Bremerhaven (ship, 1906)
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The Bremerhaven was a German fish steamer that suffered a marine accident on March 14, 1906 in the North Sea while salvaging the wreck of the Norwegian barque Tamelane .
Technical specifications
Technical data are not known. The Bremerhaven , home port of Bremen , had the distinction signal QFRT.
the accident
On March 14, 1906 8:00 am sighted the Bremerhaven , which was on returning from a fishing trip in the North Sea some 35 nautical miles NNW½W from the lightship Weser a driving Bark, which gave the impression of an abandoned and helpless ship. There was a north-northwest wind with wind force 2 to 3.
The Bremerhaven reached the barque around 9:30 a.m. before two other ships were heading for the barque. Captain delete commissioned the helmsman Johann Kramer from Idafehn , together with the cook and two sailors , to examine the barque and to establish a towing connection in order to salvage the ship.
The rescue team crossed over in a rowboat and moored the stern of the barque. It turned out to be the Tamelane from Fredrikstad (Norway) floating on a load of ice, half full of water and leaking. The crew had left the ship.
During the search, Kramer found a bottle of rum or cognac and emptied it in no time. As a result, he was unable to oversee the rescue work; the cook and the two sailors did not understand anything about operating a sailing ship and were therefore unable to carry out the necessary sailing maneuvers. However, they succeeded in establishing a provisional towing connection to Bremerhaven while Kramer lay down in the boat attached to the stern of the Tamelane and slept, although the boat had meanwhile leaked from hitting the barque's hull .
When the three crew members of the Bremerhaven missed the helmsman, they looked for and found him in the meanwhile badly damaged boat and rescued him. The damaged boat could still be hoisted on board the fish steamer.
In the meantime, Captain Delete had been forced to cut off the towing connection to the barque, as the sails that were still standing had meanwhile luffed the wreckage and brought it into dangerous proximity to the towing fish steamer. Extinguishing was forced to order the return of the salvage crew because it was evening and it seemed too dangerous for the ship's crew to stay on board the wreck. The crew was then rescued from the wreck with a lifebuoy and a buoy line , whereby Kramer showed himself to be completely unable to participate in the rescue work.
The ruling of the Seeamt or Oberseeamt
The Bremerhaven Maritime Administration came to the conclusion in its ruling of May 10, 1906: “The whole incident presents a very sad picture of complete incompetence and neglect of duty on the part of a ship's officer, as one seldom experiences, in honor of the German sailors. The helmsman, quite apart from the fact that he showed no interest in rescuing a strange ship that was still seaworthy and in securing good earnings for his shipping company and his ship, completely disregarded any consideration for the crews entrusted to him, the people finally left in the lurch and thereby brought into a very dangerous situation. " (Spruch Seeamt Bremerhaven, p. 4.)
The Maritime Office therefore withdrew Kramer's 1905 certificate of proficiency for driving vessels in medium-sized deep-sea fishing . The office obviously wanted to set an example, as it suspected that the two ships Elisabeth and Aphrodite , whose cases had been negotiated shortly before, could be traced back to the ship's command of alcohol : “Whether this was the reason why some of them, with the entire crew, went missing Ships, must remain an open question. "
This decision was revised in the verdict of the imperial Ober-Seeamt in Berlin at the hearing of November 16, 1906, and Kramer left his testimony as his own statement was followed that he had drunk the alcohol only to warm up. There were no other complaints against Kramer; the Ober-Seeamt also did not want to see a marine casualty in the accident, since in their opinion the tow had not yet been made.
The accident in the context of floating wrecks
The wreck of the Tamelane sank a few days later when another fish steamer attempted to tow it.
The Maritime Administration had rightly called the Tamelane an obstacle to shipping. Her case was by no means an exception at the beginning of the 20th century. Sailing ships were often abandoned by their crew in emergencies at sea, but then often drifted for years, mostly on a load of wood, and posed an extraordinary danger to other sailing ships and small steamers, especially at night.
See also
literature
- Chapter: "Bremerhaven" fish steamer from Bremen. Damage to boats etc. Seeamt Bremerhaven, May 10, 1906. Ober-Seeamt, November 16, 1906 , in: Reichsamt des Interior (ed.): Decisions of the Ober-Seeamt and the Maritime Offices of the German Reich , Vol. 18, Hamburg 1910, p 1-10.
- Otto Krümmel: Bottle posts, drifting wrecks and other drift bodies in their importance for the revelation of ocean currents , Berlin 1908.