The tragic journey of the Mexico

Jun 29 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

IT IS almost impossible to imagine the distances that Liverpool seamen undertook in ships that were hardly bigger than today’s Mersey Ferries.

Take, for example, the three-masted barque Mexico, which set out from Liverpool to Guayaquil, Ecuador, on South America’s Pacific coast, some 122 years ago.

Mexico was a mere 150ft long by 27ft wide and 484 gross tons. Built for a British company, she was owned by a Hamburg company when she set sail from Liverpool for South America, on December 9, 1886.

Mexico was no sooner out of the Mersey and into Liverpool Bay when she was caught in a storm, with very strong winds and poor visibility.

She was no further than Southport when she was driven onto a lee shore and pelted with snow and hailstones.

Running aground before her captain realised what was happening, the visibility cleared sufficiently for him to “see land on all sides”.

“The stretch of coast where Mexico was stranded was a notorious trap for the unwary or unfamiliar and it was exceedingly difficult, once a ship had stranded there, to get it off again,” says Dr Adrian Jarvis, former National Museums Liverpool port historian.

By now the ship was being pounded by big breakers, her bulwarks were disintegrating and she was likely to be smashed apart. The master dropped his anchor and fired distress rockets. However, matters went from desperate to tragic.

Lifeboats were launched from Lytham, St Anne’s and Southport to rescue the crew. These were unpowered craft rowed by the lifeboat men.

The Lytham lifeboat Charles Biggs, which was on her maiden operational trip, rescued the 12 crew. But both the St Anne’s lifeboat, Laura Janet, and the Southport lifeboat, Eliza Fernley, capsized.

Thirteen of the 16 lifeboat men on Eliza Fernley were drowned and all 14 lifeboat men on Laura Janet - a total of 27 of the 29 crew.

This is the worst loss of Royal National Lifeboat Institute crew in a single incident. It is, says, Dr Jarvis, “one of the blackest nights in the history of the service”.

Liverpool artist Ted Walker has memorably captured Mexico’s dire situation in this sequence of paintings, painstakingly based on contemporary testimonies.

After the bodies of the lifeboat crewmen were washed ashore, they were laid out in the bar of the Birkdale Palace Hotel, which was made into a temporary morgue. Some say this is haunted as a result.

“Because lifeboat men are usually from tight, little communities, a high proportion of the victims were relatives of other victims, so women had to go and identify, for example, the bodies of their husband and son,” says Dr Jarvis.

As a result of the tragedy, 16 women were left widows and 50 children lost their fathers.

An appeal was launched to raise money to provide a memorial to those killed, and Sir Charles Macara’s first street collections in Manchester in 1891 led to the UK’s first flag days.

The disaster branded itself so intensely onto the public mind a plethora of memorials were raised, including one in Lytham St Annes lifeboat house.

Other memorials to the tragedy were erected on the Promenade at St Annes, in the lifeboat house at Lytham St Annes, in St Annes parish church, in St Cuthbert's church and at Layton Cemetery. A memorial was also erected at Duke Street Cemetery, Southport.

Amazingly, Mexico did not break up and she was later refloated and repaired. Her luck finally ran out when she was wrecked in the Firth of Forth, in 1900.