Ally

The SS Elbe was built in the Govan Shipyard of John Elder & Company., Ltd, Glasgow, in 1881 for the Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen. The Elbe had double-expansion engines which provided power to her single screw propeller. She was a fast ship for her time being able to reach the speed of 16 knots, but small cargo capacity, along with her high consumption of coal, would soon make her uneconomical. She had a straight bow, two funnels and four masts. She was launched on the 2nd of April 1881. After sea trials she made her maiden voyage on the 26th of June 1881, leaving Bremen for New York vie Southampton. The Elbe had accommodation consisting of 179 first class passengers, 142 in second class, and 796 in steerage. She was a very popular ship with immigrants from Europe to the United States and was virtually always sold out in steerage. The Elbe would spend most of the next ten years working the North Atlantic service but she also made three voyages to Adelaide in Australia, two of which were in December of 1889 and 1890.

The night of the 30th of January 1895 was stormy. In the North Sea conditions were freezing and there were huge seas. SS Elbe had left Bremerhaven for New York earlier in the day with 354 passengers aboard. Also out at sea on this rough night was the steamship Crathie, sailing from Aberdeen in Scotland, heading for Rotterdam. As conditions grew worse the Elbe discharged warning rockets to alert other ships of her presence. The Crathie either did not see the warning rockets or chose to ignore them. She did not alter her course, with such disastrous consequences, that she struck the liner on her port side with such force that whole compartments of the Elbe were immediately flooded. The collision happened at 5.30 am and most of the passengers were still asleep.

The Elbe began to sink immediately and the captain, von Gossel, gave the order to abandon ship. Amid great scenes of panic the crew managed to lower two of the Elbe’s lifeboats. One of the lifeboats capsized as too many passengers tried in vain to squeeze on to the boat. Twenty people scrambled into the second lifeboat of which 15 were members of the crew. The others were four male second-class passengers, and a young lady’s maid by the name of Miss Anna Boecker, who had been lucky enough to be pulled from the raging sea after the first boat had capsized. Meanwhile on the other side of the Elbe, Captain von Gossel had ordered all the women and children to assemble there but no other lifeboats were launched because the ropes on the derricks were all frozen up, and so they perished along with Captain von Gossel. Within 20 minutes of the collision SS Elbe had sunk and the only survivors were the 20 people in the one surviving lifeboat. These people now had to endure mountainous seas and below-zero temperatures and they were 50 miles from land. Things looked bleak, the Elbe’s distress rockets had not been seen by any passing vessels and so no one knew of their predicament. After five hours in the raging storm, their luck changed. A fishing smack from Lowestoft called the Wildflower found them. In desperate conditions the brave crew of the Wildflower struggled to pull the twenty distressed survivors from the lifeboat which had begun to break up. The skipper of the Wildflower, William Wright, said later that the survivors would not have lasted another hour in those conditions and believed that the only reason they had stayed alive for five hours, was due to the expertise of the Elbe’s crewman aboard the lifeboat.

In the early part of 1993, a group of Dutch amateur divers searched and located the wreck of the Elbe on the sea bed. They managed to salvage a large quantity of the glasswork and tea sets from the wreck site.