ABSTRACT
In 1878 the paddle steamer Princess Alice sank after a needless collision with the Bywell Castle, a collier, in Galleons Reach. More than 600 people lost their lives in what is still the worst ever disaster on a British waterway. A tipping point in the investigations came when another sister ship, the Kowloon Bridge, ran aground off the coast of Ireland after suffering severe cracking of the deck in heavy weather in the North Atlantic. Fifty-one of the partygoers on board the Marchioness drowned in the Thames that night when their boat was struck and mounted by a much larger vessel, the Bowbelle, near Blackfriars Bridge. On the evening of 6 March 1987 it was setting off to return from Zeebrugge when disaster struck. On the night of 28 September 1994, the ferry Estonia was carrying almost a thousand passengers and crew across the Baltic from Tallinn to Stockholm. The sea conditions were rough, though not excessively so.
