Last Updated by RoxEllen on 11/04/99.

(Listed Alphabetically)

Andrea Doria	SS Atlantic	RMS Empress of Ireland
RMS Lusitania	Morro Castle	RMS Republic
Steamboat Sultana	RMS Titanic	Yarmouth Castle

• The American Experience | Rescue at Sea | Timeline (1850 - 1994) - a PBS page with a time line summarizing major wrecks and maritime losses from 1850 to 1994.  This is part of a web site about the episode of "The American Experience" entitled "Rescue at Sea" which details events of the wreck of the Republic in 1909.

• The company web site for JMS Naval Architects & Salvage Engineers includes a section on computer graphic animation they have done for a series of Discovery Channel documentaries on ship wrecks and maritime disasters. The pages are informative and the ships covered include passenger liners Andrea Doria, Lusitania, Yarmouth Castle; submarines USS Squalus and USS Scorpion, cargo ship Flying Enterprise, and ferry TEV Wahine.  Please note that the graphics on these pages can be quite large and may take some time to load.

• Lost Liners:  Earth's Once Great Ships - This site covers Andrea Doria, Empress of Ireland, Lusitania, Titanic, and Normandie (which burned at her dock in the USA while being converted to a troop ship during World War II).  The pages here have some good information and illustrations, but the formatting tends to look a little strange in Netscape browsers.

• The New Jersey Shipwrecks site has several listings, including one for the "Black Sunday" sinking of six ships in a single day by the German submarine U-151 during World War I.  13 passengers were lost when there were problems launching one of the Carolina's lifeboats.

• Titanic Town - a site with informative pages about the Empress of Ireland, Lusitania, and Titanic, their captains, and their links to Crosby, a suburb of Liverpool, UK.

• Top Ten:  Disasters has stills and Quicktime movies of several disasters including the burning of the Morro Castle and the wreck of the Andrea Doria.

On July 15, 1956, the Swedish-America liner Stockholm rammed her specially reinforced ice-breaker prow into the side of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria, which subsequently rolled over on her side (rendering most of her lifeboats useless) and sank after 11 hours.  The largest rescue fleet in history was mounted (the French liner Ile de France received one of three Gallant Ship awards given) and only 51 people died out of the total 2402 passengers and crew on both ships.  Ironically, I read somewhere that if the same sort of transverse watertight bulkheads that Titanic was designed with had been used here, Andrea Doria might not have sunk.

• Andrea Doria - Tragedy and Rescue at Sea.  This is a site maintained by a survivor of the collision who was 3 years old at the time.  He has collected a lot of information about the wreck here, including information about the ship, the crew, upcoming survivor reunions, and a nice collection of photographs.
• Andrea Doria - a page which is part of an Australian Titanic web site.
• The Andrea Doria/Stockholm Collision - has a lot of photos and statistical tables about the people, ships, etc.  There is also a summary of the wreck.
• New Jersey SCUBA Diving: Andrea Doria Exhibit - artifacts from Andrea Doria that were recovered by wreck divers.

In 1873, the White Star liner Atlantic struck a rock and sank, killing over 500 of the people aboard.  None of the women and only one of the children aboard survived.

• Loss of the Steamship Atlantic, White Star Line, March 30, 1873 - part of the Immigrants to Canada site, this is a very informative page with excerpts from 1873 wreck reports.
• The SS Atlantic Heritage Fund - home page of a fund established to help restore a grave site for some of the victims of the wreck.

On May 29, 1914, the Canadian Pacific liner RMS Empress of Ireland collided in a fog with the Norwegian coal ship Storstad.  Empress of Ireland then sank in the St. Lawrence River in 14 minutes, killing 1014 of the people aboard her (840 of whom were passengers - a greater number of passenger losses than either Titanic or Lusitania) and becoming the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history.

• Empress of Ireland:  The Disaster That Time Forgot - has quite a bit of information.
• Empress of Ireland:  Lost not Forgotten

On May 7, 1915, the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine and sank in 20 minutes.  1,198 people died.

• RMS Lusitania - a single page on the Royal Regals of the Sea web site with some basic information about the sinking.
• RMS Lusitania - this is a link to a single page on an Australian site about the RMS Titanic. This page has a bit more information on it than the one above.

The Morro Castle was a liner that caught fire and burned very badly off New Jersey in 1934, killing over 100 people.  The captain had been found dead in his cabin shortly before the fire broke out and fire fighting equipment was disabled.  The only web page I have found so far is this Morro Castle page on The Ocean Liner Resource site.  The ship is mentioned frequently in lists of events, shipwrecks, the area of New Jersey where she caught fire, etc., but I don't seem to be able to find a page that goes much into the details of the wreck itself.

The RMS Republic, the second White Star liner to have this name, was rammed by the Florida in 1909 and sank 50 miles south of Nantucket.  This wreck was one of the earliest uses of wireless to summon assistance and, in the nearly 36 hours the ship was on the surface, all the passengers were safely transferred to other vessels.  The only casualties were 6 people who died in the actual collision.  This incident may have contributed to the complacency about the safety of passenger liners and their operation that in turn led to the Titanic disaster (who needs lifeboats when we can call for help with one of these wonderful new-fangled wireless telegraphs and get rescued that way...).

Another Titanic related note:  Jack Binns, the wireless operator on the Republic, became a hero and celebrity as a result of his actions and was later offered a position as wireless operator on the Titanic.  He turned it down as he had fallen in love.  The number of people who died on Titanic was almost exactly the same as the number of people saved from Republic.

• The American Experience:  Rescue at Sea - A PBS site dealing with the event.  Apparently there was an episode of this show that dealt with the wreck - I have not seen it.  The site includes a transcript of the episode, bibliography, interview transcripts, a section about the people involved, a map of the area where the collision occurred, a teachers' guide, and a time line of significant wrecks between 1850 and 1994.
• Treasure of the RMS Republic. While this site has good information on the ship and the wreck, it appears to deal more with salvage diving rather than the history of the ship itself.

The Sultana was a Mississippi River steamboat that was allowed by law to carry only 376 persons, including the crew.  On April 27, 1865, straining against the floodwaters of the Mississippi and grossly overloaded with repatriated Union prisoners returning home after the end of the Civil War (steamboat captains were apparently paid a contract of $5 per person to carry the prisoners home and some estimates place the number of people actually on board at over 2000), Sultana's leaky boilers exploded in a huge ball of flame that was seen and heard for many miles, setting the vessel on fire and throwing many of the weakened and ill former POWs on the decks several hundred feet into the river.  Others that had survived the initial explosion were trapped in the wreckage and burned to death.  Since there was no list of personnel aboard, estimates of the death toll range as high as 1900 people (more than RMS Titanic 47 years later), making this the worst maritime disaster in United States history.  The number of survivors is estimated at approximately 500 people.  There was relatively little publicity about the incident at the time as it was overshadowed by the end of the war and the assassination of President Lincoln only eleven days earlier.

• Official Home Page of the Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends
• Death on the Dark River:  The Story of the Sultana Disaster - a reprint of a very informative article originally published in the October, 1955 issue of American Heritage magazine.  At the end of the article are posted emails from descendants of some survivors of the disaster.
• The Titanic of the Mississippi - an article in the Herald-Dispatch (of which city isn't clear from this page - appears to be somewhere in Indiana).
• An account of the sinking of the Sultana by a descendant of one of the very few female survivors (Mrs. Ann Annis), who lost her husband and seven year old daughter in the wreck.  This page includes a deposition given by Mrs. Annis during the official investigation into the cause of the wreck.
• The Sultana Web Ring

On April 15, 1912, the White Star liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank.  Over 1500 people lost their lives, in large part due to the insufficient amount of lifeboats carried by the ship.  I have a few movie-related sites here and several fact-related sites.

• Amazing Webtales:  Sink the Titanic Conspiracy - a humor page spoofing various conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Titanic.

• The Banished Titan - A large image on the index page makes this take awhile to load.  This site has a very informative question & answer page.  There is a good section here about Captain Smith's handling of the ship during the disaster.  There is also an interesting article on salvager George Tulloch and an article about Captain Lord of the Californian.

• Enchanted Titanic - a site run by the great great grand niece of Captain Smith.  There is a page here about people descended from or otherwise related to Titanic survivors.

• Encyclopedia Titanica - A very thorough site with lists of passengers and crew, who was in which lifeboat, and interactive deck plans where you can click on an area of the ship and get the names of people who were in specific cabins or pictures of some of the other areas of the ship.  Some areas of these deck plans are illustrated with photographs and some use computer-generated graphics.  There are also AVI movie clips of the Titanic, her sister ship Olympic, and Captain Smith.

• How Deep Can They Go? - RMS Titanic's Final Resting Place - this is part of a Smithsonian Institution web site about the ocean.  There is little actual information about Titanic here, but there is a huge list of relevant links.

• George Behe's Titanic Tidbits - well-researched site with a large section about the Californian controversy.  Also has a section discussing whether or not Captain Smith of the Titanic was too overconfident and another confirming that there were at least two men who, due to having shawls or towels over their heads, were mistaken for women and allowed into the lifeboats contrary to the claim that reports of a man dressed as a woman is only a legend.  There is a list of links here for web sites belonging to other members of the Titanic Internet Historical Association.

• Gigantic Concepts, Titanic Dreams - There are apparently several projects afoot to build modern replicas of the Titanic.  I'm not quite sure yet what I think of the idea(s), except that naming a new ship Titanic would be awfully morbid...

• Titanic:  Adventure Out Of Time - This is a web site for the 1996 computer game.  This game got a lot of attention when it was released for the detailed computer-generated interiors of the ship.  There are two message boards on this site:  one for the game, and one for the real Titanic.

• TITANIC: On the Net- 1000 Titanic pages - a huge list of Titanic-related links.

• Titanic - the Search for Answers - This is a very extensive site with a lot of information.  There is a page here with a list of Titanic memorials that the author has visited and another with a complete listing of all the movies and TV movies made about the Titanic.

• Titanic - A Tragic Destiny - not much info here that isn't covered in more depth elsewhere, but you might want to check out the lists of Titanic organizations, films, and publications.

• One of Titanic's tenders, Nomadic, still exists.

• The Unauthorized Titanic Historical Society Home Page - mostly links.

• Nic Wilson's TITANIC OLYMPIC & BRITANNIC Home Page - An Australian site with a lot of interesting information about Titanic and her sister ships.  There is another huge list of links here.

• Usenet Newsgroup alt.history.ocean-liners.titanic and their FAQ website.  There is also information on the website about how to join the Titanic mailing list.

• - The official web site for James Cameron's movie about Titanic.

• Titanic Bloopers and Trivia

• James Cameron's Titanic vs. RMS Titanic - a site that compares incidents shown in the movie with facts about the real ship.  Recommended reading for fans who only know the Titanic from James Cameron's movie.

The Yarmouth Castle was an aging cruise ship that burned badly in the Bahamas in 1965.  90 people died in the fire.  The only page specifically about this ship that I've been able to find on her so far is this ballad.  There are some general shipwreck sites at the beginning of this section that may have more information.

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