The British Queen was a 66-year-old steam packet (and former slave ship) pressed into service to carry Irish emigrants to America.*  In December of 1851, its 228 passengers must have felt relief when the 2-month winter voyage seemed at an end, for land had been sighted.  But instead of berthing in New York, the ship had been blown off course and was headed toward Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts.   A blizzard blew the ship inland toward ice floats that soon had the British Queen aground.  12 miles from Nantucket Harbor, the captain stowed the sales and sent up a distress signal:  the Union Jack flying upside down.  Temperatures dipped below freezing as crew and passengers huddled together on the deck and prayed.  The ship’s hold took on 11 feet of water that last night and two passengers died of the cold.

On land, a fire lookout posted in the tower of a church had seen the ship through his telescope and sounded the alarm.  Rescue plans began, but nothing could be done until the raging storm subsided.  Sailors gathered in the harbor’s abandoned warehouses (the whaling industry that helped support the islanders had died out years before) and decided that a paddle steamer should tow two schooners (captained by the Patterson brothers) past the harbor’s sand bar at midday’s high tide; the schooners would then set off and rescue the British Queen’s passengers.

One can only imagine how the crew and passengers of the British Queen felt at the sight of their rescuers.  Amid lashing winds and waves that rose the small schooners above the wreck before plunging them back to the shoal, passengers were transferred from the sinking British Queen as dusk fell and the tide turned.  Every passenger was rescued safely and by 5:00 pm all were headed back to the harbor.  The islanders split up the survivors, housing them in churches and private homes and, on Christmas Day, most boarded a paddle steamer to continue their journey to New York.

A small number of the British Queen’s passengers chose to stay on Nantucket and make their home among the people who had saved them.  Their descendants live there to this day.

* for a more detailed account of this incredible rescue, see Edward Laxton’s The Famine Ships (Henry Hold and Company, 1996)