Divers Find Wreck of WWII Steamship SS Cornwallis
The wreck of a Canadian steam merchant ship sunk by a German submarine during World War II has been discovered in the Gulf of Maine, nearly 82 years after the sinking killed 43 of the 48 people on board.
SS Cornwallis was an ordinary cargo ship going about her trade in 1944 when she crossed paths with a German submarine on a covert mission to the U.S.
According to historical accounts, the 400-foot, 5,458-ton ship left Barbados on November 20, 1944, loaded with bags of sugar and barrels of molasses for Saint John, New Brunswick. She carried 48 people, including seven armed guards, and was routed without an escort through the Cape Cod Canal and north along the New England coast.
On December 3, Cornwallis sailed into the path of the German submarine U-1230, which had landed two agents near Hancock, Maine, four days earlier. The agents had been sent to gather intelligence indd the U.S. and possibly carry out sabotage (they were later caught in New York and convicted on espionage charges).
When in range of Cornwallis, the U-boat launched a torpedo, which struck near the ship's forward cargo hold. The ship went down by the bow in less than 10 minutes.
Six men made it off the ship and reached a lifeboat that came loose as she sank. A fishing vessel later picked them up, but one of the six died of hypothermia. The five survivors were transferred to a U.S. Navy vessel, which landed them in Rockland, Maine.
The wreck’s location remained a mystery for more than eight decades until July of this year, when divers from the Nomad Exploration Team found it. The team said it had made repeated trips to the northern Maine coast over several years before locating the wreck in nearly 400 feet of water - a depth requiring technical diving techniques to reach. The site first showed up on side-scan sonar, and divers then went down to confirm it was Cornwallis.
“For the team, finding the wreck was the culmination of years of persistence. For the families and communities connected to the ship, it brings renewed attention to a largely forgotten tragedy,” said Danny Allan, a member of the Nomad Exploration Team.
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Cornwallis was built for the Canadian government by J. Coughlan & Sons of Vancouver, British Columbia. She was delivered in October 1921 as Canadian Transporter and took the name Cornwallis in 1932, when she was transferred to Canadian National Steamships.
The 1944 sinking was not the first time Cornwallis had been attacked. In September 1942, while she lay at anchor in Carlisle Bay at Bridgetown, Barbados, the German submarine U-514 fired a series of torpedoes at her. The harbor’s torpedo net stopped most of them, but one got through and hit Cornwallis. The ship went down in shallow water and was only partly submerged. She was raised and spent nearly a year under repair before returning to service in August 1943.
