Horatio Gates Spafford was born on 20 October 1828 in North Troy, New York. By his forties he was a senior partner in the Chicago law firm Spafford, McDaid & Wilson and a personal friend of the evangelist Dwight L. Moody. The Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 destroyed nearly every real-estate investment he owned.
Two years later he planned a European rest for his wife Anna and their four daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie and Tanetta, aged eleven to two. Detained at the last moment on business, he sent them ahead on the French steamship Ville du Havre, sailing New York for Le Havre on 15 November 1873.
At 2 a.m. on 22 November, mid-Atlantic, the Ville du Havre was rammed by the iron sailing clipper Loch Earn and sank within twelve minutes. All four Spafford daughters drowned. Anna was pulled unconscious from the wreckage, one of only 87 survivors. From Cardiff on 1 December she cabled her husband two words: "Saved alone."
"Spafford sailed immediately to join her. When his ship crossed the position where the Ville du Havre had gone down, the captain called him to the bridge and pointed to the spot. It was there that he wrote — on the back of a letter — the five stanzas that begin "When peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea-billows roll…""
The hymn was set to music the following year by the Sunday-school composer Philip Bliss, who titled the tune "Ville du Havre". Bliss himself died with his wife two years later in the December 1876 Ashtabula, Ohio train disaster, in which the bridge over the Ashtabula River collapsed and 92 passengers were killed.
The Spaffords went on to have three more children, moved to Jerusalem in 1881, and founded the American Colony — the aid society whose photographic archive is one of the great documentary records of late-Ottoman Palestine.