The Drowned Circus

Maritime disasters have long served as inspiration for popular songs and ballads, especially when the drama of the incident is multiplied by the presence among the victims of those whom we identify as "innocents," as opposed to professional or military sailors who are presumed, perhaps, to accept the risks as a condition of their service. Among others, there's Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James" (about a warship), Toumani Diabaté's instrumental "Lampedusa" (memorializing the deaths of some 360 migrants off the shores of the island of that name), and several songs about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, including Blind Willie Johnson's haunting "God Moves on the Water" and the ditty variously known as "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down" or "The Titanic," the lyrics of which prompted the parody containing these immortal lines, indelibly engraved in my childhood years:

Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants,
It was great when the sad ship went down.

Outside the English-speaking world I can think of Zachary Richard's "Le ballade du Irving Whale," about the sinking of an oil barge in which no human lives were lost (as far as I know) but great environmental damage was done. The example below, a bolero written by the Cuban musicians Julio Gutierrez and Bobby Collazo (here performed by the Trio La Rosa) relates an incident of unusual pathos that has a surprising connection with an apprentice journalist who went on to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

The Euskera or Euzkera was a cargo ship that had been first commissioned as a private yacht in 1891, then recommissioned as the USS Hawk during the Spanish-American War. The ship remained on reserve duty until 1940, when, according to Wikipedia, it was sold for scrap. Several years later, however, it was plying the waters of the Caribbean, and on September 1, 1948, en route from Havana to Cartagena in Colombia, it capsized and sank. Only a handful of the passengers survived (sources conflict as to whether there were six or twelve), and among the victims were most of the members of the renowned Razzore family of circus performers along with 59 circus animals. (Wrecksite has the most information, as well as a contemporary newspaper account.)

One member of the circus troupe who was not on board was its director and paterfamilias, Emilio Razzore, who had already arrived in Colombia to serve as advance man. Before the news of the sinking came through, he had appeared in the offices of the newspaper El Universal, where he peeled off his shirt to display the impressive scars he had received from the animals in his lion-taming act. There he met a twenty-one year old cub reporter named Gabriel García Márquez, who, according to the latter's memoirs, shared a meal with Razzore in a local restaurant and asked him, probably not too seriously, whether he could join the circus. Not long after that, the fate of the Euskera (the spelling García Márquez uses) became known, and the young writer remained with the devastated lion-tamer for several days, eventually accompanying him to Baranquilla, from where Razzore flew to Miami to try to rebuild his life. In Edith Grossman's translation García Márquez ends the account by saying "I never heard from him again," although the original is the more impersonal "Nada más se supo de él" (Nothing more was known of him).

The sinking was newsworthy enough that the New Yorker published a poem by an American writer, Walker Gibson, entitled "To the Memory of the Circus Ship Euzkera, Lost in the Caribbean Sea, 1 September 1948" (available behind paywall).

I haven't been able to find a transcription of the lyrics of "La tragedía del circo," only parts of which I can make out.