Anglonautes > Vocapedia > 2000s - 2010s - 2020s > English words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > Transports > Boat, ship

LONDON — Millvina Dean, who as an infant passenger aboard the Titanic was lowered into a lifeboat in a canvas mail sack and lived to become the ship’s last survivor, died Sunday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage, according to staff at the home.

She was 97 and had been in poor health for several weeks.

The youngest of the ship’s 705 survivors, Ms. Dean was only 9 weeks old when the Titanic hit an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland on the night of April 14, 1912, setting off what was then considered the greatest maritime disaster in history.

She survived with her mother, Georgetta, and 2-year-old brother when they, like many other survivors, were picked up by the liner Carpathia and taken to New York.

Her father, Bertram Dean, was among more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who died in the sinking, a fact that Ms. Dean, in an interview at the Southampton nursing home last month, attributed partly to the fact that the Dean family was traveling in third class, or steerage, as the cheapest form of passage was known.

Some versions of the disaster have contended that the crew was under orders to give priority aboard lifeboats to first- and second-class passengers, and even that doors were kept locked that would have given people in steerage faster access to the lifeboats through parts of the ship dedicated to higher-paying passengers. Though these assertions have been disputed, Ms. Dean said that she believed them to be true, and that her father might otherwise have survived.

“It couldn’t happen nowadays, and it’s so wrong, so unjust,” she said, emphasizing her point with a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem about class distinctions in the British Army in colonial India: “What do they say? ‘Judy O’Grady and the colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.’ That’s the way it should have been that night, but it wasn’t.”

Mr. Dean, 29, who had been running a pub in London, was taking his family to a new life in Kansas City, Mo., where a cousin who immigrated before him had helped buy a tobacconist’s shop that Mr. Dean planned to run. But with the family breadwinner gone, his widow spent only a week in New York before returning with her children to England.

Millvina Dean — a name she used throughout her life, though she was christened Elizabeth Gladys Dean — spent her early years on a farm owned by her grandfather, a Southampton veterinarian.

She never married and spent her working life as an assistant and secretary in small businesses in Southampton. Among other jobs, she worked at a greyhound racing track and, during World War II, in the British government’s map-making office. For more than 20 years, until she retired, she worked in an engineering office.

The celebrity that came from being part of the disaster, and eventually living almost a century beyond it, was something she always had trouble grasping. She told visitors in later years that she was “such an ordinary person” that she found it surprising that anybody took much interest in her.

In the nursing home interview, she said that for decades after the sinking, she never spoke of it or her part in it to people she met or worked with. She said she had not thought it appropriate, partly because she remembered nothing about it and partly because she did not want to be seen as drawing attention to herself.

But that changed, she said, after Sept. 1, 1985, when a joint French-American team located the wreck of the Titanic, in water more than 2 miles deep, 370 miles east of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. That set off a wave of interest in the ship and its fate that crested in 1996 with James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Titanic,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she said. “But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me.”

In the last 20 years of her life, she went to gatherings in the United States, Canada and a handful of European countries to participate in events related to the sinking.

Ms. Dean said all she knew of what happened during the sinking she had learned from her mother: “She told me that they heard a tremendous crash, and that my father went up on deck, then came back down again and said, ‘Get the children up and take them to the deck as soon as possible, because the ship has struck an iceberg.’ ”

On deck, mother and daughter were separated from father and son, and it was only at daylight, hours after they boarded the Carpathia, that she and her mother were reunited with her brother, Bertram Vere Dean. A carpenter, he died in 1997.

After failing health forced her to move to the nursing home, Ms. Dean, struggling to pay the residential cost of nearly $5,000 a month, began selling her Titanic mementos at auction, including a canvas mailbag that her mother used to carry the few belongings the family acquired during its week in New York.

She had hoped that the mailbag would prove to be the one used to lower her into the lifeboat, but when experts decided it was not, it brought only £1,500, about $2,400.

“Such a pity,” Ms. Dean said in the interview, with a quick smile. “If it had been the mailbag they used for me, it would have been £100,000!”

In recent weeks, news accounts of her plight caught the attention of Ms. Winslet and Mr. DiCaprio, and they, together with Mr. Cameron, contributed to the Millvina Fund, set up to meet the nursing home costs.

Ms. Dean died, on the 98th anniversary of the ship’s launching, without ever having seen the movie, which she attributed to reluctance to be reminded of what happened to her father. “It would have made me think, did he jump overboard or did he go down with the ship?’” she said. “I would have been very emotional.”

As for her own survival, she said that as a “very down-to-earth person,” she had little time for the metaphysical speculations urged on her over the years about why fate, or divine providence, had chosen her to survive the sinking as an infant, then allowed her to outlive everyone else who escaped.

“Heaven and hell — how can you believe in something up in the sky?” she said. Then, smiling again, she added, “Still, I’d love to be proved wrong.”

Millvina Dean, Titanic’s Last Survivor, Dies at 97,
NYT,
1.6.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/
world/europe/01dean.html

Icy Rescue

as Seas Claim a Cruise Ship

November 24, 2007
The New York Times
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
and ANDREW C. REVKIN

They were modern adventure travelers, following the doomed route of Sir Ernest Shackleton to the frozen ends of the earth. They paid $7,000 to $16,000 to cruise on a ship that had proudly plowed the Antarctic for 40 years.

But sometime early yesterday, the Explorer, fondly known in the maritime world as “the little red ship,” quietly struck ice.

There were the alarms, then the captain’s voice on the public address system calling the 100 passengers and the crew of about 50 to the lecture hall, according to passengers’ accounts on the radio and others relayed from rescuers and the tour operator.

In the lecture hall, they were told that water was creeping in through a fist-size hole punched into the ship’s starboard. As it flooded the grinding engine room, the power failed. The ship ceased responding.

“We all got a little nervous when the ship began to list sharply, and the lifeboats still hadn’t been lowered,” John Cartwright, a Canadian, told CBC radio.

About 1:30 a.m., the passengers climbed down ladders on the ship’s side into open lifeboats and inflatable craft. They bobbed for some four hours in the rough seas and biting winds as the sun rose and the day broadened, sandwiched between the 20-degree air and the nearly freezing waters, huddled under thin foil blankets, marking time. Their ship traced loose circles in the steely ocean.

And then a research ship and a Norwegian cruise liner that had heard the distress call approached.

“There was a long line of black rubber Zodiac boats and a handful of orange lifeboats strung out, and it was very surreal because it was a very beautiful morning with the sun glistening off the relatively calm sea,” said Jon Bowermaster, a travel writer and filmmaker who was aboard the ship, the National Geographic Endeavour, and was reached by satellite phone. “And all you could think was how relieved these people must have been when they saw these two big ships coming.”

A section of the Endeavour was dedicated to medical emergencies. But none were reported, and the Norwegian liner, the Nordnorge, ended up taking all the Explorer’s evacuees.

It was not immediately possible yesterday to reach the passengers, among them 14 Americans, 24 Britons, 12 Canadians and a smattering of other nationalities. But they were in good spirits, said Capt. Arnvid Hansen of the Nordnorge, who was reached by telephone about 10 hours after the rescue.

The weather had turned worse, he said, but despite snow and wind, the passengers had begun to leave the ship for the solid ground of King George Island. “They are healthy, no problem,” he said. The authorities said they would head to Chile on Saturday, weather permitting, and from there return home.

And so the 154 people who survived a modern Titanic have fallen into that strange category of luck — the kind that would not be necessary had not horrendous bad fortune preceded it.

The accident occurred well north of the Antarctic Circle in an island chain that is part of the Antarctic peninsula, which juts close to South America and where a sharp warming of temperatures has occurred in recent years. It is prime territory for a new travel industry catering to an often young clientele enthusiastic about the wild in an age of environmental uncertainty.

The tour operator, G.A.P. Adventures, is based in Toronto, and offers cruises to the Antarctic, Greenland, Scotland and the Amazon. It normally sends a dozen cruises a year into the Antarctic, all on the Explorer.

On the “Spirit of Shackleton” tour, the passengers stopped at the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island before heading for the tip of Antarctica. Scientists on board give lectures on wildlife, geology and climate change. Their stops were to include the grave where Shackleton was buried after his fatal heart attack in 1922.

G.A.P. said it had never had an accident with one of its ships before. But in March, two Canadian women and an Australian man died after a safari van chartered by the company collided with a truck in Kenya.

The Antarctic adventure niche has its own trade group, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Its members make up a growing chunk of the $21 billion cruise industry. But regulatory authority over its members can be as confusing as in the rest of the cruise world, with a network of nations, flags and maritime rules colliding.

The Explorer is registered in Liberia. Built in Finland in 1969, it was designed to operate in Antarctic and Arctic waters, according to a spokesman for G.A.P., Dan Brown. It was small, to move swiftly through dangerous waters, and had a double bottom, a second layer of steel.

But the vessel did not have a double hull, a complete second steel sheath, the kind developed after the Titanic sank.

There appeared to be questions about its safety record. Mr. Brown said “some deficiencies” were found in tests in March in Chile and in May in Scotland. On its Web site, Lloyd’s List said the British authorities had reported deficiencies, including missing rescue plans, and lifeboat maintenance problems, while watertight doors were deemed “not as required,” and fire safety measures were also criticized.

The ship later passed a safety test with “flying colors,” the company said, and Mr. Brown said the earlier problems “were not serious enough for the boat to be taken out of use.”

The Explorer had been in trouble before, struggling in heavy Antarctic seas in the same region in February 1972 when it took on water. The passengers, mostly Americans, were rescued by the Chilean Navy. The ship was refurbished and went on to become the first passenger vessel to navigate the Northwest Passage at the other end of the globe.

On this trip, it left from Ushuaia, on the southern tip of Argentina, on Nov. 11, and was to return Thursday.

But the Explorer’s fate was sealed by yesterday afternoon, after hours of listing, awash in ice floes. Even its captain and chief officer, who had stayed to operate the bilge pumps in the hope of salvation, had long before evacuated when the Chilean Navy said the little red ship had gone down.

A few hours before, Stefan Lundgren, a member of the Endeavour staff who had also worked on the Explorer, described watching the ship fade. “For me she was a beautiful lady — boats are ladies,” he said to a reporter aboard the Endeavour. “For every new owner, she gets a new face-lift. As an old woman, she’s a tough lady. She doesn’t want to give up, I can tell you.”

Reporting was contributed

by Dorothy Spears from the Antarctic,

Ian Austen from Ottawa,

Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago, Chile,

and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

Icy Rescue as Seas Claim a Cruise Ship, NYT, 24.11.2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/
world/americas/24ship.html

23 Sailors Rescued

From Listing Cargo Ship

July 25, 2006
Filed at 3:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Rescuers from the Coast Guard and Alaska Air National Guard late Monday saved 23 crew members from an Asian cargo ship taking on water south of the Aleutian Islands.

''People are out of harm's way, they are rescued and they are safe,'' said Alaska National Guard spokesman Maj. Mike Haller.

All 23 crew members were hoisted into two National Guard Pave Hawk helicopters and a Coast Guard helicopter and taken to Adak Island in the Aleutians, 230 miles to the north of the Cougar Ace.

The rescue was conducted in ''very challenging weather,'' said Master Sgt. Sal Provenzano with the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center. There were 10-foot seas whipping the ship, which was listed nearly on its side.

A nearby merchant marine vessel was standing by to take any crew member who couldn't fit on the three helicopters, but rescuers decided against conducting more hoist operations to lower the crew members onto the ship in poor weather.

''We made the decision to cram in everybody,'' Provenzano said.

One crew member with a broken ankle was to be flown by plane to Anchorage immediately after landing in Adak, Provenzano said. There were no other injuries reported.

It was not immediately known how long the other crew members, who all donned survival suits when the ship started taking on water, would remain on Adak Island.

The Cougar Ace began listing in the turbulent Pacific Ocean late Sunday night, when the crew sent out an SOS.

A Coast Guard plane earlier Monday dropped three life rafts, but roiling waters shoved the rafts underneath the dipping port side of the 654-foot ship. Racing against an increasingly tilting ship, rescuers tossed an additional raft along the higher starboard side, but it was a 150-foot drop to the water and beyond their reach.

The Cougar Ace had been carrying nearly 5,000 cars from Japan to Canada when it began taking on water Sunday night.

A merchant marine ship crew that had been in the area reached the vessel Monday morning. The crew of that ship tried, but failed, to rig a line to the Cougar Ace to keep it from tilting further.

Near the vessel, Coast Guard officers could see a 2-mile oil sheen, though officials said it was difficult to say how much of the ship's 430 metric tons of fuel oil or 112 metric tons of diesel fuel had spilled. The ocean was choppy, with rain squalls and 8- to 10-foot seas reported.

Communications between the crew and Coast Guard became increasingly difficult Monday when the batteries in the crew's hand-held radio dimmed, Coast Guard Lt. Mara Booth-Miller said. Crew members had to shout information to the merchant ship, which then relayed messages back and forth to the Coast Guard.

The Singapore-flagged Cougar Ace -- owned by Tokyo-based Mitsui O.S.K. Lines -- was carrying 4,813 vehicles from Japan to Vancouver, British Columbia, said Greg Beuerman, a spokesman for the ship owner. There were no reports of any cars going overboard. Beuerman said typically vehicles are securely fastened.

It wasn't immediately clear what had caused the ship to list, and its crew didn't know where the water was coming in.

Beside the Coast Guard helicopter, two Pave Hawk helicopters, two refueling planes and a C-130 plane were sent from Kulis Air National Guard Base in Anchorage. Guard crews carried rafts and survival kits, including food, water, flares and radios, said Guard spokeswoman Kalei Brooks.

Early on, the Coast Guard alerted the clinic at the small town of Adak -- a former Naval air station on the island of the same name -- to gear up for treating at least one broken ankle and possible hypothermia cases. Nurse practitioner Michael Terry said residents hustled to set up cots and blankets at the community center, prepare food and coffee, gather donations of warm clothing. The clinic rounded up emergency medics and braced for action.

''We actually were preparing to have an air disaster drill at the airport (Tuesday) so we moved it up a day,'' Terry said.

23 Sailors Rescued From Listing Cargo Ship, NYT, 25.7.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Listing-Ship.html

Shipwreck Teaches Students

About History

July 9, 2007
Filed at 3:40 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ON THE JAMES RIVER, Va. (AP) -- Five 13-year-olds in life jackets crowded inside the cabin of a small research boat and stared at a bank of computer monitors.

Suddenly, a dark gray mass appeared on one of the screens -- a sonar image of the wreckage of the Civil War-era frigate USS Cumberland.

As members of the Cumberland Club, the kids studied artifacts from the ship, then helped researchers beam sonar to the bottom of the James River near the coal piers in Newport News to check on the condition of the ship itself.

The U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hold the summer enrichment program, which gives students a hands-on feel for what it's like to be historians, archaeologists and marine scientists.

''It was fun to be able to do things that are important that kids don't usually get to do,'' said Jazmine Brooks of Norfolk, who'll be in eighth grade in the fall.

The Cumberland Club, now in its second year, is free to the middle school students and funded by a grant. To be selected, students wrote essays on ''Why is history important?''

Before their river outing, the 18 students spent a week studying and going to the naval museum and The USS Monitor Center at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News to learn about conservation and archaeology techniques and the history of the Cumberland.

The ship, launched in 1842, sailed to a number of Mediterranean ports, served in the Gulf of Mexico during the Mexican-American War and patrolled the coast of Africa to suppress the slave trade.

The Cumberland was anchored off Newport News on March 8, 1862, when the CSS Virginia arrived to attack a Union blockade. The Virginia pushed her iron ram into the Cumberland's side and the ship began to sink, its gun crews continuing to fire. About 100 men died.

The fight demonstrated the superiority of armored, steam-powered ships over traditional wooden sailing ships.

The next day, the Virginia and the Monitor fought a battle that ended in a standoff. The Virginia had torn off most of its iron spar when it backed away from the Cumberland, and some historians think the Monitor was spared from further damage because the spar could have penetrated the hull below its armor.

Today, the Cumberland's wreckage is protected by law. The Cumberland Club students got to handle some artifacts that belong to the Hampton Roads Naval Museum.

On one afternoon, the students looked for damage as they turned over the pieces in their gloved hands, then photographed the items for the museum's records and wrote reports describing the objects and recommending how to conserve them.

Most of the items were fairly easy to identify: a door hinge, a pulley, a spike.

Cameron Parsons and David Hart, 13-year-olds from Virginia Beach, weren't sure what they had been given. It looked like two small pieces of wood held together by three rivets. One rivet was inscribed ''Philada.''

''That's cool,'' said Michael V. Taylor, the museum's preservation officer. ''I have no idea what it is.''

David, using a magnifying glass, spotted on the ''Philada'' rivet what looked like an engraving of the scales of justice. Maybe the artifact was associated with the ship's legal officer, Taylor told the boys.

They may get to find out for sure. NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration is providing $1,000 for enhanced restoration for Cumberland artifacts, and the Cumberland Club voted to use the money in part to conserve the ''Philada'' piece.

Cameron said he enjoyed studying the artifacts ''because we're finding real stuff, not recreation stuff that adults set up for us.''

''And it's fun to see stuff that people used like a really long time ago,'' David added.

The following week, in late June, the students spent a day aboard the Bay Hydrographer, a 56-foot NOAA research vessel. They helped researchers use side scan and multibeam sonar to scan the Cumberland wreckage, as well as the nearby wrecks of the Confederate ship CSS Florida, which accidentally sank on Nov. 28, 1864, and a third, unknown ship.

James S. Schmidt, contract archaeologist with the underwater archaeology branch of The Naval Historical Center, will crunch the data collected.

Taylor believes the program will have a lasting impression on the students.

While many kids spend their summers hanging out, Taylor said, ''Cumberland kids get to say, `I went out on an archaeological expedition with The Naval Historical Center on a NOAA boat and we went to the wrecks of the Cumberland and the Confederate Florida. You know, they're important wrecks and important cultural resources.'''

------

On the Net:

Hampton Roads Naval Museum: http://www.hrnm.navy.mil

Shipwreck Teaches Students About History, NYT, 9.7.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/
aponline/us/AP-Cumberland-Club.html

Last American

to remember Titanic sinking dies

Sun May 7, 2006
4:38 PM ET
Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - The last American to remember seeing hundreds of fellow passengers drown in the icy North Atlantic when the Titanic sank 94 years ago has died at age 99, a funeral home spokesman said on Sunday.

Lillian Gertrud Asplund was returning home to the United States from Sweden with her parents and four brothers when the ship, believed to be "unsinkable," struck an iceberg on April 12, 1912. A U.S. Senate report said 1,523 people were killed.

Asplund died at home, a spokesman for the Nordgren Memorial Chapel, in Worcester, Massachusetts confirmed.

A lifetime resident of Massachusetts, Asplund was an intensely private person who shunned all publicity surrounding the disaster, one of the worst peacetime maritime accidents.

The funeral home spokesman said she instructed relatives to keep quiet about what she saw and even asked that the disaster not be mentioned in her obituary.

The two last Titanic survivors are said to be living in England but both women were infants when they were rescued and have no memories of that disastrous night, Titanic experts say.

Asplund lost more than half her family in the accident when her father and three brothers stayed behind as crewmen rushed the young girl, her younger brother and their mother into a lifeboat.

"We went to the upper deck. I could see the icebergs for a great distance around ... It was cold and the little ones were cuddling close to one another and trying to keep from under the feet of the many excited people ...," Asplund's mother told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette in an interview decades ago.

"My little girl, Lillie, accompanied me, and my husband said 'Go ahead, we will get into one of the other boats.' He smiled as he said it."

Asplund's mother, younger brother and uncle returned to the United States five days after the Titanic sank, the newspaper reported at the time.

Asplund never married, worked as a clerk at an insurance company and spent her life caring for her mother, reported the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which republished her mother's recollections of the disaster on Sunday.

Last American to remember Titanic sinking dies, R, 7.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-07T203807Z_01_N07407634_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-TITANIC.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-8 - broken link

April 16 1912

The Titanic is sunk,

with great loss of life

From The Guardian archive

April 16 1912
The Guardian

The maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, the largest ship ever launched, has ended in disaster.

The Titanic started her trip from Southampton for New York on Wednesday. Late on Sunday night she struck an iceberg off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. By wireless telegraphy she sent out signals of distress, and several liners were near enough to catch and respond to the call.

Conflicting news, alarming and reassuring, was current yesterday. Even after midnight it was said all the passengers were safe. All reports, of course, depended on wireless telegrams over great distances.

Late last night the White Star officials in New York announced that a message had been received stating that the Titanic sank at 2.20 yesterday morning after all her passengers and crew had been transferred to another vessel. Later they admitted that many lives had been lost. An unofficial message from Cape Race, Newfoundland, stated that only 675 have been saved out of 2,200 to 2,400 persons on board. This was in some degree confirmed later by White Star officials in Liverpool, who said they were afraid the report was likely to prove true. Assuming that only 675 of the passengers and crew have been saved, and taking the smallest estimate of the number of people on board, the disaster is one of the most awful in the history of navigation, for at least 1,500 lives have been lost.

The stories of the disaster are more than usually conflicting, and it is quite impossible to reconcile the bulk of the earlier and optimistic reports with the sinister news received after midnight. There is unfortunately only too much reason to believe, however, that the latest and worse news is nearest the truth, for none of the later cables contradict each other.

The main hope that remains is that the Virginian or Parisian may have picked up more of the passengers and crew than those saved by the Carpathia. As to this there is no news at the time of writing. A list of the first class passengers (who are reported from New York to have been all saved) appears on page 6.

White Star statement in New York, 9.35pm. Mr Franklin said, "I was confident to-day when I made the statement that the Titanic was unsinkable that the steamship was safe and that there would be no loss of life. The first definite news to the contrary came in the message this evening from Captain Haddock".

9 50p.m. The White Star officials now admit that probably only 675 out of 2,200 passengers on board the Titanic have been saved.

From The Guardian archive > April 16 1912 >
The Titanic is sunk, with great loss of life,
G,
Republished 16.4.2007,
p. 34,
http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/04/16/
pages/ber34.shtml

On This Day - May 3, 1845

From The Times Archive

A British ship is wrecked
at Ventry in Dingle Bay, Co Kerry

ABOUT 5 o’clock on Sunday morning the beautiful sailing vessel Cleopatra, of Northumberland, bound for North America, with a cargo of brick and coal, from England, was dashed against the cliffs at the mouth of the harbour.

Scarcely had she struck against these immense rocks, when she was literally staved to pieces. The crew (nine in number) threw themselves into the deep, and were dashed about by the immense surges, which rose mountains high, when, most providentially, they were seen by a young fellow who immediately gave the alarm.

In a very short time many persons assembled over the wreck on the cliffs above. Two amongst them volunteered to descend by a rope to their relief. The brave fellows safely descended through the cliffs; threw the drowning men, now almost exhausted, the rope, and brought all safe ashore. The perpendicular altitude of the cliff is not less than 800 feet.

The conduct of the poor Roman Catholic people of Ventry on the above melancholy occasion was, we are informed, most heroic and generous. To rescue strangers — the crew of the vessel were Scotchmen — from a watery grave, they perilled their lives, reckless of their own fate, and bent only on effecting the safety of others.

The humanity of such people deserves a better return than the appellation of “savages”, as the Irish peasantry have been so frequently designated by their ignorant brethren in other parts of this empire.

From The Times Archives > On This Day -
May 3, 1845, The Times, 3.5.2005,
http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/pages/main.asp - broken link