The long missing Steamship Pacific.
--A Message from the Sea.--Our readers may have observed recently, among our maritime extracts, the copy of the contents of a slip of paper found in a bottle some weeks ago, on the western coast of Uist, in the Hebrides, and forwarded to us by our agent at Stornoway. The paper, in question, apparently the leaf of a pocket book, used in the hurry of the moment, was covered on both sides with pencil marks, from which the following was with difficulty deciphered: ‘"On board the Pacific, from L'pool to N. York. Ship going down. (Great) confusion on board. Icebergs around us on every side. I know I cannot escape. I write the cause of our loss that friends may not live in suspense. The finder of this will please get it published. Wm. Graham."’ If we are right in our conjecture, the ship here named is the Pacific, one of the Collins line of steamers, which vessel left Liverpool on January 23, 1856, three days before the Persia, and has not since been heard of; and this slip of paper, three inches by two, is probably the only record of the fate of that missing ship. The writer was evidently some person accustomed to the perils of the sea, for it is difficult to understand how any person whose nerves had not been hardened by the presence of frequent and appalling dangers could have written with such manifest coolness in the immediate presence of death. This self-possession at once negatives the idea that the person who could exhibit it in a moment of such supreme peril could possibly have mistaken the name of the vessel whose loss he has recorded. Then, again, we find from the records of the lost Pacific, that a person named Graham sailed in her from Liverpool on her ill-fated voyage, and in all human probability was on board at the time she was lost with all hands. This is the strongest point in the entire chain of evidence, for it connects the writer of the memorandum directly with the lost ship, and the ship with the writer Lastly, since the memorandum has been given to the world, now some weeks, we have had no intimation that any ship named the Pacific, sailing from Liverpool recently, has been lost, or is even missing.--London Shipping and Mercantile Gazette.
