The Wreck of the Mexico - January 2, 1837

On December 31, 1836, after a long and difficult Atlantic crossing from Liverpool, England, the 279-ton, three-masted, American-owned barque Mexico reached the mouth of New York Harbor as bitter cold and starvation rations had already worn down those aboard. The ship's crew was suffering from frostbite, and the 111 people in steerage, most of them poor Irish immigrants, looked toward Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Staten Island with hope that they were about to reach America. But as had happened weeks earlier with the Bristol, New York Harbor pilots were not at their posts to guide the vessel through the dangerous shoals at the harbor's entrance, remaining ashore on New Year's Eve instead. Captain Charles Winslow fired the ship's gun and flew distress flags upside down, but no pilots came. A rising storm forced the barque back out to sea and then drove it onto a sandbar two hundred yards off Long Beach on the night of January 2, 1837. Icy seawater flooded the passenger areas, and the terrified immigrants climbed onto the ice-covered main deck, close enough to shore to shout but unable to swim the distance in the freezing water. With the temperature at three degrees above zero and waves reported as high as a house, only one rescue party, led by Captain Raynor Rock Smith of Freeport, dared row out from shore, and Smith saved only the captain and seven crewmen. Winslow was among the first to leave, taking his sword and the ship's strongbox and leaving 115 men, women, and children behind to freeze to death on the deck. The account holds that if he and his crew had stayed aboard, they would have had the strength and skill to pull Smith's rescue boat back to the wreck after it reached shore. Winslow was never charged for negligence, and neither were the pilots. The disaster deeply affected the seventeen-year-old Walt Whitman, who later used strikingly accurate details from the wreck of the Mexico in "The Sleepers" in Leaves of Grass.

Lakeview, New York · United States