SS La Bourgogne
The La Bourgogne in the port of Le Havre
The La Bourgogne was a 1886 put into service passenger ship of the French shipping company Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT ), the passengers, cargo and mail from Le Havre to New York promoted. It was the largest ever passenger ship of the company. The luxury liner, which was described as "floating French palace ", sank on July 4, 1898 after a collision with a British sailing ship off the coast of Nova Scotia ( Canada). Here, 565 people lost their lives. The sinking of La Bourgogne was the worst accident in the history of the CGT in times of peace as well as one of the biggest disasters in the history of civil French steamship.
The ship
La Bourgogne was the last in a series of four new transatlantic liners, which for passenger service on the North Atlantic presented the CGT in 1886 successively in service. The other three were La Champagne with 7,087 GRT, La Gascogne with 7,071 GRT and La Bretagne with 6,754 GRT. The four ships were named after regions of France. The sister ships were equipped by the Paris-based interior designer Jules Allard et Fils, one of the then popular interior designers of his time, who was known for his extravagant fashion design.
La Bourgogne was from the yard Société des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée (FCM) built on the Côte d' Azur, a company founded in 1853 shipyard, where the aircraft carrier Béarn ( 1914) and the cruise ship Saga Rose (1965 ) emerged. The ship was launched on October 8, 1885 from the pile and took off on its maiden voyage on 19 June 1886. The 150 -meter-long steamship had two chimneys, a propeller and four masts.
In her 12 years of service, La Bourgogne carried many famous personalities, including the longtime bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Iceland, Rev. Abram Newkirk Littlejohn or the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison. Rammed On February 29, 1896, La Bourgogne sank in New York harbor in dense fog the steamer Ailsa ( 1,830 GRT ) of the British shipping company Atlas Steamship Line. Modern quadruple expansion engines There were new boiler installed, installed and two of her masts removed: In the following year, 1897, the ship was modernized and converted accordingly.
Downfall
On Saturday, July 2, 1898 at 10:00 clock the steamer left New York for another crossing to Le Havre. To 730 people (508 passengers and 222 crew members) were on board. Most of the passengers were French, but there were also scattered among Austrians and Italians. In addition, 1,000 tons of cargo were worth 6 million U.S. dollars and 170 sacks of mail on board. The command had the 44- year-old captain Antoine Charles Louis Deloncle, who was skipper of the CGT for five years and who had the nickname "loup de mer " ( sea bass ). He was considered a very reliable and had the command on the 1881 -built La Normandie had.
On the night of 3 to 4 July, La Bourgogne fell on the Grand Banks in a fog bank. The fog was so dense that he dissuaded the ship during the night about 160 miles of its course. Captain Deloncle did not reduce the speed. In the early morning hours of July 4, the ship was about 60 miles south of the island Sable Iceland on the coast of Nova Scotia (Canada), as the morning suddenly pierced around 5:00 clock the bow of a small sailing ship in the starboard side of the much larger steamer. It was the British freighter Cromartyshire ( 1,554 GRT) of the Shire Line ( London), which transported under the command of Captain Oscar Henderson coal from Dunkirk to Philadelphia. Aboard the La Bourgogne no one had noticed the Cromartyshire before. The collision was so violent that many lifeboats were destroyed on the starboard side and was in the engine room of immense damage. The ship got flip side, and took water very quickly.
Among the passengers, who were torn from sleep, panic broke out on the boat deck prevailing chaos and confusion. Survivors later reported that some men were fighting in the steerage with knives and revolvers to the boats. There were not enough lifeboats and of the few who had survived the collision, some were left overflowing water, beat full of water and capsized. One of the boats, which mostly women and children had on board, was crushed by one of the chimneys, when he hit the water. No life jackets were distributed and many passengers who could not swim, drowned after jumping off the ship.
Deloncle captain and his officers tried in vain to calm the passengers and to get safely off the ship. The captain tried initially to let the ship run aground in order to save it, but it sank 40 minutes after the collision. 565 people died in the disaster killed, including 447 passengers and 118 crew members. 165 people survived (61 passengers and 104 crew members). Of the 125 women on board was Victoire Lacasse, wife of Plainfield (New Jersey) living French teacher, the only survivor. Captain Deloncle and nearly all the officers went down with the ship. Among the casualties were a then well-known Turkish wrestler Yusuf İsmail and the American painter De Scott Evans.
At the time, transatlantic ships were not yet equipped with wireless telegraphy, therefore, could not be paged for help. The rescued were taken from the Cromartyshire on board, threw off a portion of their cargo to be lighter and to make room for the shipwrecked. She remained buoyant, although her nose was almost severed. Meanwhile, the passenger steamer Grecian Canadian Allan Line had arrived on the scene and took the damaged ship sailing in dew to make it to tow to Halifax.