From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, August 26
Al Jazeera — read the full story
The water is dark and still at Lake Kariba. An overloaded ferry capsized there, resulting in seventy-two deaths as more bodies were recovered from the lake's depths by police. This tragedy underscores critical issues of vessel safety and regulatory failure in Zimbabwe's waters. Benjamin Franklin considers this incident first. Henry David Thoreau follows him.
I remember a convoy scattered on the Picardy shore, the warships limping back to port with seven hundred souls in irons , and the merchants in London still calculating the loss in ledgers, not lives. You have seen the arithmetic of a ferry on Lake Kariba: seventy-two dead because the vessel carried thrice its complement, because the inspector looked away, because the owner counted fares and not displacement. We have seen this before.
The Junto debated it in '43 , a Schuylkill packet foundered with a wedding party aboard, the captain having taken on barrel after barrel of flour until the gunwales kissed the water. "Prudence," we wrote in the Gazette, "is the ballast that keeps the ship upright." But prudence costs money, and money speaks louder than maxims in a hungry port. The bodies rise now, one by one, as they did off Brest in '78, as they will wherever a magistrate's seal is bought with a bottle of rum.
A nation that cannot enforce its own load-lines has no business complaining when the sea collects its debt. The water does not read regulations. It only weighs.
winds battered the convoy they were sending to New England and the West Indies. Several of their ships were tossed on the Picardy shore, and the three warships convoying them went back to port in very bad shape. It is rumored that the disaster resulted in the capture of seven to …
the boat, as he was sitting in an unguarded posture, and was most unfortunately drowned. Such is the account given by the Ferrymen: But it is now said that some circumstances raise suspicions to the prejudice of these men, and I hear just now that they are taken up and put in iro…
has sent us the protests of both the French and American masters, and it is remarkable that the French captain makes no mention of the American one having taken possession of the vessel, and expressly supposes she sunk that night, and that Capt. Shewel is equally silent as to the…
<Bordeaux, January 9, 1779: Yesterday the convoy for the French islands sailed, accompanied by three small cutters for the United States. From a vessel arriving out of Edenton I have learned that tobacco is £10 per hundred weight in American currency. American prices are extraord…
13: A ship from Baltimore at Cadiz reports Congress has reduced $200,000,000 in currency to a fortieth of its former value. Several warships from Lorient and Rochefort have arrived at Brest. Construction of a frigate has begun. (VII) St. Malo, June 15: Two British frigates are in…
I have watched the ice go out at Walden. It does not negotiate. A shelf of white that held a team of oxen in January surrenders to a March wind in the span of an afternoon, and the water remembers only its own level. The news from Lake Kariba — seventy-two drowned, an overloaded ferry, bodies still rising — is not a surprise to the water. It is the account settling. A ferry is a contract between gravity and displacement. Load it past the line the gunwales whisper and the contract voids itself.
I have seen the Merrimack at spring freshet climb the trunks of buttonbushes to a height no engineer's drawing anticipated. The river keeps its own ledger. The beaver dam at the outlet of Fairhaven Pond holds because the beaver knows, stick by stick, the pressure of the pond. He does not guess. He does not take on one more passenger for the fare. Men build regulations the way they build dams , with paper and inspection certificates. The water reads none of them.
It feels only weight and balance. When the vessel turned, the lake did not ask whether the operator held a license. It accepted the mass and returned the bodies on its own schedule, as the Concord returns a drowned man in June whom the ice took in December. The lake is not cruel. It is exact. Seventy-two names. The water holds them all.
new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should…
remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor. They are rarely seen in our waters at present, on account of the dams, though they are taken in great quantities at the mouth of the river in Lowell. Their nests, which are very conspicuous, look more like art than anyth…
finding a ferry or a bridge. In the Adventures of Henry the fur-trader, it is pleasant to read that when with his Indians he reached the shore of Ontario, they consumed two days in making two canoes of the bark of the elm-tree, in which to transport themselves to Fort Niagara. It…
engineer disregarded this statement, and I learn that there has since been a freshet which rose within nine inches of the rails at Biscuit Brook, and such a freshet as that of 1785 would have covered the railroad two feet deep. The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and ma…
a million crisped waves come forth to meet the sun when he should show himself. The countrymen, recruited by their day of rest, were already stirring, and had begun to cross the ferry on the business of the week. This ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed an…
The story ran in Al Jazeera. Safety oversight on Lake Kariba is now under scrutiny following the ferry disaster. That's Old News for today.