On November 21, 1847, the propeller steamer Phoenix burned seven miles north of Sheboygan Harbor with the loss of 190 to 250 lives, one of the worst disasters in Great Lakes history. Carrying close to 300 passengers and crewmen, most of them Dutch immigrants bound for Sheboygan, the vessel had left Buffalo on November 11 for the last trip of the shipping season as thousands of immigrants entered Buffalo in the late 1840s and chose the Great Lakes route over overland travel to the farmlands of mid-America. Built in 1845 and commanded by Captain G.B. Sweet, the Phoenix was among the newest propeller-driven steamers on the lakes, a type still seen as a radical departure from the more common sidewheel steamers. During the stormy voyage Captain Sweet fell and suffered an incapacitating injury, and after the battered vessel stopped at Manitowoc Harbor on November 20 to discharge a few passengers and take on fuel, it departed near midnight for Sheboygan, only thirty miles away. After several hours, with Sheboygan's lights visible and the journey nearly finished, a small fire broke out in the engine room when overheated boilers ignited overhead wooden beams. The crew at first contained the flames, but the fire soon raged out of control and the first mate ordered the ship abandoned. The two lifeboats carried 41 persons to safety, and two crewmen saved themselves by clinging to the side of the ship, but all the rest perished, many of them children, in the flames or the frigid water. The crew of the steamer Delaware, seeing the fire from Sheboygan Harbor, set out as soon as they could get up steam, but arrived to find only the dead and a burned-out drifting hulk that had burned to the water line; the Delaware towed the smoking hull to Sheboygan Harbor, where it settled to the bottom in shallow water. Survivors reported that David Blish, a first-class passenger and merchant from Southport, now Kenosha, acted heroically by organizing a bucket brigade, comforting lost children, helping others over the side, refusing a seat in a lifeboat, and finally being driven into the water by the flames, where he was last seen swimming while holding a small child; neither survived.