Passenger Liner Wrecks

The inquiry held at Stranraer after the Princess Royal was lost cleared her master, Captain McChlery, but the Privy Council for Trade disagreed with its finding. It faulted him for steaming at 14 knots through thick fog near the land and for relying on a newly adjusted compass, and although he kept his master's certificate he was made to bear the cost of his own defence. An iron paddle steamer built by Tod & MacGregor of Glasgow in 1841, she was bound from Liverpool to Greenock in 1856 when she struck Craig Laggan Rocks south of Corsewall Point in fog. Everyone aboard got ashore, and the steamer Herald carried them on to Greenock. Salvors recovered most of her general cargo, but weeks of bad weather broke her in two and she was declared a total wreck. Parts of her paddle box frames remain on the east side of the rocks.

Few wrecks carry the emotional weight of the Rohilla. This Harland & Wolff-built liner had been requisitioned as a hospital ship just weeks into the First World War and was steaming south from Scotland to collect wounded soldiers from France when a northeast gale drove her onto Whitby Rock in the early hours of 30 October 1914. With shore lights blacked out for wartime, her crew never saw the reef. What followed was a three-day rescue drama that gripped the nation — lifeboats launching repeatedly into mountainous seas, spectators lining the cliffs, and 83 lives lost despite extraordinary courage from the rescuers. Most of the dead were doctors and nurses. The site is a war grave. At low spring tides, structural remains break the surface — a stark reminder visible to anyone walking the coastal path above.

The explosion of HMS Princess Irene on 27 May 1915 occurred during World War I. The disaster, which claimed 352 lives, highlighted the dangers of handling explosives and prompted investigations into potential sabotage, although no evidence of foul play was found. The ship, originally an ocean liner built by William Denny and Brothers Ltd in 1914, was converted into an auxiliary minelayer for the Royal Navy. While being loaded with mines in the Medway Estuary, she exploded, scattering debris over a wide area and causing additional casualties onshore. Today, the wreck of the Princess Irene lies scattered on the seabed of the North Sea, near Sheerness, Kent.

On her maiden voyage, the RMS Tayleur was betrayed by her own construction: the iron of her hull threw her compasses out. Built in 1853, she was the largest iron clipper of her kind, and she sailed from Liverpool for Melbourne with over 650 people on board. Fog and a storm closed around her inside 48 hours. Her crew thought their course lay south down the Irish Sea, when in truth she was running west, directly at Lambay Island. A rudder too small for the ship and rigging that had never been stretched properly left her no escape, and on 21 January 1854 she hit the rocks; over 370 people died. Her remains lie at 9-17 metres in Tayleur Bay: hull plates, a donkey engine, the lower mast, crockery, roof tiles and even tombstones carried as cargo. She is a protected wreck: it is against the law to dive on her unless the Office of Public Works has first given its permission.

She struck Howth Head once. Backed off. Then struck again beneath the Baily Lighthouse and sank in fifteen minutes. On the night of 14 February 1853, the paddle steamer PS Queen Victoria -- built in 1838 for the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company's Dublin-Liverpool mail route -- departed Liverpool with approximately 100 passengers into a snowstorm. Around 02:00 on the 15th she hit the headland. Captain Jones tried to make harbour, but the damage was catastrophic. Dead in the water and filling fast, the ship drifted and struck a second time. Around 83 people perished including the captain. One lifeboat, carrying 17 survivors, reached shore. The Board of Trade blamed the captain, first officer, and lighthouse crew. The wreck lies at approximately 18-20 metres south of the Baily Lighthouse. Permit required to dive.

No ship afloat was bigger than the RMS Celtic when she took to the water in 1901. Harland and Wolff built her in Belfast for the White Star Line, the first of the quartet that became known as the Big Four, and at 20,904 GRT and more than 700 feet long she was the first vessel ever to pass 20,000 gross tons, outstripping even the SS Great Eastern. She met an undignified end on 10 December 1928: waiting off Cobh for a harbour pilot, she was blown onto the rocks at Roches Point. Caught on Cow-and-Calf Rock, she was pounded by the sea until her structure gave way, and within a week she had been written off as a total loss. The Danish firm Petersen and Albeck bought her and broke her up where she lay, finishing by 1933. In November 1929 hydrogen sulphide given off by her rotting cargo killed four of the men working on her. Pieces of her ended up in homes around Cork, and only sparse wreckage is left, in 10-20 metres.

Dense fog and the towering cliffs of the Old Head of Kinsale proved a fatal combination. On 22 June 1892, the Inman Line passenger liner SS City of Chicago -- 132 metres long and approximately 5,200 GRT, built by Charles Connell & Co. in Glasgow -- ran aground at Ringagurteen Point while on passage from New York to Queenstown and Liverpool. All passengers were rescued safely with their baggage, but twelve crew drowned when a rescue boat was swamped. For three days the ship held together against relentless Atlantic pounding before listing and breaking apart.

She was barely six months old when she ploughed onto Vase Rock in October 1898, killing 106 passengers and crew on what should have been a routine Atlantic crossing. No one has ever convincingly explained why the ship was so far off course. Today her boilers rise from 22 metres as the centrepiece of a richly colonised underwater landscape, while the skeletal hull frames create a striking grid that draws photographers from across the UK.

The two crews told opposite stories. Men from the Iona I said the newly launched Chanticleer came at them unlit and struck her starboard side aft of the paddle box; the Chanticleer's pilot said the Iona swerved across his bow. Built by James and George Thomson at Govan in 1855, the 325-ton paddle steamer had served William Hutcheson's Glasgow to Ardrishaig route before being sold, stripped, painted grey and loaded with coal for Nassau as a Confederate blockade runner. Her captain refused a passing tug's help unless the Chanticleer's master first accepted liability, and she went down stern first. Her midships section survives with paddles, engines and boilers, and the site is now a historic Marine Protected Area.

More than 564 people died when the RMS Leinster went down, a toll no other single sinking in the Irish Sea has matched, and one of the most devastating maritime disasters of World War I. Near the Kish Bank on 10 October 1918, UB-123 fired three torpedoes at her. The first went wide and the second hit her port side. Captain Birch was trying to bring her round toward Kingstown when the third almost cut her in two. Of the 22 postal sorters on board, 21 were killed. Built at Birkenhead in 1896 as a mail steamer for the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, she lies at 28 metres, around 4 nautical miles east of the Kish Light. Her bow stands proud of the seabed, while the rest has largely collapsed into the sand. Her anchor was raised in 1991 and is on display at Carlisle Pier, Dun Laoghaire. She is a war grave.

Built on the Clyde in 1903 as a luxury liner for the Australian run, she carried 286 passengers in considerable comfort before the Great War requisitioned her as a hospital ship tasked with evacuating wounded troops. On 26 May 1918, heading for Plymouth to collect a thousand injured Australians, a torpedo from UB-57 struck amidships and sent her to the bottom a mile off Anvil Point. Six men died. The boilers, engine room and stern section are highlights, and the marine life — from nudibranchs to cuttlefish — is outstanding for a Channel wreck.

A Board of Trade enquiry into the loss of the Champion found that the paddle steamer Caledonia had run north through dense fog at an excessive and improper speed, and it suspended her master, Captain Bell, for three months. The Champion, an iron steam paddle tug built at South Shields as the Flying Javelin and later owned in Greenock, had been carrying papers and mail to the piers below Dunoon. Captain Quintin Carsell was feeling his way south at a few knots, whistle sounding, when the Caledonia came out of the murk and drove into the tug's port sponson. The two vessels held together long enough for the tug's crew to cross over, and Carsell went back for the mail before she went down within minutes. She lies upright south of the Gantock Rocks, her stern intact and her starboard paddlewheel standing tall, while the hull forward of the engine room is broken.

No wreck anywhere on the Sussex coast is larger. The RMS Alaunia, a Cunard Line ocean liner of over 13,000 tons, was designed for the transatlantic trade and had room for more than 2,000 passengers, at a time when going by sea was the only way across. War gave her a first in 1914: no Cunard ship before her had carried Canadian troops over to fight in Europe. Two years on, on 19 October 1916, she was outward bound from London for New York when she hit a mine off the Royal Sovereign Lightship, and two of her crew died in the sinking. Off Eastbourne she rests on her port side in around 36 metres, the 159-metre hull rising 10 metres above the seabed in places. Her bow is canted at a striking 45-degree angle, the port anchor still hanging from its hawsehole, and lines of portholes are still fitted along the riveted plating of her hull.

Two torpedoes, five minutes, twelve dead. On 26 January 1918 the SS Cork, built for the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company's cross-channel trade, was on her way across the Irish Sea from Dublin to Liverpool with sheep, horses and cattle aboard when SM U-103 attacked. One torpedo struck her engine room. A second hit close to the foremast and wrecked a lifeboat, taking away any margin for escape. Barely five minutes after she was hit she had gone, nine nautical miles northeast of Point Lynas, Anglesey, and seven passengers and five crew went with her. She lies upright and largely intact in the Irish Sea at 48 metres, a well-preserved record of cross-channel commerce in the early 20th century.

Between fifty and sixty guests, workmen and crew were aboard the new paddle steamer Princess of Wales when she ran speed trials on the measured mile at Skelmorlie. Her pilot, James Barrie, altered course to match the Balmoral Castle, whose pilot James Parker kept edging further offshore, until the larger steamer sliced through her abaft the engine room. The women reached Skelmorlie in her one undamaged lifeboat, and yachts and boats from the shore came alongside for most of the others. Her stern went down at once with three workmen; the Adela took the bow in tow, but it capsized and sank off Wemyss Bay Pier. Built in 1888 by Barclay Curle & Co Ltd and still in the builders' hands, she was written off. The forepart was found in 1992 lying upside down on mud, and the stern has never been confirmed.

Eighteen minutes. That's all it took for the Lusitania to disappear beneath the Celtic Sea on 7 May 1915, taking 1,198 souls with her. A single torpedo from U-20, fired with the Old Head of Kinsale eleven miles to the north, struck the starboard side -- followed by a mysterious second explosion whose cause is still debated. The sinking turned American opinion against Germany and altered the course of World War I. Today the wreck lies on her starboard side at approximately 93 metres, heavily collapsed and continuing to degrade from corrosion and tidal currents. The wreck is protected under Irish law (National Monuments Acts; Underwater Heritage Order), and the Irish Examiner reported in 2024 that efforts are underway to document and recover artefacts before further collapse.

Built in 1925 by Fairfield Shipbuilding in Glasgow for the Anchor Line, she was requisitioned in August 1939 and converted to armed merchant cruiser F56, serving on the Northern Patrol. On 10 August 1940, U-56 torpedoed her approximately 40 nautical miles northwest of Malin Head. Taken in tow, she later foundered. Approximately 300 officers and ratings were rescued by nearby trawlers. The wreck requires a 3-4 hour boat transit from the Donegal coast.

Captain Duncan McInnes was among the thirteen survivors of the Comet II disaster, which claimed around seventy-three lives. The paddle steamer, built by James Lang in 1821, collided with the Ayr off Kempock Point in the Firth of Clyde. The collision, attributed to the absence of navigation lights and a bow lookout, led to the Comet II sinking within minutes. Despite the Ayr's damaged state, her return to Greenock without attempting a rescue drew significant criticism. Captain McInnes faced charges of culpable homicide and received a three-month jail sentence. Efforts to salvage the Comet II began in December 1825 but faced delays due to poor weather. The wreck remained underwater until the following summer, when Mr. Brown of Aberdeen successfully raised and beached her on 21st July 1826. The Comet II's tragic loss marked one of the earliest steamship disasters on the Clyde.