Bill Bleyer’s new book focuses on tragic tale of the Lexington

Before the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history, and to date the worst in Long Island history, was the destruction of the steamboat the Lexington, which sank in 1840, with a loss of as many as 150 lives. Although few now remember the tale of the Lexington, local author and former Newsday staff writer Bill Bleyer, of Bayville, hopes to change that with his new book, “The Sinking of the Steamboat Lexington on Long Island Sound.”

The Lexington was a paddlewheel steamboat that transported passengers and cargo across the Sound starting in 1835. The ship was commissioned and designed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, the patriarch of the business dynasty, and was considered one of the most cutting-edge vessels of its time.

It is suspected that the ship’s smokestack caught fire on the night of Jan. 13, 1840, while it was sailing from New York to Stonington, Connecticut, with between 143 and 154 passengers and crew, as well as 150 bales of cotton. All but four of the people on board were killed in the ensuing conflagration, drowned or died of hypothermia.

Bleyer said he first came across the story of the Lexington in the mid-1990s, when he was working on a series for Newsday on local maritime stories. While researching shipwrecks around Long Island, he said, he was amazed by the tragic tale and the dogged resilience of the four survivors.

“When I stumbled across the Lexington, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is a pretty amazing story,’” Bleyer recalled. “I actually did a full page in the series on the Lexington disaster; the fire and how the four people survived was so interesting.”

This isn’t Bleyer’s first time writing about the Lexington. He also mentioned it in his fourth book, “Long Island and the Sea,” a maritime history of Long Island, in a chapter on shipwrecks, but he knew even then he wasn’t done with the story.

It was during the pandemic that Bleyer was able to tell the tale in its entirety. He had intended to write a book about Roosevelt landmarks in New York City, but with libraries and avenues for research closed to him, he turned his attention to the Lexington.

“It dawned on me that I could probably do something else in the meantime, because this was not going to happen during the pandemic,” Bleyer said. “I called my editor at The History Press and I said, ‘While I’m waiting to do this other book, I think I have enough information now to do a whole book on the Lexington,’ and it turned out they had a whole series of shipwreck books, so it fit right into that series.”

While he was writing about and researching the Lexington, Bleyer was able to find and incorporate previously overlooked documents and new research. One such example was the work of Ben Roberts, a scuba diver who helps find lost ships using side scan sonar. Roberts examined the remains of the Lexington off the coast of Port Jefferson and recorded its dimensions and state.

Bleyer also found a copy of the coroner’s report of the legal battle that followed the sinking of the ship, when much of the blame for the disaster fell on the ship’s owners and crew. The destruction of the vessel was attributed mostly to the carelessness of the crew and the shortsightedness of the owners — Vanderbilt had sold the ship to another company the year before it sank — but Bleyer said he was amazed to find that the coroner’s account of the trial largely disproved these claims, and that the fire was accidental.

“The most interesting thing that I found was that people claimed it was an old, aging ship that wasn’t properly maintained and that the 150 bales of cotton weren’t safe cargo, which I actually had in the early drafts of the book,” Bleyer said, “but when I started doing the research, I found a lot of expert testimony that got ignored, and that there was really a lot of hysteria at the time, and a belief that people needed to be punished, basically knee-jerk blaming of the crew and company.”