The Evening Public Ledger Philadelphia, Pa. July 27, 1915 The Port Of Missing Ships - Was Once Thought To Be The Sargasso Sea, But Now We Know Better - Famous Wrecks That Preceded The Overturn Of The Eastland At Her Pier By: A. WELLESLEY BACUP The Chicago River is not the sea, but it is as treacherous as the great deep. The Eastland would have capsized no more quickly on the Atlantic than near the Clark street bridge, if the capsizing conditions were present. It is easy to say that the boat was unseaworthy-perhaps it was-but other boats supposed to be constructed to weather all storms have sailed into that crowded port of missing ships which is not connected by mail with any other city. The great mystery of the seas, whether inland or bounded by the continents, remains un- solved, though perhaps the Eastland case may provide a clue. Shifting cargoes have without any doubt been responsible for many a missing ship. The cargo of the Eastland shifted, and the rest is a great horror, from the shock of which the nation is still suffering and will suffer till the next tragedy causes a new sensation. If the Eastland had succeeded in getting into the lake with its precious freight the tragedy might have been greater. A passenger steamer would have drawn the curious excursionists to one side of the vessel and the boat would have careened in deep water, far from land, where the lifeboats would have been the only means at hand to save the passengers. When Ships Break Their Back The tragedy of the Great Lakes is as great in proportion to their size as the tragedy of the salt seas. Many a vessel has sailed from port to be heard of no more. A fleet of cargo steamers was built some years ago on the theory that there was too much waste space in the hold. The boats were not properly strengthened to stand a storm and one at least of them went to the bottom leaving no trace. The critics of the system of construction used insisted that the strain of the heavy seas broke the back of the boat by forcing the steel plates to act as shears, cutting the rivets clear through and letting the vessel go to the bottom. No one will ever know whether this theory is sound or not. There used to be a tradition that the Sargasso Sea was filled with the sodden hulks of the wrecks of centuries, but a little exploration exploded that myth as it earlier proved that men could cross the equator without being burned to death by the perpendicular rays of the sun, and that there were no fire breathing monsters of the deep whose breath would scorch the life out of the venturesome mariner. While the popularly accepted nature of the mysteries of the deep have changed, the mystery remains. The invention of steam did not lessen it, but wireless telegraphy has decreased the number of tragedies that must forever remain unexplained. If it had not been for that most wonderful application of the mysterious force of electricity the fate of the Titanic would have still been a mystery. We should have known that the boat had gone down with all onboard, but how it happened would have been explained no more fully than Tyrone Power's note in a bottle explained the fate of the President, the first great steamship to go down in the Atlantic. When the President Disappeared The President sailed from New York on March 11, 1841, with 300 persons on board, and was never seen again. When it failed to reach Liverpool on the scheduled date no one was alarmed, for steam navigation was still in its infancy and delays were expected. But days passed and grew into weeks. There was no ocean cable, so it was impossible to communicate quickly with America, or for American's to learn whether their friends had arrived safely in England. It was thought that the ship might have had to put into a remote port for repairs. Then a letter was received by the relatives of one of the passengers announcing that the boat had stopped at Madeira because her engines and rudder needed attention. The waiting friends took heart of hope and were cheerful for a while. Then an Irish packet arrived, reporting that a large steamer was waiting outside for high water to come in to the Liverpool docks. Everyone was sure that this was the President and crowds gathered by the riverside, flags were hoisted and preparations were made to welcome the lost ship. But it was not the President. The letter from Madeira was discovered to be fraudulent and for many years the mystery remained. Finally, some one picked up a bottle in the sea containing a note purporting to be written by Tyrone Power, a distinguished comedian of his time, who had been a passenger on the vessel, announcing that as he wrote the boat was sinking. The note has been accepted as genuine, but that, too, may have been a hoax. When New York Mourned The sinking of the Arctic off Cape race on October 27, 1854, has been explained, in spite of the dense fog and snowstorm in which she received her death blow. She was in a collision with the French steamer VESTA. The captain of the Arctic thought the other vessel was seriously damaged and that his own ship was unhurt, and he put off with some of his crew in lifeboats to offer assistance only to discover soon after that his own ship was sinking. Some of the passengers were saved, but 439 lives were lost. As most of the dead had lived in New York that city was deeply moved by the tragedy. The preachers took it as a text for their sermons and the school readers of a generation or two ago contained extracts from one of the most famous of these sermons, in which the horror of the wreck was described with all the skill of a modern newspaper writer. The CITY OF BOSTON, however, which left New York on January 25, 1870, stopped at Halifax three days later and then went out into the unknown, while all its nearly 200 passengers took that great voyage undertaken by those who go to the bottom of the sea. Another passenger ship that met the same fate was the COLOMBO, that sailed from Boston seven years later and vanished as completely as though it had never existed. To pass from passenger to freight steamers, the case of the NARONIC, of the White Star Line, is one of the most interesting. This ship was one of the biggest of her class, was almost new and was in the best condition. She was so stanch that it was thought she could weather the worst storm that ever raged over the restless waves. But she never reached the port of living ships, and the only trace of her that was ever found was one of her boats, picked up in mid-ocean some weeks after she sailed. This silent, inanimate survivor of the wreck contained not a trace of evidence which would explain what had become of the great freighter. It may have been blown up by a boiler explosion, or it may have been capsized by shifting cargo, or any one of the thousand and one causes which bring disaster on the deep may have been responsible for its disappearance. It has doubtless rusted away in the bottom of the sea, for the modern steel vessel is so built that it can no longer be said that its bones are bleaching on the sands of the ocean's bed. And they never did bleach there, anyway. The science of navigation has not profited by the lesson of the missing ships, for no one has ever come back to read that lesson to the marine constructors. The skilled ship builders have thereby escaped much amateur advice, such as was lavished by an outraged and indignant public at the time of the Titanic disaster, when every man who could use a pen was telling the rest of us how to prevent a repetition of similar disasters. The lesson of the Eastland, however, is apparently so clear that it teaches itself.