The Shipwreck Archives

“It will scarcely be believed that the island, which is a British dependency, is absolutely unlighted…Some seven years since I was speaking on the subject to Captain Conlan, then of the Orient Company’s ship Orizaba, who said ‘there will never be a light on Socotra until a P and O ship is wrecked there,’” opinion piece written to the London Times, 1897. Captain Conlan proved to be incorrect, the w...

“The spirit of emigration to British America has not been stronger, or more extensively prevalent, in this part of the country, for several years back, than at the present. Messrs Lyle’s large and commodious ship, the Newry, is just on the eve of leaving port, with a full complement of passengers, for Quebec…” -the Newry Telegraph quoted by the Richmond Enquirer June 8th, 1830. Though the passenge...

The Kathleen looked as though she was a relic of New Bedford’s industrial whaling past when she was anchored at her home port. The whaling industry, which had seen New Bedford become the wealthiest city in the United States, was slowly becoming a thing of the past, but the wooden bark Kathleen was also a thing of the past. Originally built in 1844, although she had originally been built as a merch...

“The Union Steamship Company boat Kawatiri…very narrowly escaped being wrecked when entering Macquarie Harbor yesterday morning. The steamer crossed the bar in safety and was passing between the lighthouse and the mainland through the narrow strait known as Hell Gate when her machinery broke down injuring the shafting. The steamer struck Lighthouse Rock with her prow and fell back on the mainland,...

 The four-masted American schooner the Cornelius Hargrave was only a little over a year old, having been launched in September of 1889 as a collier coal ship. She sailed under the command of her owner, Captain John Allen, but her short career had not been without incident. On her very first voyage, she collided with a capsized vessel near Cape Henry and was forced to put into Norfolk and land some...

With the sinking of the Titanic, attention was turned to how passenger ships could be safer. It brought to mind past disasters, including a ship that had also sailed under a British flag. Its name appeared beside the names of La Bourgogne, the General Slocum, and the Princess Alice, as one of the worst shipping disasters ever, though many of the papers disagreed on the spelling of the ship’s name....

For the Wireless Age, a magazine dedicated to the wonders of the invention of Marconi, there could be no greater testimony to the virtues of the wireless in February 1916 than the story of the SS Thessaloniki. “How the Art Was Employed to Keep Other Craft in Touch with a Ship That Was Saved, Lost, Found and Finally Abandoned. The Devotion to Duty of Three Marconi Operators in Time of Stress and th...

“We must congratulate Messrs James Baines and Co in having such a gentleman as Captain Forbes to command this clipper. If it possibly can be done, Captain Forbes will, with his gallant craft put an end to all the croakings about the inability of clipper ships to compete with steamers to Australia.” -The Liverpool Journal September 22, 1855. In less than half a year from the writing of the piece th...

“The Rothesay Castle steamboat on her homeward passage from Inverary with 50 to 90 people on board struck on a sunk rock…and immediately filled with water. Most fortunately a number of fishing boats were in the vicinity of her at the time, and about 30 of them having got promptly alongside, rescued the passengers from their perilous situation. One of them in the confusion swamped, but those on boa...

It was said that it was the smallest number of passengers the Algoma had ever carried. It was supposed that she only had seven cabin passengers and six steerage passengers, the remaining 49 people were all members of the crew, though the numbers are debated. It had been a slow season for the ship, there was now a rail route around lake superior, and smallpox was hitting the region hard. Now that t...

On October 27th, 1881 Droogleever Fortuyn, First Officer of the Koning der Nedernlanden, sat down to write a report to the owners of the ship that he had been recently in command of. “Gentlemen, the Telegram from Aden has acquainted you with the lamentable accident which resulted in the loss of the good ship Koning der Nederlanden, and now I hasten to relate some details of the catastrophe. His le...

Sometimes the MV Monte is compared to the Titanic. A newer ship, full of the rich elites of Germany, crashed into an iceberg. An SOS was sent out. That is where the similarities end, however. The SOS was a success, no lives were lost, and the ship was saved, only to wreck a year and a half later and become a total loss. Ship Name: MV Monte Cervantes  Nationality: German  Year Built: 1928 Ship type...

“Seamen of the Proserpine, your conduct has been such as to merit the thanks of the court with that of your country and I trust that the example shown by you, for good order and obedience to command, in times of great difficulty and danger, will be held forth as worthy of imitation by all the seamen of his majesty’s fleet.” So ended the court-martial for the loss of the Proserpine. The events that...

The Larchmont of the Joy Line, with a route between New York and Rhode Island, was not a ship that was considered lucky. Her life seemed to be a series of incidents, each of which could have abruptly ended her career. Her twenty-six-year-old captain also could be considered to have a streak of bad luck. He had been a pilot on the Joy Line’s ship the Tremont when she had burned, becoming a total lo...

The second officer of the Ly-ee-moon stated that in the four months that he had been with the ship had not seen any charts. He had mentioned this to the third officer, Fotheringham, he did not think it was his duty to ask for a chart, that a captain should offer them. Captain Webber kept the charts in his cabin though and the chart was never in the wheelhouse. The officers simply steered according...

The Chusan ran into difficulty almost as soon as leaving the river Clyde, bound for Shanghai. She was taking on water due to what was suspected by those on board to be due to a flaw in her riveting, and while in the St George’s Channel one of her paddle-wheels was also damaged. They stopped in Waterford for repairs, but Captain Johnson was still not satisfied. He turned around, having decided the...

The Victoria was no stranger to holiday crowds and on Victoria Day, May 24, 1881, many people had traveled between Springbank Park and the city of London Ontario up and down the Thames river. The river was notoriously shallow, enough that people would joke about boats traveling up and down it grounding on oyster cans, but a grounding was exactly what had happened to the Forest City, meaning that i...

Almost as soon as the General Chanzy had left Marseille she had been battered by a terrible storm, later described as one of the worst to hit the Mediterranean in forty years. Her captain, Captain Cayol, considered one of the most careful and steady captains that could be had, struggled to reassure his passengers as they headed to their berths for the night. They would awaken to disaster.  Ship Na...

The sixteen men who set sail from Ishinomaki, Japan on November 27th 1793 were far from worldly men. Since 1639 Japan had forbidden its citizens from traveling abroad and the furthest that the crew of the Wakamiya Maru intended to go on this voyage was Edo. There was nothing to tell them as they departed that four of were going to be the first people from Japan to ever circumnavigate the world.  S...

For most people the thick fog that enveloped part of the United Kingdom in early March of 1902 was a matter of inconvenience. It covered the Irish Channel, Holyhead, Southampton, and London. In London people found that traveling by any sort of vehicle was impossible and they could only fumble their way home on foot. For ships in the harbors it meant delays, passengers stuck in ports and mail not g...

It happens, no doubt, that from Bristol you’ve crossed in a casual way,And have sailed your yacht in the summer in the blue of Swansea Bay. Well! it isn’t like that in the winter, when the lighthouse stands alone,In the teeth of Atlantic breakers that foam on its face of stone;It wasn’t like that when the hurricane blew, and the storm-bell tolled,or whenThere was news of a wreck, and the lifeboat...

Things had been tense between the British and Majeerteen Sultanate before the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, but with the opening of the Canal, things only got worse between the two. Other European nations also began to make themselves known in the region, and Majeerteen Ports suddenly had steamers from all over the world passing by. With this came shipwrecks, and every wreck seemed to sour relati...

The editor of the Albany Mail could not deny that the passenger’s account of the wreck of the Indus, as originally published in the Times of Ceylon, would be of interest to his readers, but the statements made in it were full of frustration and allegations made against Captain Breeze that the editor put in an unusual disclaimer for 1885 ahead of the article. “We are not, of course, responsible for...

Cannon Rocks South Africa is said to have taken its name from two cannons that have been found along the stretch of beach it lays on. Both cannons are obviously the result of shipwrecks. It is supposed that at least one of these cannons most likely came from the wreck of the Portuguese ship, the Sao Joao Baptista. The ever shifting sands in the area show and then hide hints of the 1600s ship, but...

The Sausalito and the San Rafael were like old friends. They were both built in New York and then shipped in pieces to San Francisco to serve as ferries between Sausalito and San Francisco for the North Pacific Coast Railroad. Since the San Rafael had departed San Francisco, the Sausalito should have also departed Sausalito headed to San Francisco around the same time. Captain McKenzie of the San...