RMS Niagara (1913-1940)
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While the transatlantic routes between Europe and North America were the major focus of development and robust competition from the mid 19th century onward, the transpacific service between North America and ports in Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific was comparatively neglected, served primarily by cargo vessels with token passenger capacity, or smaller, economy-oriented passenger liners.
In 1910, the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand (a subsidiary of Britain's Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company) set out to change that, placing an order with John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Scotland for a luxurious new liner for Australia-Canada service. The new ship, Niagara, launched August 17th, 1912, being christened by Laura Borden, Lady Borden (wife of Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden), who made the trip from Ottawa to Scotland for the purpose.
The completed Niagara departed Clydebank in March of 1913 on her delivery voyage to Sydney, after which she started her normal service, sailing from Sydney, Australia to Vancouver, Canada, via Auckland, New Zealand; Suva, Fiji, and Honolulu, Hawaii. Niagara was something of an international ship, owned by a New Zealand subsidiary of a British company, built in Britain, flying the British flag, but crewed almost entirely by Australians, albeit with mostly New Zealander officers, and operating to/from Canada. Upon entering regular service in early May of 1913, the Auckland Star newspaper boasted of Niagara being an important new link in the consolidation of the British Empire into a single multinational bloc.
Niagara measured 13,145 gross tons and just under 525 ft. long – small by Atlantic standards, but enough to make her the largest ship in transpacific service before World War I, and, also, the largest ship owned by a New Zealand-based company. She carried 667 passengers, comparatively low density by the standards of the time, consisting of 281 First Class, 210 Second Class, and 176 Third Class, and 300 crew. A considerable 129,130 cubic ft of cargo space was provided in 4 holds, of which all but the forewardmost one were refrigerated for perishable cargo.
Her powerplant was somewhat unusual – two sets of quadruple expansion steam engines driving twin screws, with waste steam scavenged to drive a single low pressure turbine driving a third, central propeller. The system was identical to that employed by White Star Line on their Olympic of 1911 (and her ill-fated sister ships Titanic and Britannic), but was quite uncommon in general, designed to blend the high cruising speed and acceleration of a turbine, with the greater fuel efficiency at low speeds offered by conventional piston engines. The entire plant generated 12,500hp, giving a top speed of 18 knots and a usual cruising speed of 15. Even more unconventionally, Niagara's 8 boilers were capable of burning either coal or oil.
Oil fuel technology was still in its early days, but promised greater fuel economy, reduced emissions, lower crew requirements (with better working conditions), and faster turnaround times in port (cutting refueling time from 7 days to just 30 hours), however, not every port facility was capable of bunkering oil, hence the need for coal as backwards compatibility. Niagara burned coal on her original delivery voyage, but usually burned oil in regular service, with Niagara being the very first oil-fueled passenger ship licensed by the UK Board of Trade.
On board, Niagara's public rooms were every bit the equal of the great Atlantic liners, featuring richly paneled and furnished spaces decorated in several historical themes – most First and Second Class rooms were in Louis XVI style, however, the Second Class dining room was Georgian, the First Class Music Room was Adam, and one of her two premier First Class suites was in Louis XIV, and the First Class Dining Room and Smoking Room both featured ornate domed skylights. One area where Niagara was not to the equal of the Atlantic, though, was in terms of bathrooms – only two First Class cabins (the top suites, billed as cabins de luxe) featured private facilities, everyone else had shared bathrooms. This was not entirely uncommon at the time, but private bathrooms in at least First Class were starting to become more and more expected in transatlantic liners.
In 1913, Union Steamship New Zealand placed an order with Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering in Glasgow, Scotland for a larger sister ship, Aotearoa, to be powered entirely by turbines. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Niagara was permitted to remain in civilian transpacific service, however, operating under blackout conditions with windows and portholes covered with either heavy curtains or painted black, all extraneous exterior lights shut off, and the funnels painted solid black. Aotearoa was requisitioned by the British Royal Navy in 1915, when nearly complete, and commissioned in December of that year as the auxiliary cruiser HMS Avenger, which went on to be sunk by the German U-boat in 1917.
As the war dragged on, service standards on Niagara declined, due to rationing and shortages, and the difficulty in maintaining a full compliment of crew. During October of 1918, Niagara became embroiled in serious controversy, as the ship which brought the Spanish Flu pandemic to New Zealand. Niagara departed Honolulu on October 1st, during the 4-day voyage to Fiji, crew members began to fall ill, upon arrival in Suva on October 5th, there were approximately 55 cases on board, including the ship's doctor, which required two other doctors sailing as passengers to volunteer their services. Niagara sailed again on October 7th – by that point, word of the outbreak had reached the New Zealand government. The Health Minister determined that the new strain of influenza was not classified as a notifiable disease, and that he, therefore, lacked the legal authority to quarantine the ship, unless the Governor General, Arthur Foljambe, 2nd Earl of Liverpool issued an emergency order allowing him to do so.
By the time Niagara reached Auckland on October 12th, there were over 100 cases on board, and 1 had died, with 25 in critical condition. The district health officer and the port health officer both boarded and examined the patients, and sent telegrams to Lord Liverpool and the health ministry that the infected passengers and crew appeared to have only ordinary influenza, recommending that those who required hospitalization be transferred to facilities in the city, and everyone else be permitted to disembark as normal. Niagara sailed again on October 22nd, upon arrival in Sydney, the Australian authorities held her at quarantine in the harbor for a full week, with most passengers held in facilities on shore until being released on November 1st. In the meantime, Spanish Flu rapidly spread through New Zealand, killing 9,000 people during the months of October and November.
Lord Liverpool appointed a commission of inquiry which reported in 1919 that, although there were cases of Spanish Flu at a small military barracks in the Auckland suburb of Narrow Neck prior to Niagara's arrival, they had been well contained, and that it was the disembarking of Niagara's passengers and movement of her cases into hospitals in the city that caused the mass spread of the pandemic throughout the country. The local health authorities were exonerated, but the health minister was criticized for blindly accepting their determination that it was an ordinary flu, despite evidence to the contrary, and not requesting an emergency quarantine order.
Postwar, Niagara remained in regular service, but her status as the fleet flagship was lost to the new Aorangi in 1925, ordered as a replacement for the sunken Aotearoa/Avenger. A powerful new wireless set installed in 1928 allowed Niagara to reliably send and receive messages as far away as London from the middle of the Pacific, causing a craze among passengers to send novelty messages to England, which the line charged a premium for. Later that year, refrigeration was added to her forward hold, the only one not previously equipped, allowing her to carry perishable cargo in all holds. Niagara underwent a through mechanical and cosmetic overhaul during 1929.
However, her owners became increasingly concerned about the Matson Line in the United States, with a generous federal mail subsidy, Matson was getting ready to branch out from their traditional US mainland-Hawaii service with a fleet of new, modern liners for transpacific routes.
In anticipation, during 1931, P&O Steam Navigation (the owners of Union Steamship of NZ) and Canadian-Pacific Railway Company (parent of Canadian-Pacific Steamships) opted to merge their transpacific passenger business into a new joint venture, the Canadian-Australasian Line (referred to as the All Red Route, after one of the colors commonly used to depict British territories on the map), with Niagara joining the new fleet. Between 1931 and 1937, Canadian Pacific and P&O unsuccessfully lobbied the British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand governments for loan guarantees and other financial aide to order new ships to better compete with Matson, but, despite several commissions of inquiry into the matter and white papers published, no action was taken, and, in 1939, Canadian-Australasian Line officially abandoned their interest in new vessels.
Upon the outbreak of World War II, Niagara was again left in commercial service, under blackout conditions, as in the First World War. The liner departed Auckland for the last time on June 18th, 1940, loaded with half of the New Zealand military's entire supply of small arms ammunition, being dispatched to replenish what British forces lost in the Dunkirk evacuations, along with 590 South African gold bars that the British government was to use as payment to the United States for munitions and other war materiel.
At 3:40am on June 19th, while sailing off the coast of Bream Head on the east coast of the North Island, Niagara struck a mine that had been laid by the German auxiliary cruiser Orion a few days earlier. All 351 passengers and crew were efficiently and safely evacuated within an hour and a half, and the empty Niagara sank at 5:32am in 420 ft of water, between the Hen & Chicken Islands and the Mokohinau Islands.
The Bank of England offered a reward of £27,000 and 2.5% of the value of the recovered gold for anyone who could salvage it. An Australian consortium called the United Salvage Syndicate stepped forward, located the ship in February, blasted a hole in the side of the hull, and between October and December of 1941 successfully raised 555 out of the 590 gold bars, receiving about £86,000 in payments. Further private salvage efforts in April of 1953 raised another 30 bars, leaving 5 still unaccounted for.
Also still on board is a quantity of fuel oil, estimated at up to 4200 tons. Oil has leaked continuously since 1940, but leakage started gradually increasing in the 1980s, and, in recent decades, has become more severe due to ongoing deterioration of the wreck. Over the past few years,there has been increasing pressure within New Zealand to pump out the remaining oil to prevent the major ecological disaster that would occur if the ship's structure were to catastrophically fail and release the entire quantity at once, the cost of remediation been estimated at $6 million.
2022 Ioniq SE
1964 Corvair Monza -
@ranwhenparked So the ship took half of New Zealand's ammunition with it too? That seems like a vulnerability in wartime. Pretty crazy that the oil left in it is only now becoming a problem though.
Color enthusiast, Citroën fanatic, and Cruze driver
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@ranwhenparked It looks like it was only 20 miles from the New Zealand coast when it was sunk. Kind of amazing that a German warship could go unnoticed laying mines so close to British territory. All the more so since Orion came all the way from Germany through hostile waters to get there. Apparently Orion managed to hang around hunting shipping for another year, before safely returning to Germany. The Soviets eventually took it out towards the end of the war, when it was evacuating Germans ahead of the Red Army's advance.
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@WhoIsTheLeader well, yeah, but Britain had lost basically all theirs at Dunkirk, and they had to be resupplied quickly to continue holding the Germans off, New Zealand figured take care of the immediate need and worry about how to backfill inventory later
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@ranwhenparked That's a wild ending!
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@facw
(wiki) well it was a steamer converted with 6 6" guns. -
@gmporschenut-also-a-fan-of-hondas Which probably should have been a recipe for failure. Certainly their only hope was to pretend to be regular freighter and fly a false flag, since a real warship would be at a considerable advantage against a slow and lightly protected freighter. But I guess that worked for them, at least early in the war.
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@facw It was pretty common practice in both world wars, more so in the first, to just take a civilian ship, paint it grey, bolt some guns on the deck, and send it out into battle. They were usually classified as either merchant cruisers or auxiliary cruisers, in some cases, ships were designed from the start with some special adaptations as a condition of government subsidies, but it was mostly window dressing with little practical advantage in combat. I guess the last time something like that really happened was in the Falklands, when the British commandeered basically anything that floated, they turned North Sea fishing trawlers into minesweepers, etc
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@facw i believe there were a couple cases of warships being caught offguard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMAS_Sydney -
@gmporschenut-also-a-fan-of-hondas According to wikipedia that's the only one. And the aux. cruiser was also sunk. Regardless, Sydney was a significantly more capable ship that through bad luck and/or ineptitude was sunk by the raider (who according to wikipedia knew they were doomed and sent a radio message to alert German naval command of that fact before the battle).
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A powerful new wireless set installed in 1928 allowed Niagara to reliably send and receive messages as far away as London from the middle of the Pacific, causing a craze among passengers to send novelty messages to England, which the line charged a premium for.
OG Instagram. LIVING BEST LIFE IN TROPICS STOP SUN OVER YARDARM COMMA TIME FOR G AND T ENDS
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@WhoIsTheLeader Ever heard of the Halifax Explosion?
In 1917 the SS Mont Blanc, a French cargo ship laden with ammunition, gun powder, and aviation fuel was leaving the port of Halifax to take the munitions to Europe. As she was trying to exit the harbor she colided with another vessel, caught fire, and exploded with the equivalent force of 2.9 kilotons of TNT.
The explosion is one of the largest man made, non-nuclear explosions ever (equivalent to the 2020 Beirut blast). It resulted in 1800 killed, 9000 injured, leveled everything in a half mile radius, and cause significant damage to structures over a mile away.
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@facw where did it say it was teh only ship?
i went down a deep rabbit hole a couple years ago of Drachinifel navy videos and think there was another of a raider surprising a destroyer in the north sea, maybe not a sinking.
Is funny when one raider meets another raider pretending to be the first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Cap_Trafalgar -
@gmporschenut-also-a-fan-of-hondas
In one incident, the German Kormoran (ex-merchantman Steiermark) managed to surprise and sink the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, which approached too close, though Kormoran was also sunk in the engagement. This was the only occasion in history when an armed merchantman managed to sink a modern warship;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_merchantman#Auxiliary_cruisers
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@ranwhenparked Shhhhhh, I'm reading.
