3-017-028 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The screw steam-ship Royal Standard in collision with an iceberg on the home voyage from Melbourne, 1864. Engraving from a sketch by Captain G. H. Dowell, commander of the screw steam-ship Royal Standard, one of the White Star line of Australian packets...The weather [in the South Pacific Ocean] was hazy...the vessel was sailing with a fresh breeze from the north-west, ten knots an hour; her steam-engines, therefore, were not at work, and her screw-propeller was raised, while she made use of the favourable wind. Suddenly she ran into a dense fog. The look-out man...saw a large iceberg...its precipitous cliffs, 600 ft. in height, were towering above the ship...Each wave now knocked her against it...the maintopmast and the mizzen-top-mast snapped asunder...The ship, having thus lost much of her sailing power, could not now keep her hull from coming into violent contact with the iceberg...By another crash, an upper plate amidships was split, with considerable damage...the destruction of the ship seemed quite inevitable...The Royal Standard had thus rubbed shoulders with the iceberg for about half an hour, scraping along half a mile of its length, when, happily, the end of it was seen through the surrounding fog, and at last the ship got clear'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.