Chaouia (ship)
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The Chaouia was a passenger ship put into service in 1896 , which initially belonged to a Dutch and from 1911 to the French shipping company Compagnie de Navigation Paquet based in Marseille . On January 16, 1919, the Chaouia ran into a sea mine in the Strait of Messina , which had been laid by a German submarine before the end of the war . The steamer sank in minutes, killing 476 of the 660 passengers and crew on board.
The ship
The 4,334 GRT steamship was built at the Koninklijke Maatschappij de Schelde shipyard in Vlissingen for the Dutch shipping company Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland and was launched on April 11, 1896 as Koningin Wilhelmina . The 116.4 meter long and 13.8 meter wide ship had two masts , two chimneys and a single propeller. The Koningin Wilhelmina was powered by a four-cylinder quadruple expansion steam engine that developed 3600 hp and allowed a speed of 13.5 knots.
The ship could carry 790 passengers in three classes and was built for passenger and cargo traffic from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies . In July 1896 the ship was completed and handed over to its owners.
In 1911 the Koningin Wilhelmina was bought by the Compagnie de Navigation Paquet, which had existed since 1863 and maintained routes to Morocco , the Canary Islands and, from 1908, to French West Africa . In January 1912 she was put into service under the name Chaouia for the new owners and from then on served the express route Marseille - Tangier - Casablanca . From 24 February 1915 served in the First World War as an auxiliary cruiser . On January 30, 1916, she was released from military service and was used again as a passenger ship.
Downfall
On January 13, 1919, the Chaouia ran under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Calviès in Marseille for a crossing to Piraeus and Constantinople . There were 660 passengers and crew on board. The travelers included many Greek soldiers, but also civilians, including women and children, as well as diplomats, missionaries and journalists from the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle . Most of the civilian passengers were French, but there were also a few Russians, British and US Americans among them. In the late evening of January 15th, the ship passed the Stromboli .
At midnight on January 16, the Chaouia was shaken by a violent explosion on the port side . She ran into a mine in the Strait of Messina, which had been laid on October 3, 1918 by the German submarine UC 53 (Kapitänleutnant Erich Gerth). The vessel was immediately a list of 30 degrees to port and dropped in three to four minutes (position 38 ° 18 ' N , 15 ° 41' O ). There were only 184 survivors (53 crew members and 131 passengers). Most of the survivors were picked up by the British steamer Daghestan (Captain John McFarlane) of the Rome Steam Shipping Company. 476 people were killed. The Daghestan arrived with the survivors in Messina around 8 a.m. on January 16 , where numerous survivors were hospitalized because of serious injuries.