building of the sisters were described as sublime engineering, state of the art for it's time.
the Missouri proceeded to the Mediterranean, arriving at Gibraltar on the 25th of August after a voyage of nineteen days from the Capes of the Ghesapeake. The next day, August 26, 1843, the engineer's yeoman broke a demijohn of spirits of turpentine in the store-room, which ignited and started a fire that spread so rapidly that all hope of saving the vessel had to be abandoned, and the crew barely escaped with their lives. In a few hours this splendid vessel was reduced to a blackened and sinking hulk. Her commander, Captain J. T. Newton, and Chief Engineer John Faron, Jr. , were tried by court-martial upon their return home and were sentenced to suspension from duty, the former for a period of two years, and the latter for one year, which sentences were remitted after the captain had served four months and the chief engineer eight months. Congress appropriated sixty thousand dollars later to be expended in removing the sunken wreck from Gibraltar harbor. When chief engineer of the Missouri the year before she burned, Mr. Haswell had asked for a leaden tank in which to keep the spirits of turpentine, but the requisition was refused.
The Mississippi had a long and famous career, but eventually met a far more tragic fate than did her sister ship. She is said to have been a beautiful vessel, and from having had a succession of able commanders and common-sense officers in full accord with each other, she won the enviable reputation of being a "happy ship," and with this reputation was the most popular and best known of all the steamers of the old navy. She was the flagship of Commodore M. C. Perry in the Mexican War, and also his flagship in the expedition to Japan • she carried the famous Hungarian exile, Kossuth, from Turkey to France, and brought a number of his fellow-exiles to the United States. As the flagship of Flag Officer Josiah Tatnall in 1859 she was present at the engagement in the Pei lio river, where the " blood is thicker than water," sentiment is said to have originated, and at the outbreak of the Civil War was one of the first vessels to go to the front. She had twice circumnavigated the globe, and it was said of her, probably truly, that she had cruised more miles under steam than any war vessel of her time. Eventually a combination of circumstances, so strange that their suggestion during her days would have been scouted as the climax of absurdity, brought this noble frigate with hostile intent into the great river whose name she had so long and so worthily carried about the world, and there one dark night in a storm of shot and shell, in fire and smoke, and a spectacular explosion she sank to her long rest, a coffin for many of her crew, on the bottom of the Great Mississippi river.
