The London

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The London was an emigrant ship sailing from Britain to Australia in January 1866. She carried 220 passengers and a crew of 69, plus a great deal of deck cargo, altogether making the ship far too overloaded and unseaworthy.

By a story later highly publicised, when she was en route down the Thames, a seaman seeing her pass Purfleet said, "It'll be her last voyage…she is too low down in the water, she'll never rise to a stiff sea."

This proved all too accurate. The London sank in the Bay of Biscay, and there were only 19 survivors.

The disaster of The London aroused increased attention in Britain to the dangerous condition of the coffin ships, overloaded by unscrupulous ship owners, and the publicity had a major role in Samuel Plimsoll's campaign to reform shipping so as to prevent further such disasters.

The disaster of the London is extensively discussed in Nicolette Jones's The Plimsoll Sensation, a 2006 biography of Plimsoll. (See [1]).