3. La Bourgogne’s loss included 299 of the 300 women on board
An unwritten and longstanding law of the sea is that when a vessel needs to be abandoned women and children are first. It was a law forgotten on the morning of July 4, 1898, when the French passenger and mail steamer La Bourgogne, a vessel noted for its speed, collided with a British windjammer off Sable Island, near Nova Scotia. The French ship was traveling at full speed in a heavy fog, with visibility limited to less than twenty yards. An immediate list to starboard rendered the port-side lifeboats unable to be launched, and several of the starboard boats were damaged. In the darkness and fog, there was a panicked rush to the usable boats.
There were 726 passengers and crew aboard the vessel, and of the three hundred women aboard only one survived. None of the children aboard survived. Of the 173 who did live through the disaster less than seventy were passengers, and only one ship’s officer survived the sinking. The captain and deck officers went down with the ship. The British vessel, Cromartyshire, rescued those that it could once the fog thinned and daylight revealed the victims in the water and on the few ship’s boats which were deployed. Those crew members who survived were disembarked in New York when the British ship arrived there and required protection from the police when the account of the sinking became known to the public.