Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from New York's Awful Excursion Boat Horror: Told by Survivors and Rescuers
One beautiful day in June an excursion steamer, with twelve hundred Christian souls on board, set forth upon a pleasure trip. The boat was gay with multi-colored bunting; the happy voices of care-free women rang across the dancing waters; happy children were romping over the decks and - as if in mockery of the predestined catastrophe that was to follow - the band was playing a sacred hymn, Our God Is a Mighty Fortress. Then the brutal hand of Fate swept the picture from the canvas and in its place supplied a fiendish nightmare vision of horrid anguish and frantic terror.
No artist, unless he dipped his brush in the colors of hell, could portray the awful scene of a majestic vessel, wrapped in great sheets of devouring flame, speeding to a haven of refuge, while the grim helmsman Death wrestled for suprem acy with the heroic captain at the wheel. And it would need the genius of a Dante to word-paint the dreadful spec tacle of helpless children roasted alive before their mother's eyes or swept by fear-crazed hundreds over the burning rails of the boat into the hungry jaws of the devouring tide - of gentle women and feeble old men crushed beneath the falling timbers of the decks or hurled to a swifter and, possibly, less terrible death, in the rushing waters of the river.
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