The sea is a cruel mistress. That’s the poetic way of saying that life out on the open water can be quite treacherous, even fatal, as you are about to see.
These are not in any particular order, since some of them have disputed casualty numbers, and we are also not mentioning military encounters, where ships were sunk in battle. That being said, here are the worst maritime disasters in history.
10. The Doña Paz
As we said, the list is in no particular order, so we might as well start off with the deadliest maritime disaster ever recorded during peacetime – the MV Doña Paz, a passenger ferry built in Japan and registered in the Philippines.
On the morning of December 20, 1987, the ship left an island in the Philippines and headed for the capital of Manila. That same night, the Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker called MT Vector which was carrying over a million liters of gasoline. The collision caused a massive fire that quickly spread to the Doña Paz and caught most of the passengers completely unaware. Only 25 people managed to make it out alive.
Already, this was one of the biggest naval tragedies in history, but as the investigation into the disaster continued, things got so much worse. The official capacity for the Doña Paz was around 1,500 passengers, but it soon became evident that the real number of people aboard that ship was much, much higher. Because it was the Christmas season, many more tickets had been sold illegally, and young children didn’t need tickets at all, so none of them showed up on the manifest.
The grim estimation of the true death toll kept climbing, and eventually went over 4,000 people. It wasn’t until 1999 that a special task force managed to account for all of the victims of the Doña Paz disaster, which reached 4,386 people.
9. The Kiangya
Before the sinking of the Doña Paz, the unfortunate distinction of “worst maritime disaster during peacetime” belonged to the SS Kiangya, a Chinese passenger steamship. On December 3, 1948, the vessel was traveling up the Huangpu River near Shanghai when it hit a mine left behind from World War II, probably placed there by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Like the Doña Paz, the Kiangya was carrying many, many more passengers than its official capacity of 1,186, most of them refugees desperate to find safety during the Chinese Civil War. However, the true extent of the casualties aboard the Kiangya remains uncertain to this day. The manifest listed 2,150 passengers on the ship, but just as many could have been aboard as stowaways. Almost 1,000 people were rescued by other vessels, but the death toll still included as many as 3,920 people.
8. The White Ship
Sometimes, the true extent of a disaster is not immediately quantifiable. When the White Ship sank in the English Channel in 1120, around 300 people were killed and, although a significant loss of life, it pales in comparison to the other entries on this list. However, the disaster did have far-reaching consequences because one of the people who perished aboard the White Ship was William the Aetheling, the 17-year-old Duke of Normandy and heir to the throne of England.
This was just 50 years after William the Conqueror bested the Anglo-Saxons in battle and became the first Norman king of England. Tensions between the two sides were still high, which was why the next Norman king, Henry I, married Queen Matilda of Scotland, someone connected both to the Scottish and Anglo-Saxon royal lines. Their hope was that their own offspring would have both Norman and Anglo-Saxon blood and would satisfy both sides. But that offspring was none other than William the Aetheling and all plans of a peaceful succession went down with the White Ship. What followed was a civil war between England and Normandy known as the Anarchy, which lasted 15 years and caused a lot more pain and suffering, increasing the death toll significantly.
7. The Princess Alice
On September 3, 1878, between 600 and 700 people died in England when the passenger paddle steamer SS Princess Alice collided with the cargo ship Bywell Castle while both were crossing the River Thames. A subsequent investigation ruled both ships to be at fault for the crash and the tragedy led to new rules and regulations regarding navigation on the Thames.
It became Britain’s worst inland waterway disaster, an infelicitous record that it still holds to this day, but it was the way in which those unfortunate souls perished that made it truly one of the most awful nautical tragedies. The fact that the Thames was a heavily-polluted, putrid river was well-known, but the Princess Alice went down in an area called Gallions Reach, right between two sewers that had just discharged thousands of tons of raw sewage into the water.
One survivor described the experience: “Both the taste and smell were something dreadful… – having been down to the bottom and having rose again with my mouth full of it I could give a very good picture of it – it was the most horrid water I ever tasted…”
6. The Titanic & The Taiping
It comes as no surprise that the Titanic would be somewhere on this list. On April 10, 1912, the British passenger liner left Southampton on its maiden voyage headed for New York. On April 15, it sank after hitting an iceberg, and because there were only enough lifeboats on board for half of the passengers and crew, over 1,500 people died in the tragedy.
But you already know most of what there is to know about the Titanic so, instead, let’s mention a steamer in Asia that suffered a close fate: the Taiping. It is sometimes referred to as the “Titanic of the East” because it had a similar death toll – over 1,500 passengers and crewmen died on January 27, 1949, when the Taiping sank after colliding with a smaller cargo boat.
Like the Kiangya, the Taiping was sailing during the Chinese Civil War, with thousands of refugees from mainland China desperate to reach Taiwan. Only 500 or so passengers were supposed to be on board, but the ship was carrying over 1,500 people, and it was sailing quietly at night without lights, trying to reach Keelung Harbor in Taiwan without alerting the Communist authorities. Unfortunately, this also meant that other ships couldn’t see it, so it hit the Chienyuan, taking all but 37 passengers down to a watery grave.
5. The Sultana
Strangely enough, the worst maritime disaster that happened in the United States is somewhat of an overlooked event nowadays, despite a death toll that could have reached 1,800 people.
The ship in question was the Sultana, a wooden steamboat originally built in 1863 to transport cotton down the Mississippi River. However, due to the American Civil War, it was mainly used to transport troops, and, although it had an official capacity of only 376, it regularly traveled with over 2,000 people aboard.
When the Sultana left on its fateful voyage on the morning of April 27, 1865, it might have been carrying around 2,300 passengers and crewmen, most of them recently-released Union POWs. They thought they were finally headed for freedom, but their hopes soon turned to horror when three of the four boilers aboard the Sultana exploded, causing the wooden ship to catch fire. Estimates are all over the place, but anywhere between 1,000 to 1,800 people perished in the chaos that ensued.
As to why the tragedy isn’t particularly well-known today, historians point to an overload of information for Americans. On April 9, the Civil War basically ended when General Lee signed a ceasefire. Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. It was a busy month for America, so the tragedy of the Sultana did not have the impact it would have had on a different occasion.
4. The Graves Convoy
In early April 1782, the Battle of the Saintes took place in the West Indies, off the coast of Dominica, between the English and the French. Technically, this was part of the American Revolution but, in reality, it was part of the much longer conflict between England and France as the two powers fought for naval supremacy in the Caribbean. The battle turned into a resounding victory for England, which not only restored its mastery of the area but also captured four ships of the line as prizes, including the French flagship, the Ville de Paris.
Admiral Thomas Graves was the one given command of this new fleet, but he had his work cut out for him. Obviously, since all the ships had just been involved in a battle, they were in need of repairs, but there weren’t any suitable dockyards in the West Indies, so sailing back to England was the only alternative.
On September 16, 1782, the fleet was caught in a deadly hurricane. All of the French prizes except for one were destroyed, as well as two British ships and several merchant vessels that had joined the fleet. Loss of life was estimated in excess of 3,000 sailors, soldiers, passengers, and prisoners of war.
3. Le Joola
It has become pretty standard for any modern maritime disaster to get compared to the Titanic since that is the one that everybody has heard of. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Africa has its own version of the Titanic: Le Joola.
On September 26, 2002, the Senegalese ferry MV Le Joola capsized off the coast of the Gambia, taking with it over 1,850 people and leaving behind only 64 survivors. As was often the case with such tragedies, the vessel was way overloaded when it sunk, carrying almost four times more people than it had the capacity for. Another factor that contributed to the disaster might have been negligence, as the ferry was sailing out in rough sea conditions when it had been intended only for coastal waters.
In the wake of the tragedy, the Senegalese government faced heavy criticism for avoiding prosecutions and refusing international help to excavate the wreckage, in an effort to sweep the incident under the rug as fast as possible.
2. The Halifax Explosion
We now take a look at one maritime disaster that caused the largest man-made pre-atomic explosion and what made it truly terrible was that the blast did not occur somewhere in the middle of the ocean, but very close to the Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia, completely destroying a sizable chunk of the city.
On the morning of December 6, 1917, the SS Mont-Blanc and the SS Imo wanted to pass each other through the Narrows, which was a strait that connected the harbor to Bedford Basin. Unfortunately, due to carelessness, the two vessels collided at low speed. Normally, this alone wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but the Mont-Blanc was a French cargo ship that was full to the brim with TNT and other flammable substances. The collision caused barrels of benzol to topple over and flood the ship. The fuel vapors soon ignited from sparks and the Mont-Blanc caught fire.
Unfortunately for the people of Halifax, none of them knew of the dangerous cargo aboard the ship and they flocked to the streets and to their windows to gawk at the giant blaze. About fifteen minutes later, the explosives detonated, killing around 1,600 people instantly. The gargantuan blast also caused a tsunami that reached the nearby city of Dartmouth. All in all, slightly under 2,000 people perished in the Halifax Explosion, and there were also thousands of buildings that were destroyed and people who were either injured or left homeless.
1. The Kamikaze
Let’s end with what may have possibly been the maritime disaster with the biggest death toll in history – the storm that sunk the Mongol fleets. We say “possibly” because it happened 750 years ago and the Mongols weren’t exactly keen recordkeepers, so precise numbers are hard to come by.
According to the legend, in 1274, Kublai Khan assembled a fleet of hundreds of ships and between 30,000 and 40,000 men and sailed across the sea to invade Japan. A typhoon hit his forces near the island of Kyushu and destroyed around a third of his fleet. That was 10,000 to 13,000 casualties right there, but that turned out to be just the start because the true catastrophe didn’t happen until almost a decade later when the Mongols tried again.
In 1281, Kublai Khan was ready for another invasion. He had assembled one of the largest naval forces in history, comprised of over 4,000 ships and 140,000 men, and attempted an invasion on a grand scale the likes of which the world had never seen. Surely, nobody would be able to withstand the might of the Mongol Empire.
But once again, once it got close to Japan again, the fleet was besieged by a massive typhoon, which absolutely decimated their numbers. At least half of the soldiers perished, and many of the survivors who managed to reach the shore were killed by the Japanese army. All in all, up to 100,000 Mongols may have died at sea in their attempts to subdue Japan, and the two typhoons that saved their island became known in Japanese lore as “divine winds,” or kamikaze.