The Wreck of the William Brown: A True Tale of Overcrowded Lifeboats and Murder at Sea, by Tom Koch (International Marine/McGraw-Hill 2004)

The Wreck of the William Brown by Tom Koch

Book Review by Eric Fryar

On March 18, 1841, the William Brown under the command of Captain George Harris sailed from Liverpool, England for Philadelphia, with a crew of 17, a cargo primarily of salt, and 66 passengers, mostly poor Scottish and Irish emigrants in steerage. At about 10pm on April 19, the ship plowed into an iceberg in the North Atlantic, about 250 miles southeast of Newfoundland—the same waters where the Titanic would go down for the same reason 71 years later. 

Captain Harris, who had ordered the ship to sail at full speed without a lookout posted, did not go down with the ship. He and eight sailors and one passenger got into the jolly boat. The first mate with eight sailors and 36 passengers got into the longboat. They left 29 passengers, many of them children, to die on the sinking vessel. None of the crew was lost. The next morning, Captain Harris abandoned the longboat and made for Newfoundland. The jolly boat was not overloaded, had plenty of provisions, and had a sail. The longboat, on the other hand, was severely overloaded, had inadequate provisions, was leaking badly, and did not have a functional rudder. One of the crew compared the hapless longboat to a bathtub floating in the ocean. 

One of the sailors on the longboat was a twenty-six-year-old Swede named Alexander William Holmes. He was the one sailor who had risked his life to go back onto the sinking ship to rescue the youngest child of a family that had made it onto the longboat. Most of the passengers were dressed only in their nightclothes and were freezing. Holmes gave up his coat and extra clothes to the passengers. But the following night, between rain, waves, and the plug in the bottom of the boat becoming dislodged, the longboat was filling up with water. The sailors and passengers bailed frantically. One of the women screamed that the boat was sinking. The first mate ordered the crew to lighten the boat. Holmes and three other sailors systematically threw all the male passengers overboard to drown in the frigid waters. The mate ordered that husband and wife should not be separated, so two men who were with their wives were spared. Also, a twelve-year-old boy was thrown overboard but managed to sneak back on board and survived. Two women, who apparently volunteered after their brother was thrown overboard, were also drowned. The sailors were compassionate but merciless. Requests for time to pray were honored. Offers of money were not. A total of seventeen persons were tossed from the longboat and died. By the next morning, the first mate was a psychological wreck. He begged someone else to take command. Alexander Holmes did so. He directed the boat to row south toward warmer waters, away from the ice and toward the shipping lanes. He tried to make a sail out of a quilt, but the wind was too strong. He was the first to sight sails on the horizon and to attach a scarf to an oar to signal the ship. The ship was the Crescent bound for La Havre, France, which inched its way through the ice field and rescued the remaining passengers and crew of the William Brown. Ironically, the final two men were drowned (Alexander Holmes did not take part) only thirty minutes before the sails of the Crescent were sighted. 

In a thoroughly researched book, Tom Koch reconstructs the final hours of the William Brown and the horrific next two days in the longboat. The passengers and crew of the longboat were taken to La Havre, France, where the British and American consuls did an investigation and took depositions of all the crew and surviving passengers, and declared the killings justified by necessity. Koch weaves together the depositions taken in La Havre with newspaper accounts in England and America and with the trial testimony to produce a credible and persuasive reconstruction of events. The public in Britain (particularly in Ireland) and in America was outraged by the fact that all of the crew survived while two-thirds of the passengers perished. There was no casting of lots. The crew simply murdered what they considered to be the excess passengers in cold blood. Such a scandal was bad for business, both in England and in the United States. Koch traces the political factors at work and the machinations of the American State Department and the British Foreign Office to contain the scandal. 

 Ultimately, there must be a scapegoat to pay the price for innocent blood. In Philadelphia, federal officials decide to prosecute one sailor. Ironically, the one sailor they choose to prosecute is Alexander William Holmes, arguably the only man among the crew to have acted heroically. The U.S. Attorney attempted to indict Holmes for murder, but the grand jury refuses to issue the indictment. He then secured an indictment for manslaughter. The case was tried in the Third Circuit Court in Philadelphia before Supreme Court Justice Henry Baldwin in April 1842—the anniversary of the tragedy. 

When Koch begins to describe the legal proceedings, however, he gets into trouble. He seems to think that George Mifflin Dallas was the Philadelphia district attorney and made an unsuccessful attempt to have a state grand jury indict Holmes for murder under Pennsylvania law and that, failing in that attempt, he went to another grand jury and obtained a charge under federal law, which brought the federal government into the case. Koch simply does not appreciate the distinction between the state and federal legal systems. Only federal law has jurisdiction on the high seas. Pennsylvania law does not apply, and Pennsylvania state officials would never had had anything to do with the case. The charges were brought by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, William M. Meredith, before a federal grand jury. Dallas was not the district attorney for Philadelphia. In 1842, he was just returning to Philadelphia from a two-year stint as the United States Minister to Russia and had returned to private practice. Dallas, who had served as United States Attorney from 1829 to 1831, volunteered for the prosecution team on this highly publicized case. Koch seems unaware that the judge who presided over Holmes’ trial, Henry Baldwin, was a sitting Justice on the United States Supreme Court, not a senior judge on the third circuit. Baldwin was “riding circuit,” as Supreme Court Justices were required to do. Baldwin would have been joined on the bench by the sitting judge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Joseph Hopkinson. Koch is also unaware that criminal defendants were not permitted to testify in their own defense in 1842. Holmes did not elect not to testify; he could not have testified if he wanted to. 

Nevertheless, Koch’s reconstruction of the actual trial is accurate and compelling. Here is his presentation of the first and most important prosecution witness, Bridget McGee: 

The courtroom was packed on the first day of testimony, Thursday, 14 April. Journalists sat quietly in the rows reserved for them by Judge Baldwin, a press box their reward for not publishing stories during the trial. The air of excitement made it feel like an important event. “The courtroom was crowded for near a week with much of the beauty, fashion, and intelligence of the city,” according to defence lawyer David Paul Brown. The newspapers had promised a show, and Oliver Hopkinson’s opening remarks for the prosecution the day before had been, all agreed, a better than acceptable prologue to the drama that was about to unfold.

Bridget McGee, the most vocal survivor of the William Brown, was the prosecution’s lead witness. Dressed in a decent but inexpensive dress, she was the Irish colleen all had heard about, attractive and demure and outspoken at once.

Oliver Hopkinson understood his audience, and his judge. It was his place to open for the prosecution, to prepare both judge and jury for his senior colleague, Geroge Dallas. Hopkinson’s plan was to start his questioning slowly, to give both jidge and jury time to warm to Bridget McGee and her testimony. He knew that her version of the events in the longboat would serve the prosecution well.

“Please tell us, Miss McGee, your relation to the William Brown and the events that occurred on its voyage.,” Hopkinson began. “I was a passenger on board the William Brown,” she replied. “We left Liverpool on the 13th of March, 1841. But it was on the 19th of April when we struck on the iceberg.”

“And where were you when that happened?” Hopkinson asked kindly. “We were all in our beds,” Bridget said primly. “When a man said we were sinking, we all rushed on deck where the sailors were getting out the longboat and the jolly boat. I waited until the longboat was got out and then I got in … some of the other passengers were before me.” “And when you entered the longboat, seeking you place, did anyone try to dislodge you?” Hopkinson continued. “Yes,” she replied, looking directly at Holmes. “He called to me after I got in and said we must get out of the boat and go aboard the ship again.”

“You mean the defendant,” Hopkinson asked, “Alexander William Holmes?” “Yes, sir,” she said, pointing, “that man over there.” McGee then added, “I was in the stern of the boat when he ordered me out. But I told him I would not leave the boat and go back to the sinking ship. He turned from me and said no more.”

“And were you the only one so addressed?” “No,” the witness replied. “He ordered Bridget Nugent to leave the boat, too. But when she refused, he said no more, and never gave a reason for his order.” In pretrial strategy discussions, the prosecution lawyers had decided to introduce Holmes’s rescue of Isabella Edgar at the beginning of the trial in order to defuse its power. Hopkinson, therefore, next asked McGee if she had seen anyone leave the longboat. Nodding again toward the defence table, she said, “I saw Holmes leave, climb bak aboard and then bring one more passenger into the longboat. Her name was Isabella Edgar.” The whole was told matter of factly, as if it were not an important point. But it was, of course. Holmes’s rescue was the defence’s strongest argument for his character.

“When your complement was complete, how many passengers were you?” Hopkinson next asked. “When the boat pushed away from the ship we were thirty-two passengers aboard,” McGee replied. “The ship went down a little afterward.”

“Then Captain Harris departed, didn’t he?” “No” McGee answered. “The captain’s boat—the jolly boat—and the longboat stayed together until morning, when the captain gave Francis Rhodes, the mate, a compass and chart and told him he was 250 miles from land. In the morning the captain took down the names of the crew and the passengers in our boat and then he left. During the day, Tuesday, the sailors and passengers bailed and rowed constantly.”

“Now we come to that painful night, the night of Tuesday, April 20,” Hopkinson prompted. “Please describe the events as you experienced them.”

The courtroom grew still as Bridget McGee paused, remembering. The only sound was the scratching of pen quills across paper as reporters scrambled to keep up. “About 10 o’clock they commenced throwing the passengers out of the longboat. The first I heard was Owen Riley. I heard him cry to the Scotch woman, Mrs. Edgar, to speak to the sailors to spare his life. I don’t know who was the next man, but they caught hold then of Francis Askin. He, too, first called on the Scotch woman to speak to the sailors to spare his life, but she said nothing at either time. When they came to throw him over, Frank said that all he had was five sovereigns but he would give them if they would spare his life until morning. Nobody cared. Mr. Askin had two sisters in the boat. One named Mary said that if they threw her brother over, they might as well throw her after him. After they did as she said, they looked for and threw over the other sister, Ellen, too.”

McGee’s deposition, made in Le Havre, however, stated that she had not seen anyone dispatched, that she only heard the cries of some of those thrown overboard. It also said she believed that she had been kindly treated by the crew. The defence could not question her about these inconsistencies, however, because the Le Havre depositions were never made available to them.

Hopkinson slowly turned from Bridget McGee to the jury, and from them to the audience at large, as she calmly recited the names of the persons who had been drowned. Now he turned back to her and asked in a low, almost inaudible voice, if that had been the end of the carnage. She shook here head as if to dislodge his interruption, a distraction to her memories. “The next I know of, Holmes there was catching hold of James Black. He was a passenger. Holmes caught a hold of him and said, ‘Who is this?’ Black answered, ‘Why, it’s James Black.’ When the mate heard this, he said to Holmes, ‘Don’t part man and wife,’ and they did not throw him over. Then Holmes came to Charles Conlin, who was sitting next to me. When he saw Holmes coming, Mr. Conlin said, ‘Holmes, dear, you will not put me out, will you?’ ‘Yes, Charlie, you’ll go, too,’ Holmes answered. And he did.”

There were two ways to interpret this. The defence might argue it was evidence that Francis Rhodes was indeed in command, ordering the killings as a captain directing men sworn to obey. To the prosecution, however, this was evidence that Holmes was an active and willing independent murder.

Here Bridget paused, and Hopkinson asked if that was the end of her tale. She indicated it was not, and continued: “Mr. Conlin was the last person they threw out of the boat that night, but there were two others that remained in the boat they did not see. In the morning, the sailors saw these other two men; one of them was under a seat, and the other under the stern of the boat. They had hid themselves there, John Nugent and another man whose name I don’t remember. At daylight sailors threw them out, too. About an hour and a half after that, we were picked up by the Crescent.”

Hopkinson asked who it was that Bridget McGee meant when she talked about “the sailors” “I mean that Charles Smith, Alexander William Holmes, Jack Stetson and a coloured man, the cook, Henry Murray, did so.”

And the mate, Hopkinson asked, did he participate? No, McGee said. She didn’t see him drown any of the longboat passengers.

There was a sigh of satisfaction in the courtroom. This was what they had come to hear: the tragic tale of people saved from the sinking of a sailing vessel only to be drowned in the longboat by its crew. The prosecution had made its point, and, with the recitation of the persons killed, had stated the essential facts of the case.

Now Hopkinson went on to focus on the details. Was the longboat filled with water during the journey or during that horrible night? No, Bridget McGee replied. “There was not much water in the boat the second night; there was more on the first.”

And, prompted Hopkinson, the passengers helped by bailing? Yes, she answered, they would stop and start, as each saw fit, or as directed by the sailors. But, the lawyer continued, wasn’t there water in the longboat on that second night? Yes, she said, but the water was from the eternal rain and not from a leak.

Hopkinson suggested that perhaps the boat was so crowded there was no room to bail or work the oars. What he really wanted—to reinforce the prosecution’s strategy of casting doubt on the defence of necessity—was the answer that Bridget McGee was pleased to give, the insistence that such was not, in fact, the case. “There was plenty of room to work the boat,” she claimed, “and for bailing and rowing it, too. There was enough room for this before the passengers were thrown out.”

“Thank you, Miss McGee,” Hopkinson politely concluded. As Hopkinson sat down, defence lawyer David Paul Brown gathered his notes before standing up. He knew it would be a mistake to attack Bridget McGee too fiercely. The last thing he wanted was for her to gain more sympathy. All he could do on Holmes’s behalf was to blunt the edge of the essential fact to which she testidfied and which he could not dispute: Bridget McGee had seen Alexander William Holmes throw Francis Askin and others from the longboat into the sea.

“Prior to today,” Brown began, “who has questioned you about this case?” She thought a moment and then replied, “I have not been examined in regard to this matter before. I had my statement taken in writing in France, but not since I came to America.” Brown seemed puzzled by this and asked, “But didn’t you testify on this matter last autumn?” She explained that testifying and being examined were, to her different matters. “I was examined before the grand jury, and have been examined by Mr. Dallas,” she said with a nod to the prosecution’s benches, “but by no one else.”

“And when you left Ireland, Mis McGee, did you travel alone?” Brown asked. No, she said. “My Uncle, George Duffy, shipped with me at Liverpool. He was one of those thrown out.” Befpre Brown could ask another questions, she added, “I was not related to any other persons on board the vessel nor had I seen any of the passengers before I went on board at Liverpool. I didn’t know where they came from, but I was on friendly terms with them on the voyage.”

“And the crew, Miss McGee, were you friendly with them, and perhaps Mr. Holmes, on the voyage?” Brown asked. “I never spoke to Holmes on the voyage but once, I think,” she replied. “But you had an animus toward him?” When she looked at him blankly, Brown hastened to choose another word: “That is to say, perhaps, a disregard.” No, she said. Holmes had never shown her or Bridget Nugent or any of the others any unkindness during the voyage until that night.

Changing gears, Brown asked her to remember the night the ship sank. When did she first learn the ship was in trouble? “It was a quarter of an hour after the shock when James Black called down that the ship was sinking. I heard them pumping as soon as the ship struck, but there was no water in the steerage when I left it,” she began. “I saw Holmes as soon as I got on deck. He was throwing wood and things from the longboat over the side, before they launched the boat. The cook and Jack Stetson were helping him. The jolly boat was hanging out of the bow, and the sailors were getting her ready to put into the water. The longboat was then launched by Holmes and other sailors.”

“So you were first into the boat, Miss McGee?” No, she replied. “I can’t say who got into her first. There were men and women in her when I got in, but James Black and his wife come after me.” “And this,” Brown asked carefully, “is when you say the defendant asked you to leave?” Yes, she nodded, looking at Holmes in the dock. “It was before James Black and his wife came in that Holmes ordered Bridget Nugent and me to go on board the ship again. Holmes addressed himself to me even though there were others in the boat who were afterwards thrown out.” And so, Brown persisted, he ordered the others out as well? “I heard him tell no one else but Bridget and me to leave the boat. He gave no reason but took hold of Bridget by the shoulders when he told her to go onboard the ship. I heard her saying he might pull her about as much as he pleased but she would not get out.”

“But the defendant did not force you or Bridget Nugent away, did he?” Brown pressed. “No,” McGee admitted, “he did not.” There was no need for Brown to suggest that McGee had not forgiven Holmes for trying to remove her from the longboat. That was clear to all and to emphasize it would have been overkill.

Brown then asked, “And of all the sailors and passengers in the longboat or the jolly boat, was he the only man who returned to the William Brown to attempt a rescue, let alone the only man among passenger or crew to effect one?” She nodded agreement but said nothing, her silent refusal to credit Holmes implying a great deal, until the lawyer asked her to again describe the moment. “I heard this girl’s sisters cry out for her from the boat. Her mother was on board. He climbed up and went on board to carry the girls on his back. It was about an hour after Holmes came on with the girl that the ship went down but by then we were half a mile from the ship.”

Brown now turned to the condition of the longboat, to the fact that the drownings took place in extreme conditions when the sailors and passengers alike feared for thir lives. “You told Mr. Hopkinson that the passengers bailed as they saw fit, or as the sailors ordered. I take it the longboat was leaky and water-filled?” McGee responded, “Some hours after Holmes tried to put us out that first night, I discovered water in the boat. No part of me was wet but my feet, sir. And the next morning Mr. Rhodes did not complain to the captain that she was leaky and that day they could bail with the passengers sitting up. There was room for it.”

Damn woman, Brown must have thought. Others would insist the boat was overcrowded with people and filling with water. But to hear Bridget McGee tell it, there was plenty of room and no more than a few inches of water lapping at her shoes. “And so there was no time when the boat seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed by the sea?” he asked incredulously. “You didn’t hear the sailors cry for God’s help because of the water?” No, she replied, never. “The water came into our boat once from her canting,” she stated, “but I never heard them say in the boat, ‘God help us, we are all sinking.’”

Did she at least see Holmes give his warm peacoat to one of the passengers? No, McGee said, she saw the first mate give his coat to one of the Edgars, but not Homes, because, “I was in a different part of the boat.”

Brown then turned to the drownings, to the other sailors who were involved. But again Bridget McGee remembered mostly Holmes. “I don’t know who threw Riley or Duffy over, but it was on of the four sailors I mentioned. I know Holmes threw Conlin over, and that Mary Car got hold of him and said he should spare Conlin as he was the father of a family of fifteen. And I know,” she hurried on, “that he assisted in throwing out the rest. I knew it was he from his voice and the calling to him. I know Askin’s sister was thrown over, too, but not who by. And she had nothing but her nightclothes on, and when they were about to throw her over she begged them to give her a cloak.”

There was another collective sigh from the audience, involuntary and heartfelt. The testimony was grand, graphic, horrifying. They had been promised a show and a philosophy lecture. The latter was to come but the drama of it all certainly matched and perhaps exceeded their expectations. Brown next asked about the morning of 21 April, when the last two passengers were drowned. Bridget said she did not see their murders but insisted that the men were obviously not comatose, since they’d been bailing until they were shoved overboard by Smith and Joseph Stetson. That would have been devastating testimony had they been on trial, but they were not Holmes was. And because Holmes was charged only with the death of Francis Askin, the details of the others were tangential, though perhaps damaging to the minds of the jury. Brown realized that they prosecution wanted all the deaths to be described and discussed not because they were relevant to Holmes’s guilt but to encourage the jury to convict someone in the case. Against this there was no defence but to excuse the witness as soon a s possible.

“I am finished, Your Honor,” Brown said, then returned to his seat. It had been as bad as he had expected and perhaps a little worse. 

The rest of the trial receives short shrift. The closing arguments are passed over in a couple of pages. The court’s charge in a couple of paragraphs. In fact, Kock misses the central point of the charge which was that sailors owe a duty to put the interests of the passengers before their own. These instructions to the jury gutted an otherwise viable defense strategy. Both the prosecution and the defense tried the case based on the assumption that Holmes had the legal right to sacrifice the lives of others to save his own. The prosecution strategy was to minimize the danger at the time the passengers were tossed overboard so as to show that there was no overwhelming necessity to sacrifice lives at all. The defense strategy was to maximize the danger and therefore prove the necessity. The first witness was a disaster for the defense but as the trial wore on, the defense seemed to have the advantage. Justice Baldwin’s charge essentially held that in a case where lives must be sacrificed, the sailors must go first. Neither side saw that coming. The charge eliminated the defense. It changed the law and made conviction inevitable—notwithstanding the jury’s reluctance. 

The Wreck of the William Brown is meticulously researched, and it is a thoroughly enjoyable account of a trial that was one of the most significant and closely followed trials of its day. My criticism is that, for Koch, the trial is insignificant to his story—just an afterthought. He gives no information about the lawyers and judges involved in trying this significant case other than their names. His insights into the trial process and trial strategy are extremely limited. For Koch, the story is all about the events of the tragedy and, what he argues, is an official cover-up. The really interesting questions are: Why manslaughter instead of murder? Why Holmes, and only Holmes, was prosecuted? Why the death of Askin, and only Askin, was the subject of a criminal charge. Koch’s theory is that the prosecution was part of the State Department’s cover-up. I find that argument unpersuasive. The government’s lawyer truly wanted to win the case, and the public was calling for retribution. My best guess is that the government lawyers knew that they could not win a murder trial and so settled for a charge of manslaughter. My best guess is that Holmes was the only one of the four sailors who actively took part in the drownings who was available to arrest in Philadelphia when the decision to prosecute was made. Why only Askin? The evidence was strongest for the killings of Askin and Conlin. The killing of Askin may have seemed more cold-blooded. Askin had begged and offered to pay to be left alive only until the morning and then to sacrifice himself like a man if no rescue came—if that offer had been accepted, Askin would have been on board when the Crescent was sighted, and he would have lived. 

Readers of this blog should keep tuned. We will offer our own treatment of the Alexander Holmes Trial in the near future.

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