Water and Ice: The Tragic Wrecks of the Bristol and the Mexico on the South Shore of Long Island.

WATER AND ICE is an exciting, newly-rediscovered, award-winning sea story, and it is also a detailed study of New York City and Long Island maritime history in the 1830s. This is the thrilling, true story of two American tall ships, the Bristol and the Mexico, that in the winter of 1836-7 were wrecked off Rockaway Beach and Long Beach, New York, only a few hundred yards from shore in the worst accidental loss of life in the history of the United States to that time. It is a story of greed, self-interest, and dereliction of duty on the part of New York City's merchant-shippers, ship captains, and harbor pilots; and it is a story of remarkable heroism. Harbor pilots ignored their duty, drinking whiskey while hundreds drowned or froze to death. Fiends in human form cut off the fingers and earlobes of victims to get at their jewelry. Incredibly brave fishermen-rescuers fought incredible odds to drag a few dozen survivors ashore. After the wreck, poets such as Walt Whitman - in Leaves of Grass- wrote passionately about the wrecks. The twin disasters resulted in the deaths of 215 people, 100 of them by drowning on the Bristol and 115 by freezing to death on the deck of the Mexico. The book tells of the unrealized hope of hundreds of Irish immigrants squeezed aboard these two cargo ships as if they were barrels of merchandise, and who were called ignorant, lazy, vicious, and degraded pigs by New Yorkers. The book incorporates research Mr. Mattson did in Dublin, Liverpool, and New York to uncover the tragic events that culminated in a cortege of 300 farm-wagons and the interment of 139 unclaimed bodies in a mass grave in Lynbrook Long Island. WATER AND ICE is an engrossing story of two shipwrecks off Long Island, which were major catastrophes . . . it is a significant addition to maritime history and to New York and Long Island history as well. --- Natalie Naylor, Professor Emerita, Hofstra University