Aorangi (ship, 1925)
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The Aorangi (II) was a 1925 passenger ship of the New Zealand shipping company Union Steam Ship Company , which was used in passenger and mail traffic from Canada to New Zealand and Australia . When it was commissioned, it was the largest and fastest motor ship in the world. She was also the largest ship that the Union Steam Ship Company had built during its entire existence. During the Second World War she served as a troop transport and later as a barge .
The ship
The 17,491 GRT motor ship Aorangi was laid down in 1922 at the Fairfield Shipbuilders shipyard in Govan near Glasgow and was launched there on June 17, 1924. The ship was christened by the wife of Sir Charles Holdsworth, a director of the shipping company. This ship, like its predecessor of the same name, the Aorangi (4196 BRT) from 1883, was named after the Aoraki / Mount Cook , the highest mountain in New Zealand. Also present at the christening ceremony were among others Sir Alexander Kennedy (1860-1939), the chairman of the Fairfield shipyard, the founder of the Union Steam Ship Company, Sir James Mills, the British military adviser ( Military Secretary ) Lieut. General Sir Douglas Brownrigg and members of the Sulzer family.
The second Aorangi , a 182.88 meter long and 22 meter wide passenger and cargo ship, had two funnels, two masts and four propellers . She was equipped with four Sulzer AG diesel engines, which enabled an average service speed of 17.3 knots. During the eight-day test drives in the Firth of Clyde , however, she reached a top speed of 18.53 knots on December 13, 1924. This characteristic and its structural size made her the fastest and largest merchant ship in the world at the time. Three days later the ship was handed over to its owners.
The Aorangi had 16 lifeboats equipped in gravity type had moored the McLaughlin brand. She was the first ship of the Union Steam Ship Company to be equipped with these cranes. The passenger capacities were 436 passengers in first, 284 in second and 227 in third class. Officers and crew consisted of about 230 people. The ship had eight luxury suites with their own bathrooms, all of which were furnished in different styles.
The first class dining room on the upper deck was Louis XVI style . designed and could accommodate 213 people. The public lounges of the first and second class were on the promenade deck , including the music salon, the Jacobean-style smoking salon, the veranda café, the kindergarten and the library . There was also a fitness room on the boat deck, right next to the radio room. The heart of life on board, however, was the two-storey first-class lounge in Georgian style with a large skylight directly between the chimneys.
On January 2, 1925, the ship ran under the command of Captain Robert Crawford (1872-1931) in Southampton on its maiden voyage to Vancouver . The ship crossed the Panama Canal and made stops in Los Angeles and San Francisco . On February 3, 1925, the Aorangi arrived in Vancouver, from where it left three days later for Wellington , Auckland and Sydney via Honolulu (Hawaii) and Suva (Fiji). In 1932 and 1938, the passenger accommodations were modernized and the maximum number of accommodations changed.
In 1931 the Aorangi was transferred to the Canadian Australasian Line, which arose from the collaboration between the Union Steam Ship Company and the Canadian Pacific Line .
War effort
The ship remained in regular service on the Canada-New Zealand route until it was temporarily used in October 1940 to bring New Zealand troops to the Fiji Islands. After that, the Aorangi was back in passenger service on its old route. In the summer of 1941 she was requested by the Ministry of War Transport (MoWT) and converted into a troop transport in England . It brought supply forces to Singapore , war refugees from there to Australia, undertook troop trips to India , the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and transported American and Canadian soldiers to Europe .
During the invasion of Normandy ( Operation Neptune ), the Aorangi served in the Solent as a supply and hospital ship for a fleet of around 150 tugs and auxiliary ships. She then served as the commanding ship of the British Pacific Fleet . After Japan surrendered in 1945, the Aorangi was used in Hong Kong as a barge for soldiers waiting to be repatriated .
After the end of the war, the Aorangi was returned to its owners and arrived on April 14, 1946 in Sydney, where it was completely overhauled. On September 16, 1948, she cast off for her first civilian voyage after World War II, but she no longer made a profit and suffered from constant union disputes. Thanks to subsidies from the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the ship was operated until June 1953. It was then sold to Scotland for demolition , where it arrived on July 25, 1953.