Ally

The Alexander Neuski was a large screw frigate of the Russian Imperial Navy. The ship was designed as part of a challenge being offered by the Russian Empire to the Royal Navy, but was lost in a shipwreck in 1868 while the Grand Duke of Russia was aboard.

On September 25, 1868, on its way home from a visit to Piraeus, where it had participated in the celebration of Greek King George’s wedding to Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, and while carrying Grand Duke Alexei, son of Czar Alexander II, Alexander Neuski became shipwrecked off the coast of Thyborøn, a fishing village in Jutland. The vessel was travelling under sail at the time, and the admiral then aboard had seriously misjudged the precise location of the vessel as it sailed along the nighttime Jutland coast. Buffeted by rain, the Alexander Neuski struck a sandbar, and its masts and some of the ship's cannons had to be pitched into the sea to prevent the vessel from immediately capsizing.

Responding to the ship's distress signal (a gun was fired), the local fishermen poured out into the now-becalmed sea and rescued all of the ship's crew, other than five crewmen who had drowned while attempting to reach shore in one of the ship's liferafts.

The warship eventually sank, the wreck settling in roughly 60 feet of water, only 300 feet from the present coast of Thyborøn. The captain and admiral aboard were convicted of dereliction of duty at a court-martial, but the tsar intervened and pardoned them due to their long service to the Russian fleet. Grand Duke Alexei often claimed that he almost drowned when the ship went down, and enjoyed telling the story through the rest of his life.

The ship's name, a famous Russian one, was later transferred to a cruiser after the loss of the screw-frigate.

The present location of the wreck is at 56°41′N, 08°08′E.