Merion (ship)
.jpg) |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
The Merion was a passenger ship put into service in 1902 by the US shipping company American Line , which was built for transatlantic passenger and mail traffic between Europe and the USA . The Merion was used as a dummy battle cruiser during World War I until it was sunk by a German submarine in the Aegean Sea on May 31, 1915 .
The ship
The 11,621 gross register tons steamship was built at the John Brown & Company shipyard in Clydebank near Glasgow and was launched there on November 26, 1901. The ship, 161.69 meters long and 18.04 meters wide, had four masts, a chimney and two propellers . It was powered by two triple expansion steam engines from the shipyard, which produced 5,000 PSi and enabled a speed of 14 knots. The passenger accommodations were designed for 150 second class and 1,700 third class passengers.
The Merion and her sister ship Haverford (11,645 GRT), which was commissioned in 1901 , were built for the American Line based in Philadelphia . On March 8, 1902, the Merion chartered the Dominion Line on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Boston . Like the American Line, the Dominion Line belonged to the umbrella organization of the International Mercantile Marine Company . On March 5, 1903, she made her eleventh and last trip on this route for the Dominion Line. On March 30, 1903, the Merion was damaged in front of Tuskar Rock on the coast of the Irish county of Wexford in a collision with the steamer Clan Grant of the British Clan Line .
In April 1903 the ship made its first voyage for the American Line from Liverpool to Philadelphia. On November 16, 1907, the Merion completed a crossing from Antwerp to New York for the Red Star Line . On December 24, 1912, she collided with a tanker off the coast of Delaware . Two departments in the hull were flooded, but the ship made it back to Philadelphia on its own, where passengers and cargo were unloaded.
Her last peacetime voyage began on October 31, 1914, from Liverpool to Philadelphia. She was then placed in the service of the British Admiralty and became part of a program to convert merchant ships to resemble Royal Navy warships . The Merion was adjusted to the silhouette of the battle cruiser Tiger and equipped with wooden cannons. In addition, it was massively overloaded with cement and stones so that it lay deep in the water and thus corresponded to the profile of the real tiger . But it was also equipped with real cannons, which led to the German consul in Philadelphia protesting when the Merion docked in Philadelphia with this armament. The US, which was still neutral at the time, instructed that the Merion was only allowed to sail after the armament was dismantled. When she left the port of Philadelphia on September 5, 1914, the cannons were therefore stowed below deck.
The Merion saw service from now on in the Mediterranean . On May 29, 1915, the German submarine UB 8 (Kapitänleutnant Ernst von Voigt) let five convoys pass one after the other in the Aegean before torpedoing the Merion . Despite the overload, however, it did not sink until May 31. There are no known reports of fatalities.