The New England
Chapter of
The Explorers Club
"The explorer is the poet of action and exploring is the poetry of deeds."

--VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
Next Scheduled Event
As you consider your post-Thanksgiving plans, please join us for another meeting of the New England Chapter of The Explorers Club, to be held on Wednesday, November 28th. This event had been tentatively scheduled for Thursday the 29th, so please change your calendars accordingly. We are pleased to welcome back Captain Eric Takakjian, intrepid diver and veteran of countless deep sea dives to sunken wrecks, who will take us into the murky depths to revisit one of the greatest New England maritime calamities of all time, the sinking of the ship CITY OF COLUMBUS. Here Eric sets the stage:

"The CITY OF COLUMBUS was an iron hulled passenger ship built at the John Roach and Son shipyard in Chester Pennsylvania in 1878 for the Boston and Savannah Line. The ship was employed on a regularly scheduled run carrying passengers and freight between Boston and Savannah, Georgia. Although small in size, she was
typical of the many passenger ships of her time that plied the coastal routes of the eastern seaboard. Many of her interior appointments were as plush and opulent as those found aboard the better known ships on the transatlantic routes. On the night of January 18th, 1884 she struck a rock outcropping southwest of Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard called Devils Bridge. After striking the rock, the ship's captain, not realizing the extent of the damage backed the ship off the rock into deeper water. The CITY OF COLUMBUS then quickly sank leaving only the masts and tip of the bow exposed above the water. Onboard that night were a total of 132 passengers andcrew; by the following afternoon 103 people had either frozen to death in the rigging or drowned. This was the worst disaster in New England's maritime history up to that time."

Eric's presentation will cover the history of the ship, the details of the wreck and rescue of the 29 survivors by the Gay Head Lifesaving crews and revenue cutter SAMUEL DEXTER, and his search and discovery of the wreck site including some underwater images of how the wreck looks today


Yours very truly,

Mark Allio, Program Chairman
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