Albion (ship, 1863)
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The Albion was a German barque built in 1863 , which suffered a marine casualty off the Danish coast in the North Sea on July 3, 1903 , but was recovered by fishermen on the same day and brought to Esbjerg unharmed .
Marine casualty
The Albion , which came from Holland and had been based in Emden since the spring of 1903, left Emden on July 2, 1903 after a thorough repair and was heading for Trelleborg . Her load consisted of 430 tons of small coke . The ship was not insured. Captain Johannes Hagemann from Neuefehn had a 1/30 stake in the shipping company of the ship. The shipping company was not mentioned by name in the Maritime Administration .
The captain was not sober on the exit, and only a little later on deck. Navigation was therefore the responsibility of the helmsman Jan Lammers and the boatswain, Harm Gerdes Havermann, who took turns on watch.
Just before noon on July 3, Lammers took a set of utensils to locate the ship. As he feared that he had not aimed precisely at the sun due to the hazy air, he also calculated the ship's position based on the steered courses and distances covered. Accordingly, the ship had to be in close proximity to the Horns Reef - lightship , which, however, has not yet been sighted.
Around noon, two masts that were believed to be the masts of the lightship were sighted. At this point, the captain was again drunk and insane. When trying to approach the supposed lightship, the barque ran aground on the "Cancer", a shoal near Blåvandshuk . The crew panicked and, under the leadership of the boatswain, urged the helmsman Lammers to leave the ship immediately, although it was obviously not damaged. Lammers joined the crew's demand and finally persuaded the drunken captain to leave the ship with them. At 2.15 p.m. the ship was abandoned and the alleged Horns Reef lightship rowed towards, allegedly to request tug assistance for the Albion .
In fact, the masts sighted were not those of the lightship, but of a stranded cutter . As the Seeamt Emden stated in its hearing on October 3, 1903, this error could only have arisen because the English nautical chart of the Bay of Heligoland from 1900 on board , on which the lightships from Horns Riff and Vyl were recorded.
The Albion , however, came free again by itself at high tide and began to drift. The same afternoon it was found by fishermen, occupied and brought to Esbjerg in a watertight condition on the evening of July 3rd.
Saying of the maritime office
The Maritime Administration made serious allegations against Captain Hagemann, both in relation to his drunkenness and the fact that there was no sounding to determine the location of the ship. The latter charge was also made against the helmsman. However, he was credited with having relied on the much more experienced captain. On the other hand, it was criticized that he lost his head after the stranding and did not plumb and also did not vigorously oppose the crew's request to leave the ship. For Lammers, however, spoke that the captain had come on deck and was ultimately responsible for rescuing the ship.
The Maritime Administration decided to comply with the demands of the Reich Commissioner for the Maritime Offices in Brake and Emden and to withdraw the patent from Captain Hagemann , but to leave Lammers' patent.
The stranding of the Albion in the context of drifting sailing shipwrecks
The case of the Albion was, aside from the strange accompanying circumstances, in this case the drunkenness of the captain, by no means an exception at the beginning of the 20th century. Sailing ships were often abandoned by their crew, but then drifted, mostly on a cargo of wood, often for years at sea and represented an extraordinary danger for other sailing ships and small steamers.
The most famous wreck of this type was the Fanny Wilston , which was recognized 46 times in the North Atlantic from October 15, 1891 to October 21, 1894 and reported to the Hydrographic Institute of the US Navy . On this drift she had covered a distance of a good 8,000 nm or 15,000 km. After that, the wreck apparently sank. The US Navy therefore began more or less systematically from 1894 to track down such wrecks ( drifting derelicts ) in the North Atlantic and sink them using explosives or torpedoes . In particular, the dynamite cannon cruiser USS Vesuvius was used for this purpose.
literature
- Otto Krümmel: Bottle posts, drifting wrecks and other drift bodies in their importance for the revelation of ocean currents , Berlin 1908.
- Chapter: Ruling of the Seeamt in Emden from October 6, 1903, regarding the marine casualty of the barque "Albion" from Emden , in: Reichsamt des Innern (ed.): Decisions of the Ober-Seeamt and the Maritime Offices of the German Reich , Vol. Hamburg 1905, pp. 359-364.
Web links
- Report in the New York Times of November 13, 1904 about the danger of floating wrecks (registration required)
Footnotes
- ↑ So-called gisted cutlery, from English to guess = to appreciate.