SS CENTRAL AMERICA (cont.)

The first waves to crash over the steamer sent panic into the passengers and shipped more water through the portholes.  Herndon ordered sail unfurled to hold the ship head-up, but the vicious winds mercilessly shredded the canvas.  To lighten the bow and increase wind drag aft, Herndon ordered the foremast cut away, but in falling to leeward the mast fouled under the hull and began pounding the weakened seams with each passing wave.  Most of the passengers aboard were men, returning with personal fortunes from the California gold fields, and Herndon ordered the formation of bucket brigades to bail out the hold.  Over 300 formed three lines and for a few hours gained on the water.  By late afternoon on the 11^th, the port boiler was dry enough to be re-fired, but the effort fizzled.  Even the passing of the hurricane’s eye after nightfall did not give respite enough to gain further on the rising water.  By the morning of the 12^th, it became apparent that Herndon’s ship would founder.  The bailing continued–not in an effort to save the ship, but to keep her afloat long enough for help to arrive.

That afternoon the West Indies brig Marine, herself well-battered in the storm, was sighted to windward.  She had worked close enough by 1500 for Herndon’s crew to launch his five lifeboats.  Two were smashed in the twenty-foot seas, and in the hours it took to transfer the women and children to the boats, Marine was blown six miles to leeward.  Superhuman efforts by exhausted crewmen rowed the lifeboats through tumultuous seas; each boat made two successful trips to Marine.  One boat returned for a remarkable third time.  In all, 57 women and children and 44 men were transferred.  Meanwhile aboard Central America, Herndon ordered the 440 remaining men to cut away hatches and decking for rafts.  Herndon then donned his full-dress uniform and took up station on the hurricane deck.  From a distance in the stormy darkness, the last lifeboat watched the bow of the steamer rise, then plunge toward the bottom.

Another passing brig, Ellen, rescued 49 more from the water.  Three men drifted for nine days in a swamped lifeboat before being picked-up by the passing brig Mary.  In all nearly 400 men including CDR Herndon perished, and gold coins, bars, and nuggets valued in that day at several million dollars were lost.

Central America lay undisturbed in her watery grave for over a century.  Then in September 1988 an expedition led by engineering genius Mr. Thomas Thompson located the steamer in 8,000 feet of water off South Carolina.  To date nearly a billion dollars worth of gold has been recovered using remote unmanned vehicles in a salvage and archeological operation that continued through 1999.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  19 SEP 24

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Baldwin, Hanson W.  Sea Fights and Shipwrecks:  True Tales of the Seven Seas.  Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955, pp. 13-18.

Kinder, Gary.  Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea.  New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998.

Site visit, US Naval Academy, 1999.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  The loss of 400 passengers in this disaster had a significant impact on the American public, more than the loss of the bullion.  It was reported at the time to be the worst maritime disaster in America’s history.  CDR Herndon was last seen in full-dress uniform, megaphone in hand, grasping the rail of the hurricane deck over the wheelhouse.  He has been remembered in the naming of two US Navy destroyers, the post-WWI Clemson-class DD-198, and the Gleaves-class WWII veteran DD-638.  Perhaps a testament to the public sentiment over this tragedy, a memorial to Herndon was erected at the US Naval Academy where it stands to this day near the Chapel.  It is inscribed with a eulogy by Herndon’s brother-in-law, CDR Matthew Fontaine Maury, USN, “Forgetful of self, in his death he added a new glory to the annals of the sea.”  The city of Herndon, Virginia, is also named in his honor.

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SS CENTRAL AMERICA

The US Mail Steamship Line was a government underwritten packet steamer company running the US Mail as well as passengers and cargo between New York and New Orleans in the mid-1800s.  After the Mexican War a similar Pacific Mail Steamship Line was subsidized to run mail, gold, and other commodities between California and New York via Panama.  US Navy officers were detailed to command these civilian-crewed, unarmed packets.  It was thus that CDR William L. Herndon acquired command of the US Mail Line packet SS Central America in 1855.  Herndon was a 29-year veteran of Navy service.  He had commanded USS IRIS in the Mexican War, and in 1851-52 he led a six-man team from Lima, Peru, to the Brazilian coast in a detailed exploration of the Amazon.

Central America was a sleek 282-foot three-masted schooner whose real muscle was two 375-ton steam engines, each turning a side-mounted paddle wheel.  She left New York on the 20^th of each month bound for Aspinwall, Panama, with 500 California-bound passengers.  In Panama she usually embarked 500 returning passengers, consignments of gold or silver from California’s mines, and of course, mail.  On September 4^th this year, Central America headed north from Panama carrying her usual 484 passengers and $1.5 million in gold bullion and coin.  But as she weathered the Florida Straits on the 9^th, a storm began to brew.  By the time she skirted South Carolina the blow broke with the full fury of a hurricane.

Though Central America had outlasted many storms in her day, she had never seen a gale like this one.  For two days she fought mountainous seas, tempestuous winds, and horizontal rain, using her powerful engines to keep her head-up to the seas.  But the violent pounding was slowly loosening her seams, or perhaps a small patch of her hull stove in, but by the 11^th, she had shipped enough water that it sloshed to and fro in her hold.  Chief Engineer George Ashby could not find the source.

The pumps were started and for a time kept up with the leak.  But like most steamers of this day, Central America lacked water-tight bulkheads.  Water shifted from stem to stern with the pitching of the seas and pushed the vessel onto her starboard side.  More water shipped, and the cant of the decks increased, leaving the coal passers struggling to haul their wheelbarrows from the aft bunkers to the boilers.  A bucket brigade was formed for coal, but the intense boiler fires demanded more than this could supply.  The cooling fires dropped the steam pressure, the paddlewheels slowed, and the pumps lugged.  The deepening water soon splashed against the hot boilers sending bursts of steam hissing into the air.  Then late in the afternoon of the 11^th, the rising water doused the fires–first the starboard boiler, then the port.  The paddlewheels ground to a halt.  Herndon realized Central America was now in extremis, at the mercy of over-crashing waves.

Continued tomorrow…

Baldwin, Hanson W.  Sea Fights and Shipwrecks:  True Tales of the Seven Seas.  Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955, pp. 13-18.

Cutler, Carl C.  Queens of the Western Ocean:  The Story of America’s Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1961, pp. 278-80, 298, 351.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 3 “G-K”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1977, pp. 315-16.

Kinder, Gary.  Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea.  New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  USS IRIS above was a 400-foot sidewheel steamer purchased by our Navy in 1847 for the blockade of Mexico during our 1840s war.  She mounted a single 32-pounder.

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