The ''Moselle'' was a

riverboat A riverboat is a watercraft designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury un ...

constructed at the Fulton shipyard, in

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

. between December 1, 1837 and March 31, 1838. The ''Moselle'' was considered one of the fastest river boats in operation at the time, having completed a record-setting two-day, sixteen-hour trip between

and

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

.GenDisasters: Cincinnati, OH area steamboat Moselle explosion, April 1838
/ref> On April 25, 1838, the ''Moselle'', piloted by Captain Isaac Perin, suffered a boiler explosion just east of Cincinnati, killing 160 of the estimated 280–300 passengers.
(Note: This page includes illustrations of the steamboat ''Moselle'' before, during, and after its explosion on April 25, 1838.) The boat had just pulled away from a dock near the neighborhood of Fulton, when all four boilers simultaneously suffered a catastrophic failure resulting in the total destruction of the ship from the paddlewheels to the bow. The ship drifted approximately 100 yards before sinking to the bottom of the Ohio river. Negligence may have been a factor in the explosion: many eyewitness reports claimed that Captain Perin had been racing another riverboat, the ''Ben Franklin'' (1836) at the time of the explosion, and therefore the pressure in the boilers was excessively high.

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_Frederick_Dwight_s_survivor_of_the_disaster_[.p.165
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moselle_(Riverboat) Shipwrecks_of_the_Ohio_River.html" ;"title="p.165"> Frederick Dwight s survivor of the disaster [.p.165
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moselle (Riverboat) Shipwrecks of the Ohio River">p.165"> Frederick Dwight s survivor of the disaster [.p.165
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moselle (Riverboat) Shipwrecks of the Ohio River Maritime boiler explosions Maritime incidents in April 1838 Ships sunk by non-combat internal explosions