Featured on PDR in the collection The Tragedy of the Seas (1841)

So asks Charles Ellms in the preface to The Tragedy of the Seas, a book which, as its title suggests, is dedicated to the times when such waterborne adventures go wrong — a colourful compendium of thirty-seven nautical catastrophes that took place in bodies of water around the world between 1803 and 1840. We read of ships wrecked on coral reefs, capsized in hurricanes, and reduced to cinders after lightning strikes. The celebrated French navigator De Blosseville sails on a voyage of discovery to the Arctic Ocean never to return. A steamer violently explodes on the Ohio River killing dozens. The most fatal involves 116 passengers succumbing to hunger and cold after the barque Mexico was stranded off Long Island in January 1837. There is…