On November 1, 1856, the steamer Lyonnais left New York harbor en route to France with 150 persons on board. One of the 39 cabin passengers was John Gardiner Gibson, Jr., the oldest son of Catherine Hammond Gibson and brother of Charles Hammond Gibson (the first residents of what is now the Gibson House Museum). He was twenty-one years old.
The next night, the ship Adriatic hit the Lyonnais, despite the Lyonnais’s having displayed its lights and sounded its whistle upon first seeing the Adriatic. The Adriatic kept going, not knowing it had done severe damage to the other vessel. The Lyonnais began rapidly taking on water through a hole in its side. The water put out the fires that would have kept the ship moving. Crew members and a few passengers tried to pump the water out, but cinders clogged the pumps so they resorted to using buckets. Excess cargo was thrown overboard to lighten the ship’s load, and mattresses were used to try to plug the hole. None of this was sufficient; water kept coming in. The crew guessed there was probably another hole on the bottom of the ship.
The attempts to bail out the Lyonnais lasted for about seven hours. Meanwhile, a raft was built—out of such materials as masts, chicken coops, and doors—in case the ship had to be abandoned, because there weren’t enough lifeboats for all 150 people on board. By morning, it was decided to abandon the ship. More than 100 people piled into the five lifeboats, and 40 boarded the raft.
Only one boat was ever heard from again. It had been boarded by 18 people, and only 16 were still alive by the time it was rescued, six days later. During that time, they had faced freezing temperatures, a shortage of water, and snow and ice storms. Overall, more than 130 people died as the result of the shipwreck.
John Gardiner Gibson, Jr. was not on the recovered lifeboat. His body was never found. Chances are he was on the makeshift raft, which most of the cabin passengers had boarded. One of the crew on the recovered lifeboat speculated that the raft could not have withstood the rough sea conditions and probably disintegrated within a day of setting off from the Lyonnais.
The story of the Lyonnais is tragic for many reasons. One is that Catherine lost a son, and Charles a brother. This loss must have been especially horrible for them given that John Gibson, Sr.—Catherine’s husband and Charles’s father—had died at sea eighteen years earlier (although of illness, not in a shipwreck). According to Catherine’s niece, she, “never ceased to mourn inordinately” over John, Jr. Countless others, of course, also lost a loved one in the wreck of the Lyonnais.
An especially tragic aspect of this story was the failure to correct an obvious safety problem. There were not enough lifeboats on the Lyonnais. Forty people, almost a third of the people on board, had to rely on a makeshift raft. Does this remind you of any other shipwrecks of note? The RMS Titanic sunk in 1912—sixty-six years after the Lyonnais. A clear safety problem had been identified, but not fixed, for over six decades. John Gardiner Gibson, Jr. and 129 other passengers lost their lives, and no lesson had been learned from it. It took the deaths of 1,500 people on board the Titanic for this problem to finally be addressed. To me, that is the most tragic aspect of this story.
Image above: "Lyonnais: passengers quitting sinking ship" from 1856
by: Katie Schinabeck, Former Museum Guide
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