SS Sirio
| History | |
|---|---|
| Name: | SS Sirio |
| Owner: | Navigazione Generale Italiana |
| Operator: | Societa Italiana di Transporti Maritimi Raggio & Co |
| Launched: | 24 March 1884 |
| Christened: | 24 March 1884, by Lizzie Hamilton |
| Fate: | Foundered after colliding with a rock, 4 August 1906 |
| General characteristics | |
| Length: | 380 feet (120 m) |
| Beam: | 42 feet (13 m) |
| Draft: | 33 feet 6 inches (10.21 m) |
| Installed power: | Four double-ended steel boilers, three-cylinder compound engines |
| Speed: | 14.87 knots (27.54 km/h) maximum |
| Notes: | 645 Passengers and 127 crew total 772 (estimated) of which 554 saved and at least 150 to 218 lost with the ship (estimated) |
SS Sirio was an Italian merchant steamer that had a shipwreck off the Spanish coast on August 4th 1906, causing the deaths of at least 150 Italian and Spanish emigrants bound for Argentina. The shipwreck gained notoriety because the captain, Giuseppe Piccone, abandoned ship at the first opportunity. The wreck had a profound effect on communities in northern Italy and was remembered in popular songs of the era.
Sirio was a 4,141-ton, 5,012-horsepower steamboat built in 1883 in Glasgow and owned by Navigazione Generale Italiana of Genoa. She sailed on the Raggio Line, operated by the Societa Italiana di Transporti Maritimi Raggio & Co. She left Genoa on 2 August and picked up additional passengers in Barcelona, and was en route for Cadiz, carrying eight hundred third-class passengers migrating to Argentina. The captain later stated that there were 645 passengers (570 embarked in Genoa, the rest were picked up in Barcelona) and 127 crew members on board.
The ship ran aground on the Punta Hormigas, a reef off Hormigas Island, two and a half miles east of Cape Palos, Cartagena, Spain. According to an eyewitness, the captain of the French steamer Marie Louise, she was "taking a dangerous course" when he saw her stop, her bow lifting. The boilers exploded, and "dead bodies began to float past the French steamer, and those on board could hear the shrieks of the drowning." A boat was launched that saved 29 passengers, while the Marie Louise herself saved another 25. Three-hundred passengers, most of them Italian and Spanish, lost their lives.
Among the passengers were a number of Catholic officials. The Bishop of São Paulo, José de Camargo Barros, "went down with the ship while blessing the drowning passengers." The Archbishop of São Pedro, Cláudio Gonçalves Ponce de Leon, survived.Boniface Natter, the first abbot of the rededicated Buckfast Abbey (a Benedictine abbey in England), drowned as well; his fellow traveler, Anscar Vonier, survived and became the next abbot.
...
Wikipedia