Shipwreck victims' story lives in Lynbrook

Late in the summer of 1972, a young banker named Arthur Mattson walked into Rockville Cemetery, a small and plain public burial ground on Lynbrook's edge.

He'd moved into the village just days before and was reeling from news he had gotten before the furniture was unpacked: His sister Irene had drowned when her yacht was struck by a larger vessel and sank off the French coast.

At the cemetery's center was a mass grave marked by a chipped 18-foot marble obelisk. The inscription on the east face reads in part: "To commemorate the melancholy fate of the unfortunate sufferers belonging to the Bristol and Mexico, this monument was erected."

Nearly 40 years later, Mattson, 68, still lives in Lynbrook, where he is the village's official historian. He knows little about the death of his sister, a marine archaeologist en route to the Mediterranean for a dive. She is not buried at Rockville.

"It was too close to me to want to do research," he said one recent afternoon.

But the wrecks of the Bristol and Mexico fascinated him. He found a brief mention of them in an 1839 history of Long Island at the Lynbrook Public Library and, for a time, nothing more. "Nobody knew about it," he said.

Mattson hunted down ship manifests, manuscripts and newspaper articles to write "Water and Ice" (Lynbrook Historical Books, 2009), the authoritative account of the wrecks, which killed 215 mostly Irish immigrants off Long Island in 1836 and 1837.

They occurred just two months apart, and not far from each other, but make very different stories.

Fateful voyages

The Bristol, Mattson writes, crossed from Liverpool in the fall of 1836 in a respectable 35 days, carrying coal and iron and 127 passengers in addition to her crew of 17. Passengers included relatively prosperous doctors, tradesmen and farmers. Those in first and second class were served hot meals. Conditions aboard were cramped and uncomfortable, common for most ships crossing the Atlantic at that time.

The Mexico, by contrast, was 71 days out of Liverpool before reaching Long Island, slowed by storms a faster ship could have outrun. She was a dangerously overloaded leaky scow. Her 111 passengers were mostly farm laborers who needed to work through the very last of the harvest and could find no other conveyance so cheap, so late.

A broker crammed the passengers into jerry-rigged cubicles between decks and fed them salt meat and hard biscuits. The food ran out 10 days before the Mexico reached Long Island, and the passengers began to starve.

While the Mexico was fighting her way across the Atlantic, the Bristol met her end suddenly, running aground Nov. 21, 1836, off Rockaway Beach, after waiting for a harbor pilot's assistance to enter New York Harbor. On a sandbar in the Rockaway Shoals, a crewman said, a "tremendous" wave ripped off everything on the Bristol's decks, hatches included; successive waves filled her with water, drowning many of those who were below. When rescue boats arrived, the captain ordered women and children off first; 100 people had already drowned. The captain left last.

The Mexico also waited in vain for a harbor pilot and it, too, ran onto a sandbar, likely just 200 yards off Long Beach on Jan. 2, 1837. An observer described the waves that day as "high as a house;" chunks of ice floated in the ocean, and the Mexico's decks froze.

After the ship's two boats were lost, rescue came in the form of a small boat rowed by fisherman Raynor "Rock" Smith of Freeport and his sons.

The Mexico's captain got on it, along with seven of his crew and the ship's strongbox, leaving 115 terrified passengers and crew aboard.

No other boats were able to clear the surf that night, and everyone left aboard froze to death.

Years later, poet Walt Whitman, who was living in Hempstead Village at the time of the wrecks, described the Mexico's demise in "Leaves of Grass:" "I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as she strikes . . . In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in a barn."

Rockville Cemetery was chosen as a burial ground for victims of both shipwrecks, because its sandy soil made for easier digging in the dead of winter.

Reactions to the shipwrecks were swift and wide-ranging. The captain of the Mexico who abandoned his passengers was branded a coward in the press but soon found work on another ship. The monopoly that New York pilots had enjoyed over harbor business was broken when New Jersey pilots were allowed to compete for business. And Congress ordered the revenue cutters that patrolled the coast -- the Coast Guard had not been created yet -- to add rescue to their purview.

But the stories of the wrecks and their victims were soon forgotten.

"This was unlike the Titanic," Mattson said. "These were not millionaires. These were poor Irishmen . . . They would have been our brothers."

A descendant visits

Mattson said he had met only one descendant of the passengers of either ship -- state Assemb. Jack McEneny (D-Albany), who contacted him after reading the book. McEneny's great-great-grandfather, Michael Horan, was aboard the Bristol; he lived out his days in upstate New York.

McEneny visited the cemetery recently, he said, interested to see for himself the place his ancestor narrowly avoided.

"I saw a lot of Middle Eastern and Asian names," McEneny said. "It's funny -- they're surrounded by people who shared the same fears and hopes of all immigrants for a new life in a new land. There's probably more commonality than what the names carved in stone would indicate."

Memorial service for victims of the Bristol and Mexico shipwrecks
When: Saturday, Nov. 19, at 10 a.m.
Where: Rockville Cemetery, 45 Merrick Rd., Lynbrook

After the service, coffee and snacks will be served at the home of Arthur Mattson, Lynbrook’s historian. A newly discovered oil painting of the wreck of the Mexico will also be on display.
More info: RSVP to Lynhistory@aol.com, or call 516-887-7673.