The gruesome crash of the Staten Island ferry on Wednesday came as a shock. How could one of those lumbering ferry boats come to grief on a routine afternoon trip in a harbor that seems all but empty? But it was hardly unprecedented. As we tend to forget nowadays, New York was born a harbor town, and our waterways have historically been fraught with peril, even for commuters.

The most spectacular maritime disaster was the fire on the General Slocum, which killed more New Yorkers than any catastrophe before 9/11 and which even changed the human geography of the city. Hired as an excursion boat for the German-American parishioners of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in the East Village, the Slocum caught fire shortly after leaving its East River dock on June 15, 1904. The ship’s fire hoses and life jackets were rotten; by the time the captain was able to run the ship onto the rocks of Hell’s Gate, it was in flames.

Within 15 minutes, 1,021 of the 1,331 passengers died, most of them women and children. The disaster so devastated the remaining German immigrants in the East Village that they moved en masse to Yorkville on the Upper East Side. The General Slocum fire was reported around the world, and is even mentioned in James Joyce’s ”Ulysses,” which takes place over the course of the following day.

But for decades before that disaster drew global attention, New Yorkers had subjected themselves to daily terrors on the Hudson River. Robert Fulton had put the world’s first real steamboat, the Clermont, on the river in 1807; by the 1820’s the robber barons Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew and George Law were in a cutthroat competition for travelers between Albany and Manhattan’s West Side docks. Fares plummeted to 50 cents from $7, and the steamboats became floating palaces — more than 200 feet long and festooned with gilded bows and Corinthian columns. Under crystal chandeliers and rococo ceilings, passengers feasted on beefsteak.

But the ships were also floating deathtraps. Rival owners tried to lure passengers by racing their boats against each other — an incredibly dangerous endeavor in an age of iron boilers. The competitions were so intense at times that the crews would even chop up the fine furniture and woodwork for fuel. This resulted in the predictable disasters. The boilers of the Aetna and the General Jackson exploded, killing scores. In 1845, the Swallow ran aground on a small island while racing two other steamers, taking a dozen lives. Even the longtime river champion, the Reindeer, met its end in what the historian Carl Carmer described as ”a holocaust of bursting boilers, flaming woodwork, and shrieking, dying passengers.”

Perhaps the ultimate race began on the morning of July 28, 1852, when the Henry Clay and the Armenia set off from Albany, while runners on the riverfront cried out ”Hurrah for Harry of the West!” With the Henry Clay’s captain writhing below decks with food poisoning, its owner, Thomas Collyer, pushed it relentlessly in the Armenia’s wake. Both boats rushed through their scheduled stops or skipped them altogether. A number of fearful passengers got off while they could, but, amazingly, most decided to remain.

Finally, five miles above Kingston, the Henry Clay surged into the lead, cutting across the Armenia’s bow and splintering its larboard woodwork while the passengers cheered. But as the ship steamed past Yonkers, a canvas covering above one of its overworked boilers caught fire; the high winds on the river that day quickly fanned the flames into an inferno.

Before it was over, some 80 passengers were dead; many drowned in just a few feet of water. Among the victims were a former mayor of New York, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister and the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Nearly forgotten today, Downing was a national avatar of taste — a sort of cross between Martha Stewart and Frank O. Gehry — and was the likely choice to design Central Park. Instead, that task fell to two men he had mentored and introduced, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.

Wednesday’s calamity was of course not due to any such systematic recklessness. Because of great advances in technology and yes, government regulations, most commuter trips today are made in utter safety. It does, however, remind us how sudden death can still be, even on a routine trip across our quiet harbor.