A very rare broadside which provides a detailed account of the tragic events following the sinking of the American ship William Brown after it struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland on the night of 19 April 1841.
The ship was carrying 17 crew members and 65 passengers, primarily poor Scottish and Irish immigrants, on a voyage from Liverpool to Philadelphia. When the ship hit the iceberg, Captain George L. Harris, eight seamen, and one passenger escaped in a jolly boat, while nine crew members and 32 passengers boarded an overloaded longboat. Thirty-one passengers were left on board the sinking ship. On the orders of Lieutenant Alexander William Holmes, the crew threw sixteen passengers overboard to lighten the leaking longboat. Apart from two married men and a young boy, all of the male passengers were sacrificed, while all of the crew members remained aboard. After reaching Philadelphia, some of the surviving passengers filed a complaint against the crew. Of all the crew, they only managed to find Holmes, who was therefore the sole person charged with the killings.
In the landmark 1842 case United States v. Holmes, the judge provided the jury with legal guidance on the relationship between a ship’s crew and its passengers, emphasizing the crew’s obligation to safeguard the passengers in the event of a maritime disaster. The case has remained influential and continues to be cited in legal scholarship.
This broadside is one of the final works of Antoine-Joseph Garson (1803–1848), who was active in Paris between 1825 and 1842 as a wood engraver and publisher of broadsides featuring large woodcuts (‘canards’). He also produced images for clandestine printers. In August 1841, Garson was arrested for reissuing work that had previously been banned by the Paris police prefect’s censors, as well as for counterfeiting the royal stamp that was required for official documents. Following a brief release, he was sentenced to eight years of hard labour in September 1842 for printing a counterfeit 500-franc note, and died in prison in 1848.
We locate a single copy at the BnF.
Seguin, J.-P., “Un grand imagier Parisien Garson Ainé. Son Oeuvre et notes sur les canards et canardiers Parisiens de la première moitié du XIX e siècle” in Arts et traditions populaires, Vol. 2, No. 2 (April-June 1954), pp. 97-146.
