A hundred years ago – on 28 June, 1904 – the Danish ship Norge, the oldest and most reliable steamer of the Scandinavian-American line, ripped her bottom open on the reefs of Rockall, that tiny uninhabited rock 200 miles west of Scotland.
Of the 795 people aboard, mostly Scandinavian and Russian-Jewish emigrants bound from Copenhagen and Oslo for New York, 635 were lost.
The rest survived in open lifeboats, some for up to eight days, before being rescued. Of the 240 children aboard, only 30 were saved.
Though licensed to carry 800, the 3318 ton Norge had sufficient lifeboats for only 251 people. This terrible underestimate would be repeated eight years later, when the Titanic lifeboats also proved too small to cope with the number of passengers and crew aboard.
The similarity between the sinkings of the Norge and Titanic accounts for the title of Per Kristian Sebak’s book Titanic’s Predecessor. Sebak is a Norwegian historian specialising in transatlantic maritime shipping and emigration to the USA.
No doubt this heavily researched, well-illustrated and detailed book will be in the dive bags of the diving team of Project SS Norge, a British-Danish-American expedition headed by Kevin Heath, the Orkneys wreck-diver and researcher. This expedition is planned to coincide with the anniversary.
The divers will make a video record of the wreck for Danish TV and for showing to descendants of those passengers who reached the States. The survivors were offered free passage by the ship-owners and, amazingly, many took it almost at once!
Kevin Heath has researched this expedition for five years and last year was one of the first to find and dive the wreck. He found it not on Rockall but to the north of nearby Helen’s Reef. Norge is in 48m and well broken. The divers were surprised to have to abort dives because of aggressive porbeagle sharks!
The Norge could not have struck another wreck, as her captain was later to claim, but hit the reef with her bow and stayed pinioned for 20 minutes before sinking stern-first. Hideous scenes ensued.
Some who managed to get into a boat fought off other swimmers as they threatened to swamp the boats. Captain Valdemar Gundel was threatened with having his fingers smashed by an oar as he clung to the side of Lifeboat No 1, and it was only when he shouted that they needed him as captain that he was hauled aboard. That lifeboat made it to Stornaway.
Captain Gundel had somehow steered the Norge some 20 miles off course since passing St Kilda, but was acquitted of major blame. He never commanded a ship at sea again.
Kendall McDonald
- Titanic’s Predecessor by Per Kristian Sebak (Seaward Publishing, ISBN 8299677904). Hardback, 334pp, ?25
