The Wreck of the Mexico

In late December of 1836, the Mexico, was driven by severe storm into a sandbar nearly a quarter mile off of Long Beach, Long Island. While the captain and crew escaped the stranded ship to safety, 115 passengers – mostly Irish immigrants, many of them women and children – froze to death in bitter cold temperatures. The dead were later gathered ashore and laid in a barn prior to their mass burial in Lynbrook. Artist James Fulton Pringle, normally a marine painter of commercial ships, captured the tragic horror of this famous event, which was also widely written about in newspapers and publications of the day