One of the bodies washed ashore. A scene taken from the Harper's Weekly, 1873.

Rage on! Rage on! thou wild and angry sea;
Wail in your caves ye winds, wail mournfully
With solemn cadence sounding in my ear,
A requiem meets for those that slumber here.

He imagines himself on board this vessel, only to have an angry sea veer him to his tragic fate. The newspapers of the time reported this catastrophe of the worse seen off the shores of Nova Scotia. In the book, "The Two Atlantics" by Keith Hatchard, it says that two babies were born on the voyage; born into a world, and without realizing, not given the chance to speculate on this sudden reality - only to leave in pain.The Atlantic Coast took its toll of ships of the years (over sixty between 1866 and 1912 - The Titanic being the most famous).