Aguila (ship, 1909)
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The Aguila (I) was a 1909 passenger ship of the British shipping company Yeoward Line , which carried passengers and cargo between Great Britain , Portugal and Spain . On March 27, 1915, about a month after the declaration of unrestricted submarine war , the Aguila was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Wales . Eight people were killed.
The ship
The 2114 GRT passenger and cargo ship Aguila was built at the Caledon Shipbuilding & Engineering Company in Dundee , Scotland and was launched on May 6, 1909. Two months later the ship was completed. She was the first ship of the Yeoward Line to bear this name. The second Aguila entered service after losing the first in 1917.
The first Aguila was 83.94 meters long and 11.85 meters wide. It could carry 82 passengers in first class. The ship was equipped with a triple expansion steam engine from Lilybank Foundry, also based in Dundee, which propelled a single propeller and could deliver 278 nominal horsepower (NHP) and a speed of 14 knots. The test drives took place off Auchmithie on the Scottish coast. The maiden voyage took the Aguila from Dundee to the fjords of Norway.
The ship was built for the Liverpool-based shipping company Yeoward Line, founded in 1894 , which originally only imported fruit, but since 1900 has maintained regular passenger and freight traffic from Liverpool to Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands . The names of the ships in the Yeoward Line all began with an A. The funnel was black and had a red-edged yellow stripe with the letter Y.
Downfall
On Saturday, March 27, 1915, the Aguila was with 43 crew members and three passengers under the command of Captain Thomas Ross Bannerman on a crossing from Liverpool to Lisbon , Madeira and the Canary Islands .
At around 6 p.m., the steamer was sighted by the German submarine U 28 near the Smalls Lighthouse on the coast of the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire . The submarine was under the command of Kapitänleutnant Georg Günther Freiherr von Forstner . The Aguila quickly took up full speed, but was overtaken with a maximum of 14 knots by the up to 16 knots on the surface submarine. After a warning shot in front of the bow , the passenger ship stopped. The lifeboats were immediately launched , one of which capsized . Several people drowned as a result, including a passenger and the stewardess Martha Jenkins. The submarine also put the steamer under fire, which claimed other victims, including the chief machinist William Edwards and other crew members.
A total of 20 volleys were fired at the Aguila before U 28 fired a torpedo into the side of the ship. The Aguila broke in two and sank about 47 nautical miles southwest of the Smalls Lighthouse. A total of eight people were killed in the attack. The survivors, including Captain Bannerman, were brought ashore by the steamer St. Stephen and the trawler Ottilie in Fishguard and Milford Haven, respectively .
The sinking of the Aguila occurred only a few weeks after the declaration of "unrestricted submarine war " on February 22, 1915. The following day, U 28 sank the British passenger steamer Falaba in the same area . In this case, there were many more fatalities (104), including the first American to be killed in enemy action in World War I. This led to tension between the USA and the German Empire . The ship's command of the Falaba had not been informed of the sinking of the Aguila the day before.
Web links
- Entry in the wreck database
- Entry in the submarine database
- Construction plans of the ship and description of the sinking
- Information on the Aguila in a list of ship losses (p. 13, bottom left)
- The Aguila in a listing of British Merchant Navy ship losses in World War I.
- Heritage of Wales News, March 27, 1915