While shipwrecks today are more the exception than the rule, entering port in the early 19th-century Age of Sail wasn't always smooth sailing.
In Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights, a storm-tossed ship is carved in bas relief on the gravestone of one Arthur Donnelly. The marker poignantly recalls a once famous maritime tragedy in New York City’s history that began to unfold on November 20, 1836.
At about 9:00 in the evening, the Bristol had voyaged across the Atlantic from Liverpool, England. After nearly five weeks at sea, it had finally come within sight of the beacon on New Jersey’s Sandy Hook, the southern sandbar marking the entry to the Lower Bay of New York City's harbor. Captain Alexander McKown signaled for a pilot boat, but none came.
By 3:45 a.m., a storm had come and run the ship aground upon Far Rockaway, the sandbar on the harbor’s north side. Donnelly got his wife Sophia, his children and their nursemaid Vinissa, and his widowed mother-in-law into the first lifeboat.
Despite the early morning storm on November 21, 1836, residents in Far Rockaway rushed from their houses down to the beach. Local fishermen darted their small boats into the pounding surf. For hours, all attention hung on the grim spectacle of a ship sinking about a quarter of a mile out, and of passengers clinging to the limp shrouds of her masts.
According to reports of time, the cook and steward threw themselves overboard. Mothers called to their children; husbands to their wives, but the next wave muted their cries. The ship went ashore on the sandbar at 4 a.m., the wind blowing a gale from the southeast. Rushing on deck, steerage passengers were swept off by waves “almost as soon as they made their appearance.”
Cabin passengers remained below until the deck cabin was washed away, in which time Captain McKown had made preparations for their safety as best he could. Donnelly stayed aboard ship to assist the captain with other passengers, and eventually “died a victim of his own philanthropy.”
News of the tragic incident praised the valor of local rescuers, but also condemned the villainous robbers “watching like cormorants for their prey” to struggle ashore. The surviving passengers had only the clothes they stood in; their trunks, which had drifted ashore, were immediately broken open by the “worse than demons” on shore, and their contents stolen.
The Bristol shipwreck was followed soon after by that of the Mexico in nearby waters. The two maritime tragedies--often spoken of together--promoted radical protocol measures to ensure New York Pilot accountabilities.
"When you called and said, 'Arthur Donnelly', I had to sit down," says historian Arthur S. Mattson, who details the two events in his 2009 book, Water and Ice: The Tragic Wrecks of the Bristol and the Mexico off the South Shore of Long Island. "This is the Bristol's 175th anniversary."
Today, a mass grave in Lynbrook (in the Hempstead township on Long Island) and Donnelly's illustrated gravestone up in Washington Heights are somber memorials to the casualties of both disasters and to the waning years of the Golden Age of Sail.
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