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Lexington Fire and Sinking
- When
- 13 January 1840
- Where
- Off the coast of Long Island
The Lexington caught fire on 13 January 1840, igniting cotton bales and causing passengers to abandon ship. Crew errors and lack of aid led to the disaster.
The Lexington departed Manhattan's East River at 4:00 p.m. on 13 January 1840. The casing around the smokestack caught fire, igniting nearly 150 bales of cotton. Passengers and crew attempted to abandon ship, but serious errors by the crew and the failure of a nearby vessel to come to the aid of the survivors compounded the disaster.
Sources
- Lexington (steamship) Wikipedia, revision of 2026-03-30
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.