Holtenau (ship, 1882)
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The German screw steamer Holtenau collided on September 14, 1900 in the English Channel near the Isle of Wight with an unknown sailing ship , which immediately sank with all of its crew . Probably it was the barquentine Rosehill from Exeter .
the accident
The Holtenau left Hamburg on September 12, 1900 with a load of general cargo for Manchester . She was under the command of Captain Fritz Jochen Ivens, nee on November 27, 1852 in Möltenort , certificate of proficiency as a skipper on European voyages since November 3, 1879. On September 14, around 9:40 pm, she was a good seven nautical miles from St. Catherine Point . With the help of the set gaff sails, the ship made a good 9 knots .
At this point in time, the watch was held by the second helmsman Carl Ludwig Alexander Burmeister, b. February 14, 1876 in Teterow . On the lookout was the sailor Henning, who was making his first voyage as an able seaman . The visibility was good (so-called fire-sighted night). At the helm was the ordinary seaman Strötzel, who, however, had worked on land for a year.
At 11 p.m. Burmeister spotted the red light of a sailing ship a line starboard ahead at an estimated three-quarters to a nautical mile distance and immediately gave the command "port" to the helmsman Strötzel. This misunderstood the command and put the rudder to starboard. When Burmeister noticed this, he jumped into the wheelhouse and tried to put the rudder around again with the lookout man Henning, but the Holtenau was already on the new course and probably rammed the three-masted gaff schooner amidships at 11:15 p.m. on port. A scream could still be heard from the ship; it apparently sank immediately after the collision.
Captain Ivens and the first helmsman, who had been awakened by the collision, immediately hurried on deck , the captain onto the bridge, the helmsman forward. The first attempt to return to the alleged scene of the accident failed due to the swell and the fact that the Holtenau had also leaked and water penetrated the peck and the crew logis. It was only after provisional sealing measures that Ivens steered the steamer back to the assumed collision site and cruised there until daybreak, but neither the shipwrecked nor corpses or wreckage were discovered.
The sunken sailor
All efforts of the Hamburg Sea Office to find out something about the sunken ship failed.
However, it was suspected that it was the iron schooner bark Rose Hill . This had left the port of Feignmouth in Devonshire on September 13, 1900, one day before the accident, with the destination Antwerp and has been missing since then. According to a British beach service report, which the Maritime Administration had in copy, the British authorities assumed that the ship had sunk on September 15, 1900 or after. Names of crew members or even just the number of crew members were apparently not available to the Hamburg Maritime Administration, nor any information about the ship.
For the fact that the rammed ship was actually the Rose Hill , a lifebuoy with the inscription "Rose Hill of Exeter" said that on September 23, 1900, nine days after the collision, a good eight nautical miles from St. Catharine was found drifting away.
The decisions of the Maritime Office and the Imperial Ober-Seeamt
The Hamburg Maritime Administration came to the conclusion that the main cause of the accident was the helmsman's wrong rowing maneuver . How this came about could not be clarified on the basis of various witness statements.
Serious allegations were made against the second helmsman Burmeister, but it was also stated that his watch would have been better kept by the captain himself until the experienced first helmsman could have relieved him at midnight. Although the Holtenau had already passed the dangerous bottlenecks in the canal, the Maritime Administration considered the canal to be very dangerous in general, especially at night, so that the ship's command should not have been left to such an inexperienced officer.
Above all, Burmeister was accused of not having stopped the Holtenau immediately, but rather allowed it to continue running at full speed. Burmeister explained this by saying that he did not before Steven wanted from slipping down hanging ship. This argument was partially understood by the Maritime Administration, but it considered the immediate stopping to be absolutely necessary and assumed that the sailor had capsized as a result of the full voyage.
The Hamburg Sea Office decided on October 24, 1900 to revoke both Burmeister and Ivens' patents . Burmeister, on the other hand, did not lodge an objection to the Imperial Upper Sea Office in Berlin, but Ivens did.
In fact, on March 20, 1901, the Oberseeamt in Berlin reversed the Hamburg decision on the grounds that Ivens could not act differently in view of the situation, since approaching the accident site with a leak against the rising sea was too risky. He was also credited with the fact that he had never suffered a marine accident in his 14 years of service as a skipper.
literature
- Chapter: The ruling of the Hamburg Sea Office of October 24, 1900 and the decision of the Imperial Upper Sea Office of March 20, 1901, regarding the collision of the screw steamer "Holtenau" from Hamburg with an unknown three-masted schooner in the English Channel , in: Reichsamt des Innern (Hg .): Decisions of the Ober-Seeamt and the Maritime Offices of the German Reich , Vol. 14, Hamburg 1904, pp. 237–247.