The sinking of the SS Princess Alice

The ship sank in September 1878 in the River Thames 4 minutes after colliding with another ship. Around 600-700 passengers are thought to have died and a diver reported seeing masses of bodies jammed together still standing upright in the doorways.

What made this sinking particularly horrible was that the ship sank in an area where 75 million gallons of raw sewage had been released into the river an hour earlier. The water was also polluted by untreated waste coming from nearby chemical factories.

A chemist described the water as being “Two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda water with baneful gases, so black that the water is stained for miles and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour”

16 passengers who had been rescued subsequently died within 2 weeks after accidentally ingesting the water. Many of the passengers couldn’t swim and were dragged under by the weight of their heavy woollen clothing.

Bodies that were recovered were covered in slime that was difficult to clean off and the corpses rotted extremely fast due to the polluted river water.

Drowning is awful enough but drowning in a river of raw sewage is a whole other level of horrible….