Shipwrecks

No.49: Mi Amigo

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Radio Caroline 1999 Today, Friday 28th March, marks the 50th anniversary of Radio Caroline, originally a pirate radio station. Piracy on the high seas would not be complete without a shipwreck somewhere, in this case the vessel that became Radio Caroline South, broadcasting from the coast off Essex. This vessel was the Mi Amigo.

Seamen often say that ships have a personality of their own or that a ship is an ‘unlucky’ vessel. Mi Amigo certainly had an adventurous career, despite her origins as a workaday sailing schooner built at Kiel in 1921, operating in the Baltic region. She was commandeered by Nazi forces in 1941-3, and began her career as a radio broadcast vessel off Danish waters in 1960, before Radio Caroline.

During her years operating off the Essex coast, she exemplified the main problem facing stationary vessels. During storms they were extremely vulnerable to running on nearby hazards as they could not quickly steer themselves out of trouble, if at all, if their anchors broke. (Light vessels without motive power were particularly prone to this problem.) Mi Amigo drifted ashore at Holland Haven near Frinton in 1966, struck the Long Sand Head just off the Thames Estuary in 1975 and 1976, before eventually sinking after striking the Long Sand once more in 1980. Her mast was visible for a number of years afterwards and the wreck remains charted in the Estuary: she was recorded in English Heritage’s Modern Wrecks Project of 2010, 30 years after she was lost.

The last words broadcast from Mi Amigo were those of the DJ on duty just before midnight on 19/20 March 1980: “Due to severe weather conditions and the fact that we are shipping quite a lot of water, we’re closing down and the crew are at this stage leaving the ship.” All the crew were rescued by the Sheerness lifeboat, plus Wilson II the canary.

For a photo gallery of Mi Amigo in service and as a sunken wreck, please click here.

No.48: The Cieszyn

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Dziękuję ci Kapitanie!

Following a trip to Poland last week, I thought I’d talk about Polish shipwrecks in English waters.

We have at least 69 wrecks of Polish origin, but a number may have been masked by historic former nationalities such as “Prussian”. Without a home port being named, it is difficult to identify just to which modern state incorporated within the former extent of Prussia a vessel belongs. Our earliest reference is in 1389 to the Cristofre of Danzig, while a reference to “Dansk in Prucia” from 1391 is clear enough, at the period when Gdansk was one of the major cities of the Hanseatic League, a trade association which dominated the Baltic and North Sea and became a power in its own right. Richard II and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, surrendered their rights in the wreck and restored the wrecked goods to the merchants involved.

Inevitably language isn’t always much of a clue, since most Prussian names were recorded in German rather than Polish, although occasionally other languages crop up. There is even a Lord Wellington belonging to Gdansk, wrecked off Lincolnshire in 1824, when memories of the Anglo-Prussian alliance against Napoleon were still fresh. The ports of Gdansk and Szszecin continued to be referred to as Prussian Danzig and Stettin until well into the 20th century.

During World War II a number of Polish ships were lost in English waters including today’s featured wreck, the Cieszyn, which was bombed and sunk by two Dorniers off Lowland Point, near Falmouth, 73 years ago yesterday on 20th March 1941.

It was said that the boat carrying the escaping crew also came under attack, as did the lifeboatmen who put out from Coverack to rescue them in the Three Sisters lifeboat. When the Coverack cox’n, Archie Rowe, was featured on This Is Your Life in the days before it became dominated by celebrities, the team tracked down Captain Mikosza of the Cieszyn to express his gratitude.

Her bell was recovered in 1997, leading to the identification of the wreck, which had previously been thought to be a different wreck site, now believed to be the 1942 wreck of the British armed trawler Lord Snowden, lost in collision in the same general area. In turn the last resting place of the Lord Snowden has been reattributed from elsewhere, when the 1940 wreck of another WWII armed trawler, the Comet, was positively identified by her bell, having previously been believed to be Lord Snowden.

The Cieszyn also lives on in literature. As the fictional Bielsk, the Polish novelist Arkady Fiedler, who spent the war years in London, paid tribute to the Cieszyn and other wartime Polish ships in his book Dziękuję ci Kapitanie (Thank you, Captain!) For a picture of her, please see: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:SS_Cieszyn_POL.jpg

The Polish wrecks in English waters are thus tangible reminders of the shifting alliances in Europe in times of war and peace.

See also a recent post on the Raphael of Gdansk here.

No.46 The Ark

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In this week’s edition I’d like to have a look at the Ark: no, not Noah’s, though it seems that we might emulate his example if the recent weather continues!

The first Ark Royal, a name with a distinguished tradition in the Royal Navy, was built as Ark Raleigh for Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587. The date was ominous. She was purchased by the Crown as the clouds of war gathered, and became the Ark Royal, flagship of the English fleet that issued out of Plymouth in July 1588 in response to a threat spotted by a scout off the Lizard. At a much later date, Macaulay described the scene, evocatively but with more romance than accuracy:

It was about the lovely close of a warm summer day,

There came a gallant merchant-ship full sail to Plymouth Bay;

Her crew had seen Castile‘s black fleet beyond Aurigny’s* isle

At earliest twilight, on the waves lie heaving many a mile . . .

*Alderney

Ark Royal, then, was involved in events that have become the very stuff of history and legend intermingled, with names that ‘everyone knows’ from history. Ark Royal was where Howard of Effingham wrote his despatches as the English pursued the Armada up-Channel. The legend of Drake’s cool finishing of his game of bowls has been interpreted by several commentators as an acknowledgement that it would take some time to warp the fleet out of Plymouth against the flood tide. There was also the ‘Protestant Wind’ that scattered the Armada; and Queen Elizabeth’s speech of defiance at Tilbury the following month: I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king . . .

By a strange twist of fate, Tilbury, too, was where Ark Royal met her end in 1636, leading to an official enquiry. According to her master: ‘Soon after 8, the flood coming on, she floated again, and sheered in a whole cable’s length to the north of her anchor, where she was in four fathom and a half of water, not complaining any way, for aught he could perceive. Then she took ashore offwards to the south, and touched upon some bank . . . and presently they cried out in hold there was a great leakage, and whilst they were loosing the foresail and topsail to run her to the north shore, the ship suddenly overset to the larboard (port side).’ She was recovered by the summer of that year, but was so badly damaged that it was more profitable to sell her hull for £300 than to repair her for £5,000, so that she was broken up at Blackwall.

A career that included one of the most famous actions in maritime history ended up literally mired in controversy, as, while she lay in the mud and men hacked holes in her to get at their personal effects, their masters wrangled over who was to blame for her being ‘bilged on her own anchor’.

No.47 The Carl

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With the effects of the storms still with us, I have recently been processing quite a number of reports of shipwrecks uncovered by recent storm activity. The latest is the SV Carl, a German ship said to have been wrecked in Booby’s Bay within Constantine Bay, north Cornwall in 1917.

Images of the archaeological remains are stunning and certainly show the lower ribs and plates of a steel-hulled vessel which clearly stranded in this location in the inter-tidal zone (thus certainly not “sunk”!) As the sand cover has been scoured away, the wreckage has been exposed to a greater extent than recently. She was first charted by the Hydrographic Office in 2007.

An extensive gallery appears here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2567490/First-World-War-German-shipwreck-uncovered-storms-remote-Cornish-bay-century-sank-towed-Royal-Navy.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

But – and there’s always a ‘but’ – the history of the vessel herself is difficult to establish. If she is the SV Carl, she was impounded at the start of the First World War in Cardiff as an alien vessel. She then entered Admiralty ownership. Three years later, while under tow to be broken up in London, she struck the Cornish coast; when they attempted to re-attach the tow she simply broke her back.

This information comes from the Daily Mail report, which cites a letter to the local press  in 1966, from a gentleman citing his mother’s eyewitness testimony, thus within living, or recent, memory in 1966. An anecdote about a ‘wrecker’ coming face to face with the coastguard as published in Cornish Shipwrecks, Vol.2, Clive Carter, 1970, suggests that this also came via the oral history route as repetition of a contemporary rumour that she had been captured at sea involved in clandestine minelaying.

This last illustrates how secondary sources can break the chain of evidence connecting a wreck event to the site. The Carl has so far proved very elusive although her builder and date of build are said to be as follows: Ritson of Maryport, 1893. She did not appear in the Times reports of the Prize Courts in 1914, while from fairly early on in the war British newspapers were subject to censorship on shipping losses (as were American newspapers from 1917). As she was neither British, Allied, nor neutral, nor was she lost to war causes, she falls outside the scope of Lloyd’s War Losses for 1914-18; as a sailing vessel she similarly falls outside von Munching’s list of Allied, Neutral and Central Losses for 1914-18.

What seems clear is there exists a photograph annotated “The wreck of the Carl of Hamburg, Constantine Bay” http://www.wrecksite.eu/imgBrowser.aspx?15265 (full view available to wrecksite subscribers) in handwriting consistent with that era, which is complemented by a similar photograph from a different angle further to the landward in the Mail photo gallery; however, both are undated.

A sailing vessel named Carl, built at Maryport in 1893 and in Admiralty ownership, appeared in the Mercantile Navy List in 1920, and her register was closed in 1923. So what, exactly, is going on here? How can we fill in the gaps between 2007 and 1917? First-hand testimony from 1966 is a help, but it has come to us fourth-hand. Was this another ship? Do any local residents have any memories or remember stories from their forebears of the wreck event, or any subsequent sightings of the wreck? The identification as the Carl is clearly based on local knowledge, which tends by its very nature to be oral history, with all that implies for the potential for disappearance.

Can you help?

If she is indeed the Carl, then she may well prove to be another example of a ship lost while destined for the breakers: see also http://thewreckoftheweek.com/2013/06/28/28-a-tourist-attraction/

For another wreck which was revealed by storm damage last year, please see: http://heritagecalling.com/2013/08/13/uncovering-englands-shipwrecks/

No.45 The Raphael

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In this week’s instalment of our mini-series looking at wrecks and their associations with English Heritage properties, I’d like to have a look at the ‘right to wreck’.

In 1468, or perhaps a little earlier, the Raphael of ‘Dansk in Pruce’ (Gdansk in Prussia) was ‘imperilled at Bedebay [BudeBay] in the County of Cornwall, where it was perysshed upon the high sea, and out of the jurisdiction of every county’.

Wreckage washed ashore in Bude Bay near Poughill and was claimed not by a local manorial landowner, but by the servants and tenants of the Abbot of Cleeve in Somserset, citing a grant made to John, Abbot of Cleeve, of ‘wrekke de meere in all his demene londes and tenements in Poghwell and Trelasten in the Countie of Cornwall’ and to his ‘successors for evermore’.

The Abbot claimed the goods, addressing a letter to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, while John May of Bristol, merchant, launched a counter-claim. At issue was the fact that ‘Richard Herlok and Thomas Donne and other mariners of the said ship being in the same ship at the time of the perysshing thereof came to BudeBay aforesaid alive’. If anyone escaped alive from a wreck, then under medieval law it was *not* technically a wreck (regardless of the state it was in): upon such arcane arguments hung many medieval disputes over the right to wreck and salvage.

The outcome of this interesting link between two places so far apart on the Bristol Channel coast, Cleeve Abbey and Bude Bay, remains unknown – as is often the way with medieval wreck records – leaving us to imagine the sequel and to speculate whether any income from this or other wrecks helped to pay for the splendid contemporary late 15th century roof. 

Late 15th century refectory roof, Cleeve Abbey, Somerset, (c) English Heritage Photo Library
Late 15th century refectory roof, Cleeve Abbey, Somerset, (c) English Heritage Photo Library

No.44 The Dmitry

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As a result of a comment left on the Heritage Calling blog, I’ve been thinking about the relationships between EH properties and wrecks. Coastal properties come to mind: castles and religious sites on easily defensible headlands, overlooking the sea, sites of warning and succour in time of need, witnesses to battle and wreck alike. Here’s one example:

One day in 1885 a brigantine from Narva in modern-day Estonia, but called ‘Russian’ at the time, managed to make it safely into harbour during a ‘storm of great violence’ which battered the north-east coast. A ship had already been lost nearby, and the lifeboat was prepared in case she, too, should need assistance: ‘A little excitement prevailed among the thousands of people on shore, for it seemed certain that if the vessel was cast upon the rocks she would be immediately dashed to pieces and the crew drowned. The craft, however, steered straight for the port, and by good seamanship got into the harbour safely. She proved to be the Russian brigantine Dmirty‘. [sic] Another newspaper noted: ‘A cheer broke from the spectators on the pier when they saw her in safety.’

The following day the gale had abated: ‘The Russian vessel Dimitri [sic] which so gallantly entered the harbour on Saturday in spite of the terrible sea afterwards ran ashore in Collier’s Hope. It was supposed that she would be safe here, but on the rise of the tide yesterday morning, the seas beat over her with great force. Her masts fell with a terrific crash, and the crew were obliged to abandon her. She is now a complete wreck.’  

‘Collier’s Hope’, or Collier Hope, indicates the importance of the coal trade for local ships and others from further afield who called here en route for the Tyne in ballast. The Dmitry was also in ballast, with silver sand from Antwerp for Newcastle, suggesting she too was bound to the Tyne for coal.  

Does she sound vaguely familiar? Then read on!

Anyone at Whitby Abbey that morning would have seen the wreck down below at Collier Hope, in the lower harbour between Tat Hill Pier and the East Pier at the harbour entrance.  She must have been among the most memorable of the many wrecks at Whitby, her loss to a freak accident in apparent safety a shocking counterpoint to her safe arrival when all seemed lost. Here she is: http://www.sutcliffe-gallery.co.uk/photo_3182347.html

‘The sequel to the strange arrival of the derelict in the storm last night is almost more startling than the thing itself. It turns out that the schooner is a Russian from Varna, and is called the Demeter. She is almost entirely in ballast of silver sand . . . ‘ (Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897) 

Whitby Abbey, N080819, © English Heritage
Whitby Abbey, © English Heritage

No.43 The Vogelstruis

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An Ostrich with her Head in the Sand (or in the mud . . . )

Happy New Year!

To kick off another year of Wreck of the Week, here’s a ship which was captured, but not wrecked, at the Battle of Portland in 1653. She was the Vogelstruis, beautifully mangled in one English source as the ‘Fugelstrays‘!

The Vogelstruis was built for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1640. She had already made six return voyages for the VOC when she set out on her last adventure, as part of the Dutch escort for a large convoy of merchantmen homeward-bound through the Channel. The English lay in wait to intercept the convoy and thus began the Battle of Portland, or the Three Days’ Battle as it is also known, in February 1653.

In his despatches the Dutch commander Maarten Tromp* noted that it had been impossible to rescue the disabled Vogelstruis drifting ‘in amongst the English fleet . . .’ , who captured her and sent her for Portsmouth. She entered English service under a simple translation of her original name, to become the Estridge or ‘ostrich’, a name that was redolent of the faraway climes of her earlier VOC service.

If a ship could be named Ostrich, then contemporary poets such as Richard Lovelace likened the ostrich to a ship: Eastrich! Thou featherd Foole, and easie prey, That larger sailes to thy broad Vessell needst (Lucasta’s Fanne, 1649).

She was hulked in 1653 and is reported in one source as becoming a careening hulk, a support vessel in the ‘careening’ or heeling over of ships on the shore to be cleaned and repaired, an essential but time-consuming process in the age of sail. As warships aged and/or became obsolete, they would be successively downgraded, passing through a number of incarnations after leaving active service, a process of decay that sometimes ultimately led to wrecking by abandonment or through structural weakness in adverse conditions.

There was another fate, and a common one in the 17th and 18th centuries as the demands of the Royal Navy for facilities increased: to be sunk as harbour foundations or as breakwaters at principal ports. Such was the fate of the Estridge, given variously as at Portsmouth or at Sheerness, but in all sources for the same purpose, and at the same date, in 1679. The Augustine, also captured from the Dutch in 1653, became a foundation at Harwich in 1665, a fate shared by the Play Prize, ex. French Le Jeu[x] in 1697. Even as late as 1830 HMS Glatton was scuttled as a breakwater foundation, again revealing Harwich’s rich heritage of ‘recycled ships’.

*the banner photo is of the Admiral van Tromp, a modern wreck named after Admiral Maarten Harpertsz. Tromp.

No.42 The Bumper Christmas Edition

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The Annunciation: The Angel Gabriel from Heaven came . . .

The Engel Gabriel was a Dutch ship scuttled by the English at the Battle of Portland in 1653, during the First Anglo-Dutch War, and a name very much in tune with the times in the 17th century. Quite a few wrecks of the Anglo-Dutch wars bore names inspired by characters from the Bible, though such names were beginning to fall out of favour in the Protestant nations. We have an Angel Gabriel of unknown nationality which struck at Jury’s Gap in 1637 with a cargo of wine from Spain. You may also like to have a look at another Angel Gabriel, which was lost in a hurricane off the Maine coast in 1635.

The Annunciation to the Shepherds: The First Nowell that the Angel did say . . .

We have four wrecks in English waters called Noel, one of which was a French steamer which staggered from collision to collision off the Royal Sovereign Light Vessel in the English Channel, during a gale in 1897 which saw widespread casualties all over England. She ran first into a barque, which was at first feared to have gone down, but was later seen under tow with her bows ‘stove’. However, the Esparto steamer was not so lucky, and sank after being cut nearly in two. It took some time for the full story to emerge: the Noel‘s crew could not be rescued for a few days because they were ashore in a rather inaccessible location in the teeth of a howling gale, and could only communicate by signals from the master. In the meantime, the rest of the crew took shelter in the stern, the bows being ‘completely torn away, exposing the whole of the forepart of the ship, which is entirely submerged, having apparently settled over the bank’.

 . . . was to certain poor shepherds in the fields as they lay . . .

There is also a small flock (sorry!) of lost vessels named Shepherd, some probably for the surname. However, I particularly like the Shepherd and Shepherdess of 1766, which struck the Farne Islands: perhaps the name cashed in on the popularity of contemporary Arcadian subjects, for example, this Meissen couple from 1750.

O little town of Bethlehem . . .

The name Star of Bethlehem seems to have been current in fishing communities in the 1890s. Our first loss was a Grimsby trawler off Staithes in 1890, with three weeks’ worth of fish. I wonder if a local fisherman saw the name and was taken with it, since the next wreck, in 1892, was of the newly-built ship of the same name, operating out of Staithes, and also lost in that region. Finally, the last wreck to bear this name in English waters was a Scottish herring lugger from Banffshire in 1895, working the Great Yarmouth fishing grounds as so many Scottish fishermen did, up to the mid 20th century. Perhaps this last gives a clue as to why the name was popular: the crews followed the migratory herring as the shepherds and the wise men followed the star. Could anyone from a fishing community shed any light on this?

The Annunciation to the Magi: Star of the East, the horizon adorning . . . .

In the same way, a fishing vessel named Star of the East was run down by a steamer off the Eddystone in 1904, while returning from Newlyn to her home port of Lowestoft.

And finally . . . no Christmas would be complete without a nativity scene:

When the General Gascoyne struck the Burbo Bank off Liverpool, in 1837, inbound from Quebec and Montreal with deals, potash and passengers, she rapidly found herself in a perilous situation. Potash prices rose on the Liverpool markets with the loss of the ship and her cargo. This prosaic detail was rather overshadowed by what happened to the crew and human cargo who ‘were clinging to the poop and mizen rigging with a heavy sea breaking over them’ when the local tug Eleanor steamed to the rescue. Those on board either jumped off into the ship’s longboat or were taken off one by one by the Eleanor‘s crew, who boarded the ship at the risk of their own lives.

The accounts of what happened next are slightly conflicting: according to the Lancaster Gazette, a lady ‘far advanced in pregnancy’ promptly gave birth on board the Eleanor, suggesting the shock of shipwreck had brought on labour; according to the Times, she had been ‘only confined the previous day’, and was ‘rescued along with her infant’. Either way, this nativity was surely a miraculous rescue.

No.41: The Barbary Corsair

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Alarums and excursions:

In 1760-1 these news items appeared in the English press with a conflation of Turks and Algerians that was probably quite typical of the time.

‘London, October 2. An express has been received from Mount’s Bay, that between the 26th and 27th ult. an Algerine Chebeck, of 20 guns, and full of men, was driven ashore by a strong southerly wind, and entirely lost; 170 of the crew got on shore, which terribly affrighted the country people. It is 25 years since an Algerine cruizer was in any of our ports in England…’  (Newcastle Courant, 11.10.1760, No.4385, p1)

‘London, January 3. His Majesty’s frigate Bland is arrived at Falmouth, to convoy the Turks, which were stranded at Mount’s Bay, to Algiers.’ (Newcastle Courant, 10.01.1761, No.4398, p1)

Why were the local people so ‘terribly affrighted’? They clearly suspected the ship of being a Barbary Corsair, or Sallee Rover, from Salé in Morocco, privateers of the Mediterranean who sometimes ranged further north in feats of daring seamanship, since their lateen-rigged triangular sails were less suited to the rougher waters of the Atlantic. They were occasionally active in British waters in the 17th and 18th centuries, and ventured as far north as Iceland in 1627, when the Revd. Olafur Egilsson was captured – which was why people were so afraid. (A recent English translation of his travels and travails has been made available.)

A household name, albeit fictional, who also spent time as a ‘guest’ of the Sallee Rovers, was Robinson Crusoe!

As was the case where privateers of any nationality were concerned, it was not uncommon for ships to be ‘taken and retaken’, captured by an opposing force, then recaptured by their own, or to suffer serial capture, as the two following ships with some connection to Corsairs demonstrate.

The Fountain was captured from the Algerians in 1664 and taken into the service of the Royal Navy. She was intended to be used as a fireship but was prematurely set ablaze by a shot from the Dutch side at the Battle of Solebay in 1672.

Similarly, the Dutch fluyt Schiedam, one of our Designated wrecks, was wrecked in Jangye-Ryn Cove, Cornwall, after serial capture. Laden with a cargo of timber from Spain, she was captured in the Mediterranean in 1683 by Barbary Corsairs. She was then captured by the English under Sir Clowdisley Shovell (shipwreck seems to have hung around his career: he just missed being wrecked in 1703 in the Great Storm, before being finally lost with his fleet in the Association disaster off the Isles of Scilly in 1707), and despatched for Tangier to act as a transport for England, on which voyage she was finally lost.

No.40: Mahratta I

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Jute, Jam and Journalism

Following my call in a recent edition for ‘challenges’ I was asked to investigate what wrecks we might have in the jute trade for Dundee. So here’s the answer: Dundee was famous not only for jute, but for jam (well, marmalade!) and journalism, including those august publications, the Beano and the Dandy. So here are some jute ships which got into a jam, and I shall quote some journalism!

We have seven wrecks that were bound from Calcutta to Dundee with a cargo explicitly described as jute, or including jute, exactly half of our jute wrecks, as other consignments were bound for London and Liverpool. Some may have discharged their other cargoes from the East Indies in London, before sailing on to Dundee with the jute, as the Mahratta was intended to do (I shall talk more about her in a minute). Our earliest jute wreck, the clipper James Baines, was being unloaded in the Huskisson Dock in Liverpool in 1858 when she caught fire, a fate echoed by our last known jute wreck, the Falcon, in 1926. There was a certain inevitability about it: her cargo was jute and matches, a combustible combination if ever there was one.

The time span of the wrecks bound for Dundee with jute parallels that of the heyday of the jute trade, from the late 19th century to the early 1920s, by which time the industry was already in decline. The earliest Dundee-bound wreck was in 1884 on the coast of Northumberland, followed by the Bay of Panama, driven ashore in a snowstorm in 1891 along with three other ships nearby.

The most famous was the Mahratta I, which struck the Goodwin Sands in 1909, her fame heightened by the fact that her namesake, the Mahratta II, struck a mile to the north-east in 1939. Mahratta I shows a wide range of human response to shipwreck: she had a number of passengers on board, some of whom were phlegmatic, and some not. One woman refused to leave the ship until she absolutely had to, when the ship was beginning to break up, objecting to the Customs intending to enforce the quarantining of her pet dog even under the circumstances.

Sadly, after going aground on the Goodwins, the chief engineer committed suicide in his cabin, the sole casualty of this wreck, in which a 90-strong crew, the majority lascar sailors from India, and all the passengers, were saved. Likewise all the salvors, about 100 local boatmen pressed into saving as much of the cargo as possible, were themselves saved. As the salvage proceeded, the ship began to break up, and only 289 bales of jute were taken out of the wreck, out of a cargo of 10,000 tons that also included tea, coffee, rice, iron, gum, and rubber. Much of the jute is said to remain on board what is now a well scattered wreck.

One of the engineers provided a rational but vivid description of the ship’s disintegration, as reported in the Times of 12 April 1909:

‘The vessel was in charge of a Trinity pilot when she struck. Efforts were made to get her off under her own steam, but these failed, and tug services were accepted. Within a short time of the stranding water entered the liner and the main shaft was badly bent. The ship strained severely, and there was a continual grinding and snapping as plates sheered and buckled and heavy iron rivets broke away by dozens. The crew were put to work assisting the boatmen in salving the tea and throwing the jute overboard in order to lighten the vessel, but only about 200 tons had been got out when the Mahratta broke in two. Before this we had been working over our knees in water in the engine room. The ship parted with great suddenness at about 8 o’clock. The noise was like a cannon shot, followed by rending and tearing. The liner broke amidships, across the bunkers and the saloon. There was a great rush for the boats immediately by the labourers who had been assisting to jettison the cargo. One man was so scared that he caught hold of me round the body, and I had a difficulty to get clear from him.’

I hope that’s a good answer to the question, and please do keep coming with more!