Coaled below the water line – Frank McNally on a prequel to the Titanic disaster, 150 years ago this weekend

Decades before the RMS Titanic, there was the SS Atlantic: also an ocean liner, also built in Belfast, and also run by the White Star Line.

Launched in 1870, it lasted a bit longer than its infamous successor. But on its 19th voyage, 150 years ago this weekend, it too sank off North America, with the loss of more than 500 lives.

There was no iceberg involved that time. Bound for New York but delayed by bad weather, the ship had diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to refuel.

Blown off-course and approaching a harbour unfamiliar to most of the crew, it sailed onto rocks at a place called Marr’s Head, in the early hours of April 1st, 1873.

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Lifeboats were lowered but were all washed away or destroyed. Many passengers survived by swimming to shore or clinging to the wreckage long enough to be rescued.

A shocking feature of the death toll, however, was that of the 189 women and children on board (including two babies born during the voyage), none except a 12-year-old boy were rescued.

By contrast, there were 131 survivors among the ship’s crew. Only 10 of the paid hands died. In one of the dramatic published accounts of the disaster, the sailors were described as “a bad lot”.

The diversion to Halifax had in any case been unnecessary, it later emerged. The captain wrongly thought his ship had insufficient coal left to reach New York. He was led to this belief by the chief engineer who, as was common practice, erred on the side of caution in under-reporting reserves.

Corporate economies, or as some prefer “greed”, may have been a factor too. There was a coal strike in Britain at the time, driving up prices. Fuel was much cheaper in Canada, encouraging the liner companies to skimp on the west-bound leg.

The Atlantic had sailed from Liverpool on March 20th. But like the Titanic, its last stop in Europe was at Queenstown (now Cobh), meaning there were many Irish on the passenger list and among the dead.

The site of the disaster also abounds with Irish names. Marrs Head and Mars Island (as now spelt) were both originally “Meagher’s”. There is also a Hennessy’s Island and a Ryan’s Island nearby. The local magistrate who led the investigation was a Ryan too.

Although Nova Scotia was named for Scottish settlers, Halifax is one of the most hibernified parts of Canada. By the 1860s, after the wave of Famine emigration, half the population of Halifax and its neighbour Dartmouth were from Ireland, mainly the southern coastal counties.

The O’Reillys, a farming family who lived closest to the fatal Golden Rule Rock, were prominent in rescue efforts. So were the Clancys, especially the teenage Carrie, “a poor fisherman’s daughter” subsequently romanticised as a new Grace Darling.

A popular account of the disaster – “Carrie Clancy: The Heroine of the Atlantic” – combined a summary of witness statements with breathless, illustrated vignettes of her mercy missions: diving into the sea to try and save a mother and baby, bringing food and drink to survivors, and protecting the dignity of the dead.

In one scene, portrayed in line drawing, she threatens a thief: “You wretch! I’ll brain you with this boathook if you rob that poor corpse.”

It was this same account that, quoting survivors, damned the crew: “They were picked up about the Liverpool wharves and docks, and it was with the greatest difficulty that they were kept under control during the voyage. The storekeeper says that one of them made an attempt to snatch his watch and chain one night . . . On another occasion during the storm of the 25th of March, he says that some of the crew attempted to break into the spirit room . . . When the boats came from the shore to rescue the survivors, the sailors repeatedly pushed the passengers aside, or knocked them down and jumped into the boats themselves.”

But in general, the 1873 shipwreck is far less commemorated or storied than the one of a later April, 1912. When a British disaster movie called Atlantic appeared in 1929, the title was a legal fiction, to keep the White Star Line lawyers at bay from a thinly disguised (if badly acted) version of the Titanic story.

Earlier in that decade, PG Wodehouse had set set a comic novel on an ocean liner called the Atlantic, also fictional. He made not have known about the doomed original.

The White Star line liked ship names ending in -ic. Atlantic was one of four ocean liners built for the company in the early 1870s, all at Harland and Wolff.

Oceanic and Baltic were two of the others. But loyalist Belfast also produced an SS Republic as part of the series. Perhaps ominously for unionism, that one didn’t sink, although after 38 years’ service under various flags, it was scrapped peacefully in 1909.