It was a long cold night for the surviving crew of the Southport lifeboat, one of the lifeboats which had responded to a distress call from the ship Mexico which was in trouble off Southport on 9 December 1886. Because of the bad weather the Southport lifeboat had been turned over and some of the crew held on to the outside of the upturned boat. Others were trapped by ropes and rigging underneath. As the men got colder two of the survivors Henry Robinson and John Jackson decided to swim for the shore. Both made it safely home and the alarm was raised.
A search was organised in the early hours of the morning of 10 December and immediately the bodies of some of the Southport crew began to turn up. Incredibly four other members of the Southport crew were found alive, but attempts to keep them alive failed. By late morning the bodies of some of the crew of the St Anne’s lifeboat, Laura Janet, which had also responded to the distress call, began to turn up and it was realised that two lifeboats had been lost. Nothing is known of how the Laura Janet met with disaster as her entire crew of thirteen lifeboatmen died. From the sixteen man crew of the Southport lifeboat, there were only two survivors. Of the forty-four lifeboatmen who went to the rescue of the Mexico, twenty-seven died, leaving sixteen women without a husband and fifty sons and daughters without a father. |
