The ''Moselle'' was a

riverboat A riverboat is a watercraft designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury ...

constructed at the Fulton shipyard, in

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is a city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking River (Kentucky), Licking and Ohio Ri ...

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

. between December 1, 1837 and March 31, 1838. The ''Moselle'' was considered one of the fastest river boats in operation at the time, having completed a record-setting two-day, sixteen-hour trip between

and

St. Louis St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a populatio ...

. On April 25, 1838, the ''Moselle'', piloted by Captain Isaac Perin, suffered a boiler explosion just east of Cincinnati, killing 160 of the estimated 280–300 passengers.Cincinnati Views: Ohio River: Steamboats, p. 5
(Note: This page includes illustrations of the steamboat ''Moselle'' before, during, and after its explosion on April 25, 1838.) The boat had just pulled away from a dock near the neighborhood of Fulton, when all four boilers simultaneously suffered a catastrophic failure resulting in the total destruction of the ship from the paddlewheels to the bow. The ship drifted approximately 100 yards before sinking to the bottom of the Ohio river. Negligence may have been a factor in the explosion: many eyewitness reports claimed that Captain Perin had been racing another riverboat, the ''Ben Franklin'' (1836) at the time of the explosion, and therefore the pressure in the boilers was excessively high.

References

External links

Frederick Dwight s survivor of the disaster [.p.165
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moselle (Riverboat) Shipwrecks of the Ohio River">p.165"> Frederick Dwight s survivor of the disaster [.p.165
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moselle (Riverboat) Shipwrecks of the Ohio River Maritime boiler explosions Maritime incidents in April 1838 Ships sunk by non-combat internal explosions