could have reached the stricken vessel in time to save its ill-fated passengers had he tried.
Discovering the steamer on fire, Captain Oliver Meeker of the sloop Merchant tried to sail his vessel from the pier at Southport.
But the combination of a shallow harbor and a falling tide caused the Merchant to run aground.
Captain Hillard and Benjamin Cox had drifted about a mile from the Lexington when she went down. A scattering of clouds strayed over the mainland and a bright moon illuminated the Sound. The night air was incredibly cold, and the men tried to keep warm by whipping their hands and arms around their bodies. They were as miserable as two humans could get. Then, as if ordained to multiply their agony, a large swell overturned their cotton bale. Plunged into the frigid water, Millard and Cox struggled to climb on the opposite side. Losing the paddle was a double blow. Besides employing it as a means to keep warm through exercise, they had found it useful for steering against the tide. Now the bale became uncontrollable and rolled heavily under the onslaught of the waves.
Cox had abandoned the boat wearing only a flannel shirt, loosefitting pants, boots, and a cap. An old mariner, Hillard had wisely worn his heavy woolen pea jacket. He gave Cox his vest, and then rubbed the passenger's arms and legs, beat him on the body, and made every attempt to keep his blood circulating.
"I want to die," Cox suddenly announced.
"You talk like a crazy man," said Hillard. "Do you have a wife and family'?"
Cox nodded drunkenly. "A fine wife and six children."
"They will suffer miserably without their father. You cannot give up hope. Think of them waiting for you at home."
Cox did not answer. He seemed to have lost all desire to live.
Hillard did not realize it at the time, but his efforts at keeping Cox alive no doubt prolonged his own life as well. "Damn you, Cox," he snapped. "Do not let yourself die. Hang on for God and your family."
Cox appeared not to hear. He was beyond caring. The cotton bale slewed broadside in a trough before being struck by the next wave.
Millard somehow clutched the bale with hands numb of all feeling, fighting to hang on as the bale was pitched and tossed crazily.
His body limp with apathy and insensibility, Cox slipped off the bale and Hillard saw him no more.
Hillard's ordeal was very nearly an exact replay of the drama acted out on Captain Manchester's cotton bale.
Manchester's partner, McKenna, complained constantly about the bitter cold. Then as the icy water soaked his skin and the frigid air sucked the life from his body, he babbled about his wife and children, how he had kissed them the morning he left home.
"You'll be with them this time tomorrow," Manchester gamely assured him.
"No, I fully expect I'll die from the cold."
"Move about, man," Manchester implored, trying to encourage McKenna. "Get your blood flowing. Wave your arms, kick your legs, anything to keep warm."
"What good will it do?" mumbled McKenna. "We're both going to perish."
"Speak for yourself!" Manchester suddenly snapped. "I'll be damned if I'll give up."
Like Benjamin Cox on another cotton bale less than a mile away, McKenna appeared not to hear and went silent.
Manchester had heard many tales from ocean mariners about shipwrecked sailors who lost the will to survive. Discipline, they swore, was the key to survival. Too many mariners who were forced to abandon their ships expired out of lethargy and hopelessness. He could see it happening before his eyes. McKenna did not appear to care whether he lived or died. Staying alive to keep his wife and children from having to survive without a husband and father seemed the farthest thing from his mind.
Manchester could do nothing but watch helplessly as McKenna gave in to fate. He died shortly after the Lexington sank. His body fell backward, his head hanging partially in the water. The first heavy wave that struck the bale washed him off. For almost half an hour, he floated alongside Manchester, the moonlight reflecting on his white face and hands, before he finally drifted out of sight.
The agonizingly cold night came and passed, a night of torment that never seemed to end. With the coming of the sun, the sea turned smooth, and Captain Meeker of the Merchant, who had labor
ed through to dawn, unloadin cargo to lighten his vessel, was finally able to work his sloop off the sandbar with the incoming tide and set sail into the Sound.
Perched on his cotton bale, ffillard sighted the Merchant at about noon and wildly waved his hand to attract the attention of those on board. Captain Meeker smartly turned his sloop toward Hillard and came alongside. The helping hands of the crew pulled the half-frozen survivor over the side, where every courtesy was paid to him. He was taken below, where damp clothes were replaced with warm blankets, and he was placed in front of a stove while being fed cups of coffee laced with whiskey.
Next to be rescued was Captain Manchester. Nearly insensible from the cold, his hands frozen, he managed to insert his handkerchief between his rigid, unfeeling fingers and wave it feebly in a light breeze.
Observed by Meeker's alert crew, he was soon thawing out beside Captain Hillard in the galley of the Merchant.
At two o'clock in the afternoon, fireman Smith, his hands and feet badly frostbitten, was barely conscious when he was spotted by Captain Meeker and picked off the paddle-wheel guard. All three men suffered from the effects of the exposure to extreme cold, but all recovered in time to testify at the coroner's inquest. Captain Meeker also retrieved two bodies from the water before heading back to Southport.
The most remarkable story of survival was that of Second Mate David Crowley. Luckily, his bale did not capsize or roll heavily with the sea, enabling him to burrow a nest into the center of the cotton.
With his clothing stuffed with cotton until he looked like a fat snowman, he kept from freezing to death. Unseen by Captain Meeker's crew, Crowley suffered all day Tuesday and through the night. Not until nine o'clock Wednesday night did his floating home-away-from-home drift against an ice pack along the Long Island shore.
Afraid he might fall through into the frigid water, Crowley crawled across the ice on his stomach until he reached land. Then he stumbled nearly a mile to a house and rapped on the door with the last of his strength. The residents, Matthias and Mary Hutchinson, thought they were looking at a bloated dead body, dressed only in bulging light pants and a shirt, and with a bared head. They were astounded when the warmth of the house and their vigorous massage of his limbs brought Crowley back to life. He had suffered forty-eight hours of freezing cold on his floating cotton raft and had drifted over fifty miles.
Shortly after his miraculous survival, the owners of the cotton on board the Lexington presented Second Mate Crowley with the same bale that had carried him to land. He had it transported to his home in Providence, Rhode Island, where he kept it standing in his living room for many years. When the price of cotton skyrocketed during the Civil War, Crowley sold his bale for charity. From it sprang the famous Lexington brand of cotton cloth.
There were other intriguing sequels to the burning of the Lexington.
Lithography was becoming a popular profession in the 1800s.
People throughout the country bought lithographs from their general stores and hung them in their living and dining rooms. For the price of a few pennies, the public came into the habit of changing the colored lithographs on the wall every week, especially when the subject that was illustrated struck their fancy.
Right after the burning of the Lexington, a young artist, struggling to launch a lithography studio, was contracted by the New York Sun to produce a lithograph of the disaster. Working night and day, he turned out his masterwork in just sixty hours, and splendiferously titled it: THE AWFUL CONFLAGRATION OF THE STEAMBOAT LEXINGTON IN LONG ISLAND SOUND, MONDAY EVE, 13TH JANUARY 1840 BY WHICH MELANCHOLY OCCURRENCE OVER 100 PERSONS PERISHED.
Appearing in the New York Sun's extra edition, the portrayal of the frightful catastrophe became a sensation and hung in almost every home in America. Considered a breakthrough in journalism, the use of graphics to illustrate a hot news story quickly became a traditional style that is with us today in newspapers and magazines.
The young artist's reputation was made, and he went on to become world famous. If the tragedy of the ill-fated Lexington did nothing else, it gave the country the remarkable talents of Nathaniel Currier, who in seventeen years would join forces with another artist/lithographer, James Merritt Ives, to produce evocative color lithographs that became the illustrated soul of early America.
The man that arrived late at the dock and who wisely decided not to make an attempt to jump onto the Lexington read of the disaster in the extra edition of a newspaper late the next morning. He could not believe his luck. If he hadn't been delayed because of an argument with his editor, Park Benjamin, over editorial changes in his poem The Wreck of the Hesperus, set for publication in the World newspaper, he certainly would have been one of the 150 frozen bodies floating in the Sound.
He folded the newspaper, set it aside, and asked the waiter for a sheet of the hotel's stationery and an envelope. After the dishes were cleared, he began writing his wife and father to inform them their husband and son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was still alive and well in the restaurant of a New York hotel.
Captain Joseph Comstock was appointed by the Transportation Company to proceed to the scene of the disaster and search for the bodies of passengers and crew, and to recover any luggage and company property. The steamboat Statesman, Captain George Peck commanding, was chartered for the recovery operation.
Comstock's first problem was to determine the approximate position of the Lexington when it caught fire and later sank. Witnesses to the flames on the water gave conflicting testimony. Some reported seeing the burning ship off Eatons Neck Point, others put it in the middle of the Sound off Crane Neck Point. The lighthouse keeper at Old Field Point claimed he saw the flames vanish about three o'clock in the morning about four miles to the north of the lighthouse and slightly west. The depth of water was judged to be twenty fathoms.
After two days of searching, only seven bodies were discovered, including the two pulled from the water by Captain Meeker of the Merchant. Numerous sections of wreckage washed up ashore. The nameplate on the wheelhouse, two feet in length with the entire word Lexington, and a swamped lifeboat, were found and retrieved, along with several pieces of luggage.
The weather during the search was intensely cold, the temperature holding at four degrees below zero. The sudden accumulation of ice along the shore rendered further efforts hopeless. Captain Comstock called off the search and ordered the Statesman back to New York with its pitifully small cargo of dead. The recovery operation was especially bitter for Comstock. One of those lost, whose body was never recovered, was Jesse Comstock, clerk of the Lexington, the captain's brother.
The coroner's inquest threw blame in every direction. The jury censured the steamboat's owners for maintaining a dangerous ship and denounced them for transporting inflammable cargo on a steamboat carrying passengers. They criticized the state steamboat inspectors for ignonng gross safety violations, and the dockworkers for loading combustible cargo next to a heat source. They accused Captain Child and his dead crew of the Lexington of dereliction of duty, while strangely exonerating Captain Manchester, Second Mate Crowley, and fireman Smith from all blame.
The verdict was that the Lexington was a firetrap. The casing around the smokestack ignited a fire that was communicated to the cotton bales stacked around it. No one was indicted, convicted, paid a fine, or lost a license.
All that remained were hearts overwhelmed with grief. The burning of the Lexington left ninety grieving widows and nearly three hundred fatherless and motherless children. For all but five of the dead, there would be no tomb.
POSTSCRIPT
An item from a weekly paper, the Long Islander, Huntington, New York.
September 30, 1842. THE LEXINGTON. The wreck of this ill-fated vessel has been raised to the surface of the water, but, one of the chains breaking, she again sank in 130 feet of water. The attempt is again in progress. The eight hundred dollars recovered from her were not in bills, as before stated, but in a lump of silver, weighing thirty pounds,
the box having been emptied on the deck to be used as a bucket for throwing water on the flames.
Enter NUMA
April 1983
I can't remember what initially sparked my interest in the Lexington. I believe it might have been an afterthought while searching the sand and surf of the Fire Island National Seashore in New York for the remains of the first steamboat to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah.
She struck the beach during a fog in 1821, several years after her epic crossing. Although she was under steam for only eighty hours, her famous voyage stands unchallenged in the history books.
This type of search is usually the most frustrating because almost all ships that run aground on sandy shores or on the banks of rivers are covered in time and completely buried under a shroud of silt. You can easily observe this phenomenon while standing at the edge of a surf line. As the dying waves pass beyond you, your feet sink into the sand and are soon covered. The same thing happens to a ship, even a battleship, if given enough time. Another problem is that landmarks go through great change, and the sightings of contemporary witnesses seldom apply.