The following and the series of articles to follow on this subject were transcribed by Petra Michinson and are posted here with her permission. Geo. When The Times Digital Archives were freely accessible in April, I came across an article taken from the Cumberland Pacquet which mentioned that 10 people from Cumberland had lost their lives in the wreck of the steamship London (Bridget Casson recently transcribed this article for the Cumberland Rootsweb list). Intrigued, I tried to find more information about this disaster - and got a lot more than I bargained for! The London sank in a bad storm in the Bay of Biscay on 11th January 1866 on its way from London to Melbourne. 220 passengers and crew lost their lives; 16 crew and 3 passengers managed to get away in one boat and survived. The disaster happened after a wave tore off the skylight covering the hatchway above the engine room; the masses of water pouring into the ship extinguished the engine fires, leaving her without steam power to work the pumps, and eventually the continuing ingress of water made her sink. This calamity sent shock waves through the nation, particularly as another passenger steamer, the Amalia, sank a day later in the same storm in the Bay of Biscay under very similar circumstances. The report of the shipwreck spawned numerous letters from people speculating about the causes for the sinking and suggesting possible remedies. An inquiry was held by the Board of Trade, finding no blame with anybody, and of course there was an outcry that the inquiry had not been thorough enough and was designed to protect the shipowners... In between there were touching letters from relatives of the victims and reports about letters in bottles from the ship and a body found on the coast of France. It was quite hard to find the relevant articles - try searching The Times for the word "London" and you get dozens of hits in every edition! Even so, I found 37 articles relating to this accident, and that in spite of stopping the search at the end of March 1866. And I missed some important articles - of the 12 days of the inquiry, I missed the reports of days 2, 3 and 5. Unfortunately when I discovered that during the transcribing, the free access to The Times Digital Archives had long finished, so I can't rectify my omissions now. Transcribing all 37 articles produced a Word document of over 80 pages, which I divided into 58 emails. And no, I am not going to send them all in one go, as I would rightly be accused of swamping the lists! I will send them in instalments over the next week or so. As always, I have left the spelling etc. as I found it (although I may have inadvertently added a few spelling mistakes of my own!). The only change I have made is that when whole lists (e.g. of passengers) were given within a paragraph, I put each person on a new line but left the punctuation as it was. I have also capitalised all surnames. I must say that in particular the report of the sinking of the ship was one of the most harrowing articles I have ever transcribed. The whole story is not for the faint-hearted! If you find it all too long to read, I recommend at least the following articles: No. 3 - 7 : Report of Last Journey (includes lists of crew, passengers and survivors) No. 16 : Victims from Cumberland (previously transcribed by Bridget) No. 36 : Miraculous Preservation at Sea (mostly not at all about the London, but another shipwreck - with lots of names!) No. 47 : Letters in Bottles No. 49-51: Body Found (and identification) Some of the reports about the inquiry are also very interesting as most of the survivors were interviewed on days 4-9. The passengers and crew were from all over the country as well as from Australia, so you might even find some non-Cumberland relatives! If anyone wants to save all the transcriptions, just ask me to send you the Word document. I hope you all enjoy the transcriptions! Petra