A merchant ship's ill-fated voyage from Liverpool resulted in the loss over 350 lives, including children.
Migrant ship the Annie Jane set sail on September 9, 1853 on a voyage to Quebec, Canada.
The captain, William Mason from Liverpool, had already turned the battered ship back once into port after violent gales destroyed the mast.
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Once repairs had been completed, Mason headed back out to sea again with a total of 450 passengers and crew onboard, determined to complete the journey to The New World.
The emigrants were chiefly Scottish with a number of Irish, French and Germans aboard.
The vessel soon encountered rough weather again as a heavy gale took away the topmasts, along with the lower mastheads.
The crew managed to make repairs at sea but the terrified passengers begged Mason to turn back once more.
He headed the ship back towards Liverpool but as night fell, he turned the Annie Jane back around and set course again for Canada.
The next day, as the passengers surrounded the captain, he is reported to have shouted "To Quebec or the bottom!", before threatening to shoot anyone who attempted to take control of his ship.
On the night of September 28, when off Barra Island in the Hebrides, the ship was hit by a final, devastating storm.
As Mason tried to steer the Annie Jane into calmer waters it ran into rocks.
A vivid account of the disaster was published in the Dundee, Perth, and Cupar Advertiser on Friday, October 14, 1853.
The account reads: "Between twelve and one o'clock, on the morning of the 29th, the ship took the ground with a fearful concussion. The great majority of the passengers, including all the women and children, were below in their berths; but the striking of the ship gave them a fearful wakening.
"Many rushed on deck in a state of nakedness; wives clung to their husbands, and children clung to both, some mute from terror, and others uttering appalling screams, and eagerly shrieking 'Is there no hope?'"
It describes the passengers running to the lifeboats but they were either already destroyed or fixed down and secured.
It continues: "...Within a very few minutes after the ship had grounded, she was struck by a sea of frightful potency, which instantly carried away the dense mass of human beings into the watery waste, and boats and bulwarks went with them. It is the opinion of our informants that least one hundred perished by this fell swoop."
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Within minutes the Annie Jane was torn to pieces by the sea's relentless assault.
In total, only 102 of the 450 people including passengers and crew survived the catastrophe, and only one of those that survived was a child.
The child is said to have belonged to an Irishwoman travelling with her two children who was about to join her husband in America.
She had tried to save both by tying one to her back and grasping the other in her arms, but when the stricken ship broke up, she was unable to keep her grip and the child she was carrying was "dashed into the sea".
The vessel was eventually wrecked on the tiny island of Vatersay, one of the Outer Hebridean islands off the West coast of Scotland.
As the dead washed ashore they were buried in two mass graves in the sand dunes. A small monument marks the site on the island of Vatersay where the bodies recovered from the sea.
An inscription reads: "On 28th September 1853 the ship Annie Jane with emigrants from Liverpool to Quebec was totally wrecked in this bay and three-fourths of the crew and passengers numbering about 350 men women and children were drowned and their bodies interred here."
As luck would have it, Captain William Mason was one of the 36 members of crew who survived.
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