Connecticut western news., 1888-08-22
CATTLE MARKETS
A TERRIBLE DISASTER. The Collision of Two Steamers Leads to Wholesale Drowning.

In thick fog at early dawn, Aug. IA, off Sable Island, near Cape Race, the steamship Thingvalla, of the Thingvalla line, crashed into the steamship Geiser of the same line, and, five minutes later, the waters of the Allan tic were gurgliug through great hole in the' hull of the Geiser as she sank to grave be- meath the angry waters.
 The Geiser left New York with 163 souls on board, ninety-three passengers and seventy of her crew, bound for Stettin, Copenhagen, Denmark and Christina Sweden. The Thing valla was bound from those ports to New York. The sun had just commenced to climb toward her zenith when the accident occurred, but the heavy fog that rested over the waters so ob- scured the vision that the officers of neither vessel could see more than few yards ahead.
 Everybody in the illfated deiser, except the portion of the crew who were on duty, were asleep at the time. The first mate of the Geiser, who stood on the bridge keeping sharp lookout, did not see the approaching Thingvalla as she glided over the water on her fated mission of destruction until her bow was too near the Geiser for the terrible calam- to think the Thingvalla was on him. There was shock, crash, and the terrible work of destruction was done.
 wild panic seized everybody, and passen- gers and crew rushed hither and thither up and down the decks of the sinking ship, crying for help. Order was impossible. All was con. fusion, and the heartrending screams of men, women and children made the task of saving life even more difficult han it otherwise would have been. The side of the Geiser was crushed in by the deadly blow and the water poured into her like deluge. The panic-stricken pas sengers, thinly clad in their night robes and shivering with the cold and wet, realizing that their chances of life were not one in ten thous- and threw bits of wood and boxes into the sea and jumped after them into the dark water, trusting rather to keep themselves afoat with their improvised buoys until assistance should come than to remain longer on the sinking ship. The hatches were torn up and set afoat with women and children clinging to them. The life boats were quickly filed and some of them were used to tow the life burdened matches away from the vortex the oinking ves- sel would make.
 The crew of the Thingvalla, herself disabled by the collision, strove manfully to rescue those whose lives the blow of their vessel had endangered, but in spite of their almost super human efforts but 8 small portion were saved.
 The official report of the disaster shows that there were ninety-three passengers on board the Geiser, of whom seven were second cabin and the remainder were steerage. The crew numbered seventy men, including the officers. None of the cabin passengers were saved, and seventeen of the crew were saved, inclusive of the officers. Of the steerage passengers four teen were saved, The record, therefore, shows that 132 passengers, with the big ocean steam ship as their coffin, sank forever in the ocean to rise no more.
 Her injuries are thus descrbed: hole is clean square cut, leaving long piece of the upper part of the bow projecting out over it. It looks something like a building would ap- pear with the front and piece of each side taken clean out and the roof left overhanging. Twenty feet of strong iron plates are torn out from the stem back into the sides of the iron steamer, and the sea washed into the forward compartment with the same ease that it lapped the sides of the ship.