SS Austria

The Vessel

The SS Austria was a Hamburg-America Line passenger steamship, commissioned at the Caird and Company yard at Greenock, Scotland, on 5 March 1857. She was 97 metres long, 2,384 gross tons, and was one of the first Hamburg-America Line steamers designed specifically for the Hamburg-to-New-York immigrant trade. Her engines were British-built twin-cylinder steam reciprocating engines of the mid-1850s standard design, driving a single screw propeller at a service speed of 10.5 knots.

The Hamburg-America Line (Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft, HAPAG) had been established in 1847 specifically for the emigrant trade between Hamburg and New York. By 1858 the line had expanded to operate four similar ships (Hammonia, Borussia, Saxonia, Austria), which together represented the principal German emigrant transportation channel for the mid-1850s. The Hamburg-America Line's specific commercial strength was its ability to service the German-speaking Mitteleuropa (Bavaria, Württemberg, Austria, Bohemia) that had been producing substantial emigration to the United States since 1848.

Her master on her final voyage was Captain Friedrich Heydtmann, 49, a career Hamburg-America Line officer.

The Voyage

On 1 September 1858 the SS Austria departed Hamburg on her third round voyage of the 1858 season, bound for New York with 538 aboard: 453 emigrant passengers (predominantly German, Bohemian, and Austrian), 30 cabin-class passengers, and 55 ship's crew. Her specific routing was the standard Hamburg-America passage: down the Elbe to the North Sea, through the English Channel, and across the Atlantic on the southern route via Madeira to avoid the transatlantic iceberg zone.

By 13 September 1858 she was approximately 1,800 kilometres east-northeast of the Azores, approximately halfway through her Atlantic crossing. The weather was fair; the sea was moderate; the voyage had been routine.

At approximately 12:00 on 13 September 1858 a fire was detected in the forecastle of the SS Austria. The specific cause of the fire was an accidental ignition related to the then-standard disinfecting procedure used in mid-nineteenth-century emigrant steamships: a barrel of boiling tar had been placed in the forecastle for the purpose of disinfecting the crew's quarters, and the tar had boiled over and ignited the surrounding wooden furniture and stores.

The Disaster

The fire in SS Austria's forecastle spread rapidly through the ship's wooden-lined interior compartments. The specific vulnerability of mid-nineteenth-century passenger steamships to interior fires was well-known but had not been successfully addressed at the operational level: the combination of wooden hull, wooden interior lining, cotton upholstery, oil lamps, and open coal stoves in the galleys and cabins produced a fire risk that no contemporary fire-suppression system could adequately counter.

The crew response to the SS Austria fire was, by contemporary standards, adequate in intention but catastrophically inadequate in execution. Captain Heydtmann ordered the ship's fire bucket brigade to attack the forecastle fire; the attack failed. By 12:30 on 13 September 1858 the fire had reached the main cabin areas; by 13:00 the fire had reached the engine room and had destroyed the ship's steam power.

The specific failure of the evacuation reflected the contemporary inadequacy of passenger-ship life-saving equipment. The SS Austria carried four small wooden lifeboats (total capacity approximately 100 people) for her 538 aboard. Three of the four lifeboats capsized during launching attempts in the heavy swell adjacent to the burning ship; only one lifeboat launched successfully, carrying approximately 25 people. The remaining 500+ aboard either burned in the fire or entered the sea without adequate flotation support.

The SS Narragansett (an American sailing packet) reached the scene of the SS Austria sinking at approximately 15:00 on 13 September 1858 and rescued approximately 65 survivors from the water. The SS Maurice (a French sailing barque) subsequently rescued an additional 25 survivors. The combined rescue produced 89 survivors from the 538 aboard.

SS Austria sank at approximately 17:00 on 13 September 1858 at approximately 47°00′N 35°30′W, 1,800 kilometres east-northeast of the Azores, in approximately 4,500 metres of water. 449 of her 538 aboard died, the largest single loss of life in the history of the trans-Atlantic immigrant trade to that date.

The Legacy

The loss of the SS Austria produced an immediate public reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. The German and Austrian press coverage of the disaster focused specifically on the immigrant casualty count: the 449 dead were predominantly working-class Germans, Bohemians, and Austrians whose families in Europe had invested substantial resources in their emigration to the United States, and whose deaths represented both individual family tragedies and a broader disruption of the European-American emigration economy.

The American press coverage, concentrated in New York and German-American publications across the American Midwest, focused on the specific inadequacy of contemporary passenger-ship safety: the wooden lifeboats that had failed; the inadequate fire-suppression equipment; the combustible interior lining that had fed the fire; and the inadequate crew training that had not permitted an effective response.

The legislative consequences of the SS Austria loss were, however, limited. The British, American, and German governments did not, in 1858-1859, implement significant passenger-ship safety reforms in response to the disaster. The specific reason was that contemporary passenger-ship regulations were widely considered adequate by the shipping industry and by the regulatory authorities; the SS Austria's loss was attributed to the specific unfortunate circumstances of the tar-barrel disinfecting procedure rather than to a systematic safety deficiency. The broader passenger-ship safety reform that would eventually produce the SOLAS 1914 convention was still 56 years in the future.

The SS Austria has become, in contemporary German-American emigration historiography, one of the canonical examples of the nineteenth-century emigration disaster. The 449 dead, most of them individually unmemorialised in contemporary American sources, have been the subject of genealogical research by German-American family-history organisations through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Approximately 100 of the 449 dead have been specifically identified by name through genealogical research; the remaining 349 remain unnamed in the surviving documentation.

The wreck of the SS Austria lies at approximately 4,500 metres depth in the North Atlantic; her specific position is unknown. She has never been located by modern deep-ocean survey expeditions. The Hamburg-America Line, which continued operations through 1970 (when it was merged with Norddeutscher Lloyd to form Hapag-Lloyd), maintained a memorial to the Austria dead at the Hamburg-America Line headquarters building in Hamburg; the memorial was destroyed during the 1943 Hamburg bombing raids and has not been restored.