- The London
The London was an emigrant ship sailing from Britain to
Australia in January 1866. She carried 220 passengers and a crew of 69, plus a great deal of deck cargo, altogether making the ship far too overloaded and unseaworthy.By a story later highly publicised, when she was en route down the
Thames , a seaman seeing her passPurfleet said, "It'll be her last voyage…she is too low down in the water, she'll never rise to a stiff sea."This proved all too accurate. The "London" sank in the
Bay of Biscay , and there were only 19 survivors.The disaster of The "London" aroused increased attention in Britain to the dangerous condition of the
coffin ships , overloaded by unscrupulous ship owners, and the publicity had a major role inSamuel Plimsoll 's campaign to reform shipping so as to prevent further such disasters.The disaster of the "London" is extensively discussed in
Nicolette Jones 's "The Plimsoll Sensation", a 2006 biography of Plimsoll. (See [http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com/2006_07_02_archive.html] ).ee also
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Plimsoll line External links
* [http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com/2006_07_02_archive.html Review of "The Plimsoll Sensation" in Bookworm on the Net, July 2, 2006]
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