Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 November 1890 — TERRIBLE CRASH AT SEA. [ARTICLE]

TERRIBLE CRASH AT SEA.

Nearly One Hundred Lives Lost in a Collision. An unknown schooner, apparently bound east, with a load of coal, ran down the Spanish steamship Vizcaya, outward bound from New York, and cut it half in two amidships. Within ten minutes both vessels had sunk in twelve fathoms of water, their masts showing above it. Of the ninety-seven persons on board the steamer nearly all went dswn with tlie hull. Some thirty clung to the railing, and a few of the schooner’s crew, with three of the crew of the steamer, found clinging space in the upper rigging of the latter. As the night advanced, the cold and consequent exhaustion claimed the weaker ones, and they dropped into the water one by one, and were drowned. Only twelve —four officers and eight seamen—were still in the rigging at daylight when the tramp steamer Humbolt re: cued the survivors by means of its boat: This terrible disaster occurred withii eight miles of the New Jersey coast at Barnegat. Sixteen passengers, a steamship crew of sixty-five, and a schooner crew of probably sixteen, the usual number—ninety-seven in all—certainly perished. Among the passengers who were losj was Signor Juan Pedro, a millionaire of Havana, who was the chief owner of the Compania Transatlantic Espanola, who was on his way home after a summer spent in Paris. He took this steamer because it was esteemed one of tlie finest and safest in the line. The surviving officers claim that the schooner had no lights out. She was fairly on top of the steamer before she was seen, though the night was clear. Capt. Cuniil was at hi® post of duty on the bridge, and was in stantly killed by the bowsprit of th schooner.