The Sea Shall Embrace Them: The Tragic Story of the Steamship Arctic

Readers who approach Shaw's The Sea Shall Embrace Them as an academic historical account of the sinking of the American steamship Arctic in 1854 will be disappointed. Although Shaw mentions sources sporadically throughout the text (mostly at the beginning), most of the information, including quotations, are not referenced. Shaw writes a lot of details including what was going through the minds of the main people involved in the tragedy, their mannerisms, the environment they saw, etc. through interpretation. If readers approach this work as history written for a mass audience presented with a novelist's flair, they will find this book to be riveting. The chapters are brief (most around 8 pages) and the story is interesting, exciting, and fast-moving. At times, it may be a little more flowery than most students of history are used to, but such possibly superfluous descriptions of scenery, etc. are not that distracting. It mostly affects a handful of pages in the first chapters, although my favorite example is on page 152: "...men and women, as well as their teenagers, children, and infants, would never again admire the blazing fall foliage soon to be dressing the environs of New York in a spectrum of orange, red, and yellow even more intense in color than when Arctic set off on her last voyage in September." The book does not always read like this, though. Of course, the story gets more exciting as it approaches the accident and sinking with huge loss of life; however, I also found the beginning chapters very interesting, especially the competition between the English Cunard Line and the American Collins Line for supremacy of the overseas mail. Cunard will of course be challenged later by the White Star Line which created Titanic and her sister ships. Much of this story has similarities to Titanic, so those who enjoy reading about the latter will probably find this book to be of great interest. Shaw demonstrates an incredible amount of research. When listing the salaries of the Collins employees or the price of a ticket on the Arctic, he includes the equivalent in today's money which better explains his points (it cost over $2,300 in today's money for a first class one-way fair, pg 40. Ouch!). He also uncovers many interesting details. For example, 7 of the 9 ships Luce captained before Arctic sank under another captain's command (pg. 87).Footnotes would help this book. For example, why does Shaw describe Luce as being depressed while setting of on his final voyage on the Arctic? Was the detail garnered from a diary entry or a later account made by the captain? Still, Shaw demonstrates vast knowledge of the sea and I am confident many of his details, while probably not derived directly from sources, is relatively accurate. Some elements are found lacking. For example, there is much information on those struggling for life on rafts and a paddle box, but nothing on those who left early in the lifeboats who survived. Possibly these

Be prepared to be embraced by "The Sea Shall Embrace them",a riveting story about the sinking of the steamship Arctic in 1854. Mr. Shaw has researched first hand accounts of the survivors, and brought them back to life to tell the story of heroism and cowardice. Anyone who has spent any amount of time on the water will be sucked into the extraordinary details covering the tragedy. Beyond the horrible events that caused the sinking, the book wrestles with the sociological implications of the era and the maritime ethic of women and children first. Standby for heavy rolls!

This book is evocative of the sorrow and loss at sea of which Walt Whitman wrote so emotionally. In contrast to Whitman's poem however, here the vessel - the steamship Arctic - did not make it to port, and rather than a son mourning for his lost father it was the other way around. The Captain of the Arctic, James C Luce, was grief-struck as he helplessly watched his son and the vast majority of the passengers drown in the frigid north Atlantic some fifty miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland. The story has its origins in competition between the UK and the US. In 1840 Britisher Samuel Cunard inaugurated steamship service on his Royal Mail Steamship Line (the Cunard Line). In 1848 he brought the competition to the US by making New York his base for transatlantic crossings. By now Cunard was operating a fleet of ten ships that provided a regular schedule of steamship service between Liverpool and New York. Cunard had also raised the ire of US officialdom. Shaw quotes a US Senator as saying "America will soon become tired of being informed now of British maritime supremacy." Shaw says the response was "a new breed of steamships, stamped with American ingenuity and backed with the might of the US Treasury [whose] sole purpose was to 'cast this man Cunard from the sea'". Three such steamships built for this purpose were the Atlantic, Pacific, and the Arctic. They belonged to the United States Mail Steamship Company or the Collins Line as it was more popularly known - named after its owner Edward Knight Collins. Collins we are told was a man bent on "maintaining schedule and setting records whenever possible." The Arctic was a 3,000 ton, wooden paddle-steamer and was the largest, most luxurious, and fastest of the line. She set a record in 1852 making the New York to Liverpool crossing in ten days. The fateful voyage of the Arctic took place in September 1854. In command was Captain James C Luce. There were over 400 aboard with more than 300 being passengers; the rest comprised the "black gang" (as the stokers for the boilers were called) and the ship's officers. Among the passengers was Luce's son and E.K Collins' wife Mary and two of their children. Everything was routine as the Arctic set off from Liverpool but she shortly ran into a rolling fog bank. Luce maintained his course and speed of thirteen knots, but unknown to him, a French steamer called the Vesta had also entered the fog. The Vesta was a much smaller ship at 250 tons but she had iron cladding and when the two collided bow on, the larger wooden Arctic came off much the worse. This wasn't immediately apparent and Luce, fearing he had crippled and sunk the smaller ship, lowered one of his lifeboats as rescue. What was supposedly a mission of mercy to another ship soon became a desperate attempt to save his own as Luce soon discovered that the Arctic had been pierced in three places and the ship was taking on heavy water through a five-foot gaping hole. Shaw's description of the ensuing event

Everyone has heard of the British Cunard line; few have heard of the American Collins line. Yet in the mid-19th century the American trans-Atlantic lines dominated. The end of that dominance has much to do with the tragedy of the Arctic.The Arctic was hit bow-on by an iron-clad vessel as it sped recklessly through the foggy and heavily-travelled Grand Banks. But there were no musicians playing on the deck, as on the Titanic. Instead, there was a vicious fight for survival in which not one woman or child survived, and 400 passengers and crew died. The captain took his son to the wheelhouse and prepared to go down with the ship. A series of incredible events followed which I won't divulge here, and the captain survived. The scandal that broke out when he returned to New York and incriminated the crew kept the headlines buzzing for a month.This is an excellently written book, which not only tells a compelling story but also gives a vivid feeling for life in the maritime trades in 19th century America, as the nation was coming into its own and sail was giving way to steam.

It's always refreshing to find a book that tells me about a little known incident in American history. This book, concerning the 1854 sinking of the steamship Arctic, is one of those books. As an added bonus, it's extremely well-written, reading almost as if it were a novel. There are a lot of nautical terms thrown about, but there is a glossary to help those, like myself, who are unfamiliar with them. We get a capsule history of the Great Race across the Atlantic between competing British and American companies, and a bit about ship design 150 years ago, when most were wooden, with side paddle wheels. The story about the collision of the Arctic with another ship, and the subsequent tragedy that happened because many crew members ignored the adage "women and children first" is heartbreaking. The astonishing survival of some of the folks from the ship, including the captain, is quite riveting, in large part because of the excellent writing involved. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and highly recommend it to others.