Runic (ship)
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The Runic (II) was a passenger ship put into service in 1900 by the British shipping company White Star Line , which was used in passenger and freight traffic from Great Britain via Cape Town to Australia . In 1930 she was sold and used as a whaling ship under the name New Sevilla . In 1940 she was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Northern Ireland .
The ship
The 12,482 GRT steel steamship Runic was commissioned from the Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff in 1899 and was launched there on October 25, 1900. She was the sister ship of the Suevic , which was launched shortly after her. The two steamers were an addition to the three sister ships Afric , Medic and Persic , with which the White Star Line had opened its Australian service in 1899. These five ships were unofficially known as The Jubilee Class, which reflected the anticipation for the approaching turn of the century .
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The 172.2 meter long and 19.3 meter wide ship had three decks , a chimney and four masts . The Runic was powered by two four-cylinder quadruple expansion steam engines from Harland & Wolff, which acted on two propellers and made 5,000 PSi . The top speed was 13.5 knots. The Runic could carry 400 passengers in the cabin class and had seven holds. Freight and luggage could be loaded with a total of 21 loading trees .
On December 22, 1900, the Runic was handed over to her owners and on January 3, 1901, she sailed from Liverpool on her maiden voyage to Sydney via Cape Town , Albany , Adelaide and Melbourne . On November 25, 1901, the Runic collided with the Dunottar Castle of the Castle Line and took it to Dakar in tow. Like her sister ships, the Runic was under the control of the Liner Requisition Scheme between 1917 and 1919 .
On November 3, 1928, the ship crashed at Gourock (Scotland) on the Firth of Clyde with the heavy cruiser London , which was on a test drive . On September 26, 1929, the Runic made her last voyage for the White Star Line.
As a whaling ship
In May 1930 the now obsolete Runic was sold to the Norwegian shipowner Anders Jahre and his Danish partner AP Møller , who wanted to convert it into a fishing factory ship. Finally it was converted into a whaling factory ship at the Germania shipyard in Kiel and put into service by A / S Sevilla, Tønsberg, under the name New Sevilla . The modifications increased the tonnage to 13,801 GRT. It was the largest conversion of an existing ship into a whaling factory ship until the commissioning of the Yuri Dolgoruki in 1960.
The two sister ships of the Runic , Medic and Suevic , as well as the similar Athenic had already been converted into whaling factory ships in the previous two years and had already been completed as the British Hektoria , and under the Norwegian flag as the Skytteren and Pelagos . For use with the New Sevilla five new fishing boats of 245 GRT were built at the Smith's Dock shipyard in Middlesbrough with the construction numbers 935 to 939, which were named Bouvet 1 to 5 . The Bouvet 5 was lost in the Antarctic ice at the end of the first fishing season. In the following season, the New Sevilla, like all Norwegian whaling factories, was not used.
In 1932 the whaling shipping company Christian Salvesen & Company , based in Leith near Edinburgh, again acquired the majority of the company it had owned from 1922 to 1929 and the ship came under the British ownership of the Sevilla Whaling Company, London, with its four remaining whalers Flag. From 1932 to 1939 the New Sevilla was used by Salvesen together with their whaling mother ships Salvestria (11,938 GRT, ex Cardiganshire ) and Sourabaya (10,107 GRT, ex Carmarthenshire ) in the Southern Ocean . The four Bouvet boats all stayed with the New Sevilla until the 1934/1935 season , only the Bouvet 4 stayed with her mother ship until the last fishing season in 1939/1940. There were also very similar whalers from the Salvesen shipping company, such as the Sevra, Svega, Stefa, Sluga, Sulla, Shusa, Sukha, Silja and Sirra . From 1937 onwards , new, larger boats such as the Santa of 355 GRT, the Sondra of 433 GRT or in 1938 the two Norwegian newbuildings Sigfra and Simbra of 336 GRT were used with the New Sevilla . In all eight fishing seasons from autumn 1932 to spring 1940, the New Sevilla was in action with six to seven fishing boats. In addition, in the summer of 1937 she hunted mainly sperm whales with seven fishing boats as the only factory ship ever deployed there in the North Sea off Norway .
The factory ship Salvestria
The factory ship Sourabaya
On September 20, 1940, the New Sevilla was with 284 people on board under the command of Captain Richard Black Chisholm in ballast on the way from Liverpool via Aruba to South Georgia to take part in the fishing season. The ship was to cross the North Atlantic in convoy OB-216 with 27 ships.
Between 9:20 p.m. and 9:26 p.m. on the evening of September 20, several torpedoes were fired at the convoy 52 nautical miles northwest of the island of Rathlin off the Northern Irish coast . The torpedoes came from the German submarine U 138 , which was on its first patrol under the command of Oberleutnant zur See Wolfgang Lüth . The steamers Boka , Empire Adventure and City of Simla as well as the New Sevilla were hit.
The ship was taken in tow but sank the following day nine miles before the Mull of Kintyre in position 55 ° 48 ' N , 7 ° 22' W . Two people were killed. The survivors were taken over by the British corvette Arabis of the Flower class and the Icelandic tug Belgaum and brought ashore in Liverpool and Belfast respectively. The former Runic was the largest of the ships sunk by U 138 .
literature
- Joh. N. Tønnessen, Arne Odd Johnsen: The History of Modern Whaling . University of California Press, 1982, ISBN 0-520-03973-4
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945 . Manfred Pawlak Verlag, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-009-7
Web links
- A summary of the ship's history on a website about ships of the White Star Line
- The Runic as New Sevilla in the submarine database
- The Runic in Norway Heritage
- Mission history of the New Sevilla
- History of operations of the Salvesen whalers and technical data