Famous Shipping Disasters: The torpedoing of the "Carpathia" (1918)

Famous for rescuing the survivors of the Titanic disaster in 1912, the 8,000-ton Carpathia was one of the smaller members of the vast Cunard fleet. Over the course of her career, which began in 1903, nine years before she became famous because of the Titanic, the Carpathia had operated the route between Liverpool and Boston, undertaken cruises to the Mediterranean and sailed between New York and the Austro-Hungarian city of Fiume. 

In 1914, she was requisitioned for the Imperial war effort and assigned to help the Canadian Expeditionary Force move Canadian troops across the Atlantic to the Western Front. As with most requisitioned passenger ships, her voyage routes and purposes were often changed and she served in a variety of functions between 1914 and 1918. One of the troops she brought over for active service was the American soldier, Frank Buckles, a native of Missouri who went on to become the last living American veteran of the First World War; dying at the age of 110 in 2011.

On 17th July 1918, a date that was to become famous in European history for another event entirely, the Carpathia was sailing through the Celtic Sea, near the southern coast of Ireland, en route for Boston. The recent influx of American service personnel, some of whom the Carpathia had helped bring over, had hastened the defeat of the Central Powers and the Great War was now in its final months. But, at 9:15 in the morning, the Imperial German Navy showed that it still had some teeth; its submarine, U-55, fired two torpedoes into the Carpathia's side. Five men died in the initial explosions. Captain William Prothero ordered everyone into the lifeboats, which were quickly lowered, as the ship began to sink. Keen to hasten the ship's end, the U-55 vindictively fired a third torpedo and was menacingly approaching the lifeboats when the Royal Navy ship, Snowdrop, arrived and opened fire.

It was a measure, perhaps, of just how appallingly vindictive the First World War had become that the U-55 seemed to be preparing to target the survivors. In 1915, when another Cunard ship, the Lusitania, had been torpedoed, the German navy had insisted that they would never have fired a second torpedo into a sinking ship. By 1918, such niceties had vanished and three had been fired, with the possibility of attacking the survivors in the lifeboats only being prevented by the arrival of a British warship. 

The Carpathia sank in one hour and forty-five minutes; its wreck was discovered by American author Clive Cussler in the year 2000. 

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Britannic" (1916)

When news reached Belfast in 1912 that the Titanic had sunk on her maiden voyage with such an enormous loss of life, the Harland & Wolff shipyards in the city were quick to learn lessons from the tragedy. When the findings of the American and then the British inquiries were published, numerous changes were made in the building of the Titanic's incomplete younger sister. Designed to be the third of three luxurious transatlantic liners for the White Star Line, most of east Belfast's workforce were still toiling away on building this ship when changes were made to prevent a repeat of what had happened with the Titanic. Both the Titanic and the first sister, Olympic, had been named after powerful figures in Greek mythology - the Olympic after the fictional gods of Mount Olympus and Titanic after the titans, a race of younger gods gifted with incredible strength. The third and largest of the three sisters was apparently originally intended to be named Gigantic, which had the same triumphalist air as the name Titanic. Desperate to put as much distance between their new ship and the disaster of 1912, White Star stealthily had the name changed to the more patriotic Britannic and then denied there had ever been any serious intention of christening her Gigantic.

Weighing in at 50,000 tons, the Britannic was the largest ship ever built in the British Isles at the time of her launch in 1914. She was four thousand tons heavier than her unlucky sister Titanic and five thousand heavier than her eldest sister, and future running mate, Olympic. Together, the two surviving sisters were intended to operate a weekly crossing of the north Atlantic - with one leaving from New York, at the same time another would leave from Southampton in England. Unlike her sisters, however, the Britannic was not the largest ship in the world at the time of her construction. That honour had already gone to a 52,000-ton German liner, the Imperator, and would soon go to her sister, the 54,000-ton Vaterland - which, like Britannic, was pandering to the ultra-patriotic environment of 1914. However, she was to remain the largest ship built on British soil until the Queen Mary in 1936 - quite the achievement for Harland & Wolff.

Britannic took to the water in Belfast for the first time on 26th February 1914. Some of the proposed changes included extending the watertight bulkhead divisions, making it easier for steerage class passengers to reach the lifeboats and nearly quadrupling the number of lifeboats. There were also more cosmetic alterations, including expanding the ship's famous grand staircase, its first class Louis XVI restaurant, adding a Parisian coffee house like the one the Titanic had and making various expansions to the top private suites in first class.

However, the Britannic was destined never to see commercial service and when the First World War came in August 1914, the new ship was hastily converted into a hospital ship on the government's orders. Now formally serving as His Majesty's Hospital Ship Britannic, HMHS Britannic's first tour of duty involved her evacuating the numerous British and Commonwealth casualties from the military campaign in the Dardanelles, against the Ottoman Empire. 

After safely depositing thousands of invalids in Greece, the Britannic was returning to collect more soldiers, under the command of Captain Bartlett and with a combined crew and medical staff of just over one thousand people on-board. There had been some trouble with the weather earlier in the week, but by the morning of 26th November 1916, the Britannic was steaming through a glorious Mediterranean winter's morning. At about twenty minutes past eight, a massive explosion shook the liner. The ship had struck a German mine and soon began listing rapidly on her side. None of her new safety features, designed to protect her from the kind of natural disaster which had destroyed her sister, could feasibly cope with the technological attack from a military mine. 

Captain Bartlett's response was rapid and within ten minutes, the first lifeboats were leaving the Britannic. In a truly horrifying moment however, the Captain's tactical decision to try and race the ship closer to the shallows and thus run her aground to save her, meant that one lifeboat was torn to pieces by the still-turning propellers. Fifty-five minutes after being struck, the Britannic suddenly turned over on her side and vanished into the crystal blue waters. One of the nurses, Violet Jessop, who had once served as a stewardess on the Titanic, later wrote, "She dipped her head a little, then a little lower and still lower. All the deck machinery fell into the sea like a child's toys. Then she took a fearful plunge, her stern rearing hundreds of feet into the air until with a final roar, she disappeared into the depths, the noise of her going resounding through the water with undreamt-of violence...."

Had the Britannic hit the mine on her way back from her mission, when she was filled with injured soldiers, it's likely that her sinking would have constituted one of the worst humanitarian disasters in maritime history. As it was, the disaster cost "only" thirty lives. The survivors were soon picked up by the British Royal Navy and conspiracy theories later circulated that the ship had been deliberately targeted by either a German spy or a German torpedo. However, given the scale of the damage inflicted on the wreck, it seems clear that it was a mine which sank the Britannic.

After the war, White Star Line were rewarded for their service to the British war effort and for the loss of the Britannic. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to reimburse Britain for her lost liners. The 56,000-ton Bismarck, then the largest liner in the world, was given to White Star and renamed Majestic (below.) She became the flagship of the White Star Line and the largest passenger ship in the world for over a decade, until the French Line's Normandie was designed by a former Tsarist naval architect in 1935.

Today, the Britannic lies on her side at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Her wreck was discovered by the famous oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in 1976. All that remains on dry land of her fabulous interiors, which were never completed or installed because of the war, is the lavish philharmonic organ that was intended to add a 'Baroque' feel to her grand staircase. It is on display at the Swiss National Museum in Seewen. 

The sinking of the "Príncipe de Asturias"

The Príncipe de Asturias was built in Scotland in 1912 and, along with her sister ship the Infanta Isabel, she was one of the largest ships in the Spanish merchant fleet. Spain's commercial shipping did not rival Britain's or Germany's in size at the time and the Príncipe de Asturias (named after the title traditionally given to the heirs to the Spanish throne) weighed 8,400-tons, with room for 1800 passengers. 

Spain under King Alfonso XIII stayed neutral during the First World War. There seemed no obvious territorial or commercial benefit to embroiling herself in the conflict, furthermore she had no major long-standing alliance with any of the combatants. The Royal Family itself was divided on the issue - King Alfonso's mother, the 'tall, fair and sensible' Maria-Christina, was an Austrian archduchess by birth; his wife, Queen Victoria-Eugenie (often known as Ena), was a British princess, the cousin of King George V, but she was also Kaiser Wilhelm II's cousin and had a host of German relatives. Furthermore, public opinion in Spain was divided between the Allies and the Central Powers. 

With Spain officially neutral and King Alfonso's government acting alongside Sweden and Switzerland as a diplomatic conduit for many official negotiations between the warring powers, commercial life continued much as before in the Iberian kingdom. In 1916, the Príncipe de Asturias was re-assigned to operate the route between Barcelona and Buenos Aires. On a return visit in March 1916, the ship was sailing off the coast of Brazil in a dense fog, when she ran aground of a partially submerged sandback near the city of São Sebastião. The captain attempted to turn the ship towards the nearby port of Santos, but the damage sustained was too extensive. Tragically, the Príncipe de Asturias sank shortly before sunrise on 5th March, 1916, with the loss of 445 lives. 

Famous Shipping Disasters: The attack on the "Lusitania" (1915)

Although she is less famous than her equally-unlucky rival the Titanic, it's arguable that the Lusitania's actual impact on history was far greater. When she first entered service for the Cunard Line in 1907, the 32,000-ton flagship was instantly hailed in the British press as recapturing that all-important national maritime pride in the commercial race for transatlantic dominance with Imperial Germany. Since 1897, German companies like Northern German Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika had garnered most of the international prestige with their series of patriotically-named superships. With the Lusitania and her slightly larger, slightly faster and slightly younger sister-ship, Mauretania, Britannia was fighting back. The Cunard sisters were nearly twice again as large as any of their rivals and both easily out-paced their German competitors when it came to speed. At the end of 1907, the Mauretania won the Blue Riband, the coveted prize for the fastest crossing of the North Atlantic, which she quite incredibly managed to keep until 1929. With room for 2,200 passengers in three classes, the Lusitania was praised for the opulence and comfort of her interiors (below), as well as for her speed, safety and commercial success.

But the Lusitania's ultimate historical importance arrived eight years later when she once again became a symbol for the rivalry between the British Empire and Germany. This time, the rivalry had turned into a bloody conflict and as the First World War raged, more and more of Britain's commercial fleet was requisitioned by the Royal Navy. A drop in passenger numbers meant that Lusitania's two running mates, Mauretania and Cunard's new flagship, Aquitania, were voluntarily removed from service and laid-up in Liverpool. (Both were called up for service as troop carriers and hospital ships once the Gallipoli campaign against the Ottoman Empire began.) By the spring of 1915, the Lusitania was the only major luxury liner still operating the route from New York to England. 

The Imperial German embassy in America suspected that she was being used to transport munitions from British sympathisers in the United States. Furthermore, the government in Berlin had recently declared that any ships, commercial or military, attempting to bypass the German blockade of Britain would be legitimate targets for German submariners. Heedless of these warnings, or perhaps ignorant of them, the Lusitania set sail from New York from Pier 54 on May 1st, 1915. Six days later, off the Old Head of Kinsale in Ireland, she was struck by a German torpedo at 2.10 p.m. Passengers, finishing dessert in the first-class dining saloon, felt an enormous jolt rock the ship and from the periscope of the U-20, the German captain, Captain Schweiger, heard a second explosion, which he initially assumed to be an exploding boiler or coal powder.

The sinking of the Lusitania was quick, chaotic and hideous. The 32,000-ton steamer sank in only eighteen minutes, tipping hundreds into the beautiful but freezing Irish waters. The ship pitched so violently to one side that half the lifeboats could not be launched; power-cuts and the speed of the sinking meant that dozens of passengers were trapped inside the ship's elevators and drowned like caged animals; lifeboats fell and crushed survivors fleeing in ones below; children were separated from their parents in the chaos and dozens were killed by miniature explosions, scalding water and deck equipment. Residents in the nearby Irish port of Queenstown later said that the dozens of children's bodies in their little coffins in the town's streets was a sight they would never forget.

Since the day of the Lusitania's sinking, controversy has raged about what caused the second explosion and the actions of the respective British and German governments. In the United States at the time, there was no doubt that Germany was to blame. American public opinion was inflamed by the deaths of so many American civilians and Captain Schweiger was painted as a war criminal for refusing to give the Lusitania time to disembark her civilian passengers before firing. Britain, unsurprisingly, concluded that the sinking had been "the illegal act of the Imperial German government" and insisted the second explosion had been caused by Schweiger vindictively firing a second torpedo into the ship's side. Germany, and later conspiracy theorists, insisted the second explosion was Britain and America's fault, because they had been trading munitions and it was those munitions which exploded on impact, causing the Lusitania to sink in such record time.

It seems that the Lusitania was carrying arms - shells and cartridges - but she had been carrying those in trade even before the war began. It is doubtful that American port authorities would ever have allowed a commercial vessel to load significant amounts of military hardware, particularly at such a delicate time. In hindsight, the second explosion, which helped pitch the Lusitania onto her side as she sank, was almost certainly caused by the first torpedo igniting either a boiler fire or a coal dust explosion. The British version of events, which claimed there had been a second German torpedo, and the German version of events, which claimed the Lusitania had been little more than a military cargo ship with a civilian shield, were both almost certainly incorrect and self-serving. At the time, Germany's reputation in the United States was irreparably damaged and Germany's two principal allies, Imperial Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, both distanced themselves from the sinking and refused to condone it.

The United States entered the war on the Allied side in 1917.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The scuttling of the "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" (1914)

Named after the first emperor of a united Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse ("Emperor William the Great") first entered service for the North German Lloyd shipping line in May 1897, operating the transatlantic route from Bremerhaven to New York, via Southampton. She was the first liner to use the soon-to-be-iconic four funnels and media attention focused on her speed, size and the neo-Baroque opulence of her first class interiors, which were soon nicknamed the Luxe Germanica style of decoration (below). She was a huge hit with wealthy German and American travellers, whilst her steerage quarters were regularly fully booked by immigrants moving to the United States. On her first voyage, she captured the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the North Atlantic, much to the consternation and shock of the British who still firmly believed that Britannia alone should rule the waves. Commercially, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was successful enough to spawn three sister ships and running-mates, all named after members of the Imperial Family - the current Emperor Wilhelm II, the Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife, Crown Princess Cecilia. They were nicknamed "the Four Flyers."

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the liner was requisitioned by the German navy as an auxiliary cruiser. Her captain, Captain Reymann, sank three British ships, but only after offering their crew the chance to evacuate. Running low on fuel, the ship set sail for the Spanish north African colony of Rio de Oro, where she was intercepted by the British warship, HMS Highflyer. A battle ensued, with the Kaiser running out of ammunition half-way through. Determined not to let the ship fall into enemy hands, Captain Reymann ordered the evacuation of the Kaiser and then had the remaining crew members detonate an enormous hole in the ship's side. Scuttling, the nautical form of suicide, thus ensured the Kaiser sank rather than fall into British hands. Captain Reymann swam ashore and worked his way back to Germany as a stoker on a Spanish passenger ship.

The Kaiser's demise so early in the war and the fact that it had been refuelling which left her vulnerable to enemy attack made both sides change their plans about converting ocean liners into auxiliary cruises. From that point on, they were more often converted into troop carriers or hospital ships.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Empress of Ireland" (1914)

Despite being the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history, the 1914 sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the icy Saint Lawrence River has attracted relatively little subsequent historical attention, particularly in comparison to the interest still shown in the Titanic and Lusitania disasters. A 14,000-ton liner for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, the vessel operated the transatlantic routes between Liverpool and Quebec City. Built in Scotland in 1906, she was noted for her speed and for the comfort and elegance of her interiors (below.)

The Empress of Ireland disaster, which claimed 1,012 lives, occurred as the ship was starting out for one of her routine voyages to England. Sailing in thick fog, she collided with a Norwegian cargo ship, the SS Storstad. Within minutes of the collision, the Empress of Ireland had listed so far to starboard that it became impossible for the crew to launch half of her available lifeboats. Minutes later, there was a sudden lurch and then the ship stopped moving, leading many on-board to mistakenly believe that, mercifully, she had run aground. Fourteen minutes after the collision, the Empress of Ireland tipped over into the water and disappeared from sight, hurling hundreds of people into the freezing river water. Perhaps one of the most tragic facts reported in the British and Canadian newspapers at the time was that of the 138 children on-board at the time, only four survived the disaster. Among the survivors was the sailor "Lucky" Frank Tower, who had survived the Titanic disaster and went on to serve and survive the Lusitania, as well.

Since 1914, the Empress of Ireland has continued to claim lives, with several hardcore diving enthusiasts dying on expeditions to its murky wreck. In 2005, a Canadian documentary resurrected the theory that although most of the blame at the time fell on the Norwegian crew of the Storstad, the Empress of Ireland's captain, Henry Kendall, may have been partly to blame for the disaster by attempting to overtake the Storstad and that modern-day examinations of the wreck indicate that the ship's watertight doors had not been closed, as claimed - thus explaining the rapid speed of the sinking.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Titanic" (1912)

With the centenary approaching, the Titanic is once again big news, particularly in Belfast, where a host of festivities are being designed to mark the opening of the world's largest (and long-overdue) Titanic visitors' attraction. Built in Harland & Wolff as the second of three sister ships for the White Star Line, the Titanic is today probably the most famous ship in history - eclipsing Noah's Ark and Cleopatra's Barge. With several Hollywood blockbusters and television movies made (the most accurate is the brilliant 1958 A Night to Remember) and the discovery of its broken, eerie and rotting wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic in 1985, the Titanic shows little sign of diminishing its hold over the world's imagination.

Much of what happened, or is supposed to have happened, on board the Titanic as she sank has achieved the status of twentieth-century legend - the boasts that she was "unsinkable" (grossly exaggerated and never made by the White Star Line itself), its luxurious first class accommodation, its undiminished speed as it entered the ice field, the bravery of the band as it continued playing throughout the sinking, the insufficient numbers of lifeboats, "Women and Children" first, the high casualty levels in Steerage and the tragic loss of life.

At the time, however, the Titanic did not garner nearly so much media attention as her elder sister ship, the Olympic, which went into service in May 1911, eleven months before Titanic. Titanic's maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10th 1912 did not quite have the same fanfare as Olympic's, but five days later when news broke that the vessel's inaugural trip had ended in the worst maritime disaster, to date, the Titanic shot into her place in popular culture and never left it. Her very name is still synonymous with disaster.

For a more in-depth post on the sinking of the Titanic, click here. This blog has also posted about life in the ship's first, second and third-class accommodation.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The Loss of the "Republic" (1909)

This month, there was the tragic news of the sinking of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia, after it ran aground off the Isola del Giglio. Costa Concordia was, to date, the largest ship built on Italian soil and, at the time of writing, the sinking has claimed sixteen confirmed lives, so far.

The Costa Concordia's sinking is one of the first maritime losses of a luxury liner in the twenty-first century. Over the next few days, I'll take a brief look at some of the previous century's most famous disasters at sea.

The sinking of the RMS Republic (1909)

Ironically, given its name, the White Star liner Republic was actually built in Ulster, the most vociferously monarchist of the four provinces of Ireland. At the time, Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyards were the largest and the best in the world; the east Belfast workforce produced ships for companies all over the globe, but their closest working relationship was with the British firm, White Star Line, one of the main British commercial bodies operating the lucrative transatlantic trade. Built in Belfast in 1903, she was originally christened Columbus and sailed under the livery of the Dominion Line, a sister-company of White Star's, before being transferred to the White Star and re-named, after only two voyages. Although Republic was praised in shipbuilding industry journals at the time for the comfort offered onboard, she was originally built with an eye to incorporating all of the latest safety techniques. In 1909, six years into her commercial life, these features were put to the test when Republic departed New York for the British colony at Gibraltar, and other Mediterannean ports. In thick fog, she was hit by the Italian liner Florida. Two of the Republic's passengers were killed on impact, as they slept in their cabins, and three of the Florida's crew men also died. Part of the rescue was carried out by the Florida and the U.S. coastguard's Gresham; the passengers were then transferred back to New York by another White Star steamer, the Baltic. In many ways, the tragedy of the Republic ironically gave the shipping industry, and White Star in particular, a false sense of security. The Republic took a full thirty-nine hours to sink. At nearly 16,000 tons, Republic was the largest ship to be lost to the sea, at that point in history. The slow speed at which she sank, the effectiveness of Marconi in securing multiple rescue ships and the low loss of life all helped persuade many industry insiders, like Captain E.J. Smith, that terrible, swift maritime disasters were a thing of the past - a view which the tragedy of the Titanic would brutally dispel three years later. Today, the Republic is most well-known for the rumour that at the time of her sinking, she was carrying $3 million in coins for the Imperial government of Russia. If that were true, the coins, if still onboard, could be worth nearly $5 billion in 2012. However, if these stories are true, to my mind, it's improbable that they would not have been evacuated along with all of Republic's passengers and crews during the lengthy rescue operation.