March 5, 1867

On March 5, 1867, the Montreal Ocean Company's steamer Moravian was traveling at thirteen knots under the combined force of wind and its 400-horsepower steam engine when, at approximately five o'clock in the morning, its starboard quarter struck a rock that was marked on no chart of those waterways. The collision occurred in latitude 27° 30' and longitude 72° 15', and the ship was carrying 237 passengers returning from Canada. Only the high quality of its hull prevented the Moravian from splitting open and sinking. The officers on watch rushed to the stern and examined the ocean with scrupulous care, but they saw nothing except a strong eddy breaking three cable lengths out, as if the sheets of water had been violently churned. The site's exact bearings were taken, and the Moravian continued on course apparently undamaged; however, when its undersides were later examined in the service yard, part of its keel was found to have been smashed. This occurrence, extremely serious in itself, might have been forgotten like so many others had it not been reenacted under identical conditions three weeks later, when the Cunard liner Scotia was holed by a perfectly symmetrical, isosceles-triangle gash two and a half meters below its waterline. The Scotia incident caused an immense uproar because of the reputation of the Cunard Company, which in twenty-six years had never lost a man, craft, or even a letter. The Moravian collision thus became the first piece of a pattern that forced the public and the governments of Europe and America to accept that the phenomenon was no longer a scientific problem to be solved but a quite real and serious danger to be avoided. The monster had become a runaway reef, unfixed and elusive, and the demand to purge the seas of this fearsome cetacean grew irresistible, leading directly to the fitting out of the high-speed frigate Abraham Lincoln under Commander Farragut.