Lost at Sea [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION On 21 October 1988, in calm weather, the 6306-ton Greek cruise liner, Jupiter, with nearly 500 British schoolchildren on board, came into collision with a roll-on-roll-off car-carrying freighter, Adige, just outside the port of Piraeus, Greece, and sank in a matter of forty minutes. In February 1986 the roll-on-roll-off ferry. Herald of Free Enterprise, capsized and sank in just forty-five seconds in the harbour of Zeebrugge, Belgium, with the loss of almost 200 lives. Both disasters appear to have been the result of neghgence, and passengers who had been happily looking forward to their journey were a few minutes later either fighting for their lives or dead. When steam power began to be used at sea there was a great rush to cash in on the transatlantic trade, and by the 1840s ships powered by steam were regularly crossing the Atlantic. Many were hell ships but not all. President was not much more than a year old when she disappeared. Launched in 1839, she was a paddle vessel also rigged for sail, with a tall smoke stack just forward of the paddle wheels. She was a handsome ship with a rakish bow and, because steamships were still a novelty, a huge crowd turned out to watch her leave New York on 11 March 1841, for Liverpool. They were the last people ever to see her because she never made port. However, her captain had a good reputation, and even when stiff gales blew up no one worried. When on 1 April there had been no news. The Times announced that she had been delayed by storms. She had been expected to reach Liverpool in sixteen days, but there followed the sad sequence of her being reported first iate', then