Excerpt from New York's Awful Excursion Boat Horror: Told by Survivors and Rescuers One beautiful day in June an excursion steamer, with twelve hundred Christian souls on board, set forth upon a pleasure trip. The boat was gay with multi-colored bunting; the happy voices of care-free women rang across the dancing waters; happy children were romping over the decks and - as if in mockery of the predestined catastrophe that was to follow - the band was playing a sacred hymn, Our God Is a Mighty Fortress. Then the brutal hand of Fate swept the picture from the canvas and in its place supplied a fiendish nightmare vision of horrid anguish and frantic terror. No artist, unless he dipped his brush in the colors of hell, could portray the awful scene of a majestic vessel, wrapped in great sheets of devouring flame, speeding to a haven of refuge, while the grim helmsman Death wrestled for suprem acy with the heroic captain at the wheel. And it would need the genius of a Dante to word-paint the dreadful spec tacle of helpless children roasted alive before their mother's eyes or swept by fear-crazed hundreds over the burning rails of the boat into the hungry jaws of the devouring tide - of gentle women and feeble old men crushed beneath the falling timbers of the decks or hurled to a swifter and, possibly, less terrible death, in the rushing waters of the river. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.