When Everything Was Gone, He Still Sang

On November 22, 1873, Horatio Spafford stood at a telegraph office in New York and read a message from his wife that began with two words: "Saved alone." Four of their daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta — had drowned when the French ocean liner Ville du Havre sank after colliding with a sailing vessel in the Atlantic. His wife Anna had been pulled from the water unconscious. His daughters had not.

Just two years earlier, Spafford had watched his thriving real estate investments along the Chicago lakefront burn to ash in the Great Fire of 1871. Now, crossing the Atlantic to meet his grieving wife, he asked the ship's captain to mark the approximate location where his daughters died. As the vessel passed over those waters, he put pen to paper:

When peace like a river attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll —