Waratah (ship)
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The Waratah was a steamship that disappeared off the South African coast in July 1909 on the voyage from Durban to Cape Town . The fate of the ship is still unclear today. It is believed that the Waratah went down in a storm . No remains have been found to date.
There have been several attempts to locate the wreck . The South African NUMA (South-Africa National Underwater and Marine Agency) reported in 1987 that it had discovered the ship 10 km offshore, but in 2001 it turned out to be another ship, the Nailsea Meadow , sunk in World War II . The South African Emlyn Brown, the head of NUMA who searched for the wreck for decades, gave up in 2004.
The facts
The Waratah , a 140 meter long, 18 meter wide and 9,340 GRT large steamship, was built in 1908 by a shipyard in Glasgow ( Scotland ) and was to become the flagship of the famous Blue Anchor Line . The Waratah was to serve as a passenger and cargo ship to Australia. With its two four-cylinder steam engines, the ship could reach a top speed of 13.5 knots (25 km / h). Its name was derived from the Waratah flower , which is the symbol of the Australian state of New South Wales .
The ship made its maiden voyage from London to Australia in 1908 . The trip went smoothly. The Waratah was then to return to London from Australia via South Africa in 1909. She left Durban on July 26, 1909 with 92 passengers , 119 crew members and over 10,000 tons of various cargo . Her captain, Joshua E. Ilbery, thought she was a seaworthy ship, perhaps a little top-heavy and with a tendency to "lurch and get stuck". One of the witnesses to the incorrect trimming of the ship on its maiden voyage to Australia is a passenger, Nobel Prize winner William Henry Bragg . The reports on the instability of the ship are contradicting itself, as the official investigation revealed. At that time, a slight top-heaviness was not unusual on passenger ships because of the slower taxiing.
The Waratah was seen by Clan McIntyre at 9:30 am on July 27th in the course of the day with drastically deteriorating weather with winds around 50 knots and waves up to 9 m high . If visibility was poor, the ship was sighted again in the evening by the Guelph (however, the 3rd officer could only recognize the final letters TAH of the name when exchanging light signals) and possibly by the Harlow . She saw a steamer fighting the waves 10 nautical miles behind the Harlow with heavy smoke development , and finally at 8 p.m. a double flash near the position of the ship, the lights of which were then no longer to be seen. The captain of the Harlow initially mistook the flash for fire pits on the coast and paid no further attention to it, nor did it enter anything in the logbook. When he arrived in the Philippines, however, the captain spoke to a Lloyd's agent of an explosion and thought the smoke was a fire.
When the Waratah did not arrive in Cape Town on July 29, 1909, after its only three-day voyage , initially nobody thought it possible that this modern ship could have sunk. There had been a storm, but other ships had mastered the same route. Wreckage and corpses were not sighted and no lifeboats were driven ashore. It was therefore assumed that the Waratah had suffered machine damage and was now drifting around. Since the marine radio was still in its infancy and the Waratah was not equipped with this modern technology either, it could not call for any help.
On July 31, 1909, two Royal Navy cruisers began the search, but returned ten days later without having achieved anything. The Australian government chartered the search ship Severn for a month, which also gave up after 4,345 kilometers without result. The steamer Sabine searched from September 11 to December 7, 1909, covered 22,500 kilometers in these 88 days and even grazed the foothills of the Antarctic . When there was still no sign of life, the Waratah was finally reported missing at Lloyd's on December 15, 1909 .
The coast between Durban and Cape Town is known for its stormy, unpredictable weather and rough seas. When a south- westerly storm whips the current at the Needle Cape , waves 18 meters high are by no means uncommon. Many ships have already been lost or damaged in these waters.
Rumors and false reports
Rumors and fake news shot up pretty soon. They ranged from messages in a bottle washed up in Australia to white children allegedly raised by African tribes near the coast to men who pretended to be survivors and wanted to sell their stories to the press . Clairvoyants also pretended to be able to locate the position of the wreck. In any case, the Waratah remained or will remain one of the unsolved riddles in shipping history. Her fate has not been clarified to this day. It is almost certain that the ship went down in bad weather. Whether the cause is ultimately a lack of stability, structural defects or a so-called monster wave will probably never be clarified.
Official announcement
A commission in London in 1910/11 found the Waratah to be seaworthy, but suddenly capsized and lost in stormy seas. The Commission recommended further studies on the stability of ocean ships.
Picture gallery
Waratah
Waratah
The Waratah in Sydney
The Waratah in Port Adelaide
Waratah
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literature
- John Harris: Without trace - the last voyage of eight ships. Mandarin, 1989, ISBN 0-7493-0043-4 .
- Geoffrey Jenkins: The Waratah's Log. Goldmann, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-442-24058-1 .
- Alan Villiers: Lost at Sea , Delius-Klasing 1976
Web links
- List of passengers ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English.)
- List of team members ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English.)
Footnotes
- ↑ WARATAH (Expedition Report) ( English ) National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA; South Africa). Archived from the original on December 27, 2010. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ↑ Waratah Wreck Update ( English ) National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA; South Africa). Archived from the original on October 12, 2011. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ↑ At 32 degrees, 17 minutes south, 29 degrees, 17 minutes east. See Evening Standard of September 24, 1909 .
- ↑ About 180 nautical miles from Durban, 51 nautical miles from the Clan McIntyre sighting , about 31 degrees, 18 minutes south, 29 degrees, 45 minutes east. Evening Standard, loc. cit.
- ^ The Mysterious Ship Disappearances ( English ) Maritime Connector. Archived from the original on July 5, 2011. Retrieved July 29, 2017. See therein the entry “SS Waratah, 1909”.
- ^ Evening Standard, loc. cit.