Law: Sea Burial

Unknown to most ocean travelers, every major liner carries a couple of coffins and its ship’s doctor is a qualified embalmer. While ship captains by immemorial law of the sea have the right to order burial of bodies at sea, such is a non-sailor’s horror of this type of burial that the bodies of persons dying aboard ship today are usually embalmed and turned over to authorities at the decedent’s home port.

Two years ago, returning on the lie de-France, Miss Elizabeth Ann Ahearn, 68, a devout school principal of Danvers, Mass. who had been six times received by the Pope, died of a stroke while in her bathtub. She had been sleeping daily until noon because of poor health and her death was not discovered for some 14 hours. Ship’s doctors found it inadvisable to embalm the body and the captain called upon Catholic priests aboard to officiate at a sea burial. Subsequently four cousins sued the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (French Line) for $100,000 for their mental anguish resulting from Miss Ahearn’s body not having been committed to hallowed ground in a Catholic cemetery. Last week a jury in a Federal court in Manhattan, to which the French Line had had the case transferred from a State court, refused any damages to the cousins after Catholic ‘canonical experts testified that necessitous burial in unconsecrated ground is “not disgraceful.” A letter from the officiating priest aboard the lie de France was introduced into evidence stating that though Miss Ahearn’s body was in th? sea, he knew her soul was with God.