Germany (ship, 1866)
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The Deutschland was a steam sailor owned by Norddeutscher Lloyd that was shipwrecked off the English coast on December 6, 1875 .
technology
The ship was built in Greenock in 1866 at the Caird & Company shipyard and was 106 meters long and 12 meters wide. A classic sails and a steam engine with 600 nhp (nominal horsepower) served as drive . The ship reached a top speed of 13 knots. It was measured with 2,947 gross register tons and it had eight lifeboats with space for 70 people each. The maiden voyage took the ship from Bremen via Southampton to New York .
The misfortune
The ship left Bremerhaven on December 4, 1875 for the USA . On board were 234 people, 135 passengers and 99 crew members. The captain of the ship was Eduard Brickenstein. The passengers were emigrants of various nationalities. On December 6, the Deutschland deviated significantly from course due to navigational errors during a storm . At around 5 a.m. it ran aground on the Kentish Knock sandbank in the Thames estuary , around 40 kilometers from Harwich harbor . After 31 hours, the surviving passengers from the Liverpool were rescued. Of the 234 people on the Deutschland , 57 died. Only twelve bodies could be recovered.
The captain has been tried in a maritime court in the UK despite the accident taking place in international waters. This led to resentment between the United Kingdom and imperial Germany and marked the birth of the German maritime offices .
Captain Brickenstein stated before the court that shortly before the impact on the sandbank, a strong impact could be felt through the hull , presumably due to the change back to full power which had taken place shortly before, which would have stressed the propeller's drive shaft too much. Neither the court nor recent research could ever confirm this statement. It was ignored by the court. Because of the correct decisions made by the master during and after the accident, he was acquitted by the court, but it was only a "second class" acquittal, since he had contributed to the accident through his navigation error. After that, Captain Brickenstein never went to sea again.
Among the dead included five nuns of the Franciscan Sisters of Salzkotten (FCJM) what the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins long to his 35 verses Ode The Wreck of the Germany ( The Wreck of Germany inspired). Hopkins was a Jesuit and questions why God is testing a second time the Franciscan Sisters who have been forced to emigrate as a result of the Kulturkampf .
The remaining survivors were lucky in the misfortune. They should have crossed to America eight days later on board the steamboat Moselle . However, an insurance fraudster wanted to blow up this ship with a time bomb in the Atlantic - but due to a mishap while loading the ship , the bomb exploded in Bremerhaven before the survivors of the Deutschland could board in Southampton.
A wreck was found near the site of the shipwreck on the northwest side of Kentish Knock in 1969 (position 51 ° 40 ′ 0 ″ N , 1 ° 37 ′ 0 ″ E, ). It is about 14 m deep. Although it could not be clearly identified as that of Germany , finds by the underwater archaeologist Andreas Stolpe in 2005 suggest that it is this ship.
literature
- Michael Klaus Wernicke: Failed Rescue - Five Franciscan Sisters and the shipwreck of the "Deutschland" in 1875 . Ernst Kabel Verlag, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-8225-0318-5 .
Movies
- 2008 31 hours of hell - the last journey of "Germany" (documentary), director: Robert Schotter , ZDF
Web links
- The Wreck of the Germany - poem text at the engl. Wikisource
- Trips into the unknown: 31 hours of hell on the Germany - ZDF expeditions, documentation
- North Atlantic passenger steamship losses 1841 to 1978 - The ship list
Footnotes
- ↑ Sad balance - 57 deaths and second class acquittal. (No longer available online.) Zdf.de, April 13, 2008, archived from the original on January 11, 2018 ; accessed on January 10, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ John Sutherland, Stephen Fender: Love, Sex, Death & Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature . icon Books Ltd, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-84831-269-2 , p. 464
- ↑ Germany ( en ) Historic England.
