The SS Naronic and the Bottles in the Atlantic

The SS Naronic was a 6,594-ton iron-hulled steamship built at Harland and Wolff in Belfast in 1892 for the White Star Line’s Liverpool to New York livestock service. She was a working ship of the late Victorian transatlantic trade, a kind of vessel almost forgotten in the shadow of the great passenger liners of the same era. Naronic and her sister Bovic were among the largest cattle ships then in service, designed to carry up to a thousand head of cattle on the eastbound leg from American feedlots to British markets, returning westbound with general cargo and a small complement of crew.

She made eight successful crossings between her launch and the early winter of 1893. On her ninth, departing Liverpool on the evening of February 11, 1893, she carried no livestock, a small cargo of general goods, and a complement of seventy-four officers and men under the command of Captain William Roberts. She was last sighted by the Liverpool pilot at around eight o’clock on the evening of departure, dropping the pilot off the Tuskar Rock light at the southern end of the Irish Sea. After that point, she was never seen again.

When Naronic failed to make her scheduled arrival at New York on February 24, the White Star Line waited a further week before declaring her overdue. The North Atlantic in February 1893 had been unusually severe, with multiple gales sweeping the route and a number of other vessels reporting damage. The first assumption was that Naronic had simply been delayed. By the middle of March, when no further news had been received, the line acknowledged the loss publicly. The Board of Trade opened a formal inquiry.

The Lifeboats

The first physical evidence of the disaster came in early March, when two of Naronic’s lifeboats were found drifting empty in the open Atlantic by the German liner Coventry on a routine westbound crossing. The boats were identified by their builder’s plates as belonging to the missing ship. They were waterlogged but otherwise undamaged. There were no bodies aboard either of them, no provisions, and no sign that they had been launched in any orderly fashion.

The discovery confirmed that Naronic had been lost at sea. It did not explain how. The condition of the boats suggested they had been swept from the davits rather than launched by the crew, which in turn suggested that the loss had been sudden and that the ship had gone down before any organised abandonment could be carried out. The Board of Trade inquiry, completed later that year, attributed the loss to “stress of weather and possibly collision with ice,” and observed that no specific cause could be determined from the available evidence.

The Bottles

What has kept the Naronic case alive in the literature of maritime mysteries, beyond the bare fact of a large modern steamship vanishing without survivors, is the curious series of message bottles washed ashore on three continents over the following months. The first was found on the Virginia coast on March 30, 1893, by a fisherman walking the beach near Cape Henry. It contained a piece of paper bearing the message: “Naronic sinking. All hands praying. Please pray for us. Goodbye.”

A second bottle was found at Ocean View, Virginia, on April 18 of the same year, with a longer message claiming that the ship had struck ice at one o’clock in the morning of February 19 and was sinking rapidly. A third was found at Mt. Desert Rock off the Maine coast in May, with a message in a different handwriting describing a fire aboard the ship. A fourth was recovered on the coast of Brazil in late summer, partially deteriorated, with a fragmentary message in what appeared to be the hand of one of the ship’s officers. A fifth, the most carefully analysed of the group, was found on the coast of Ireland in October by a child playing on the strand at Lahinch.

White Star and the Board of Trade investigated each of the messages. Several were dismissed as obvious hoaxes, the work of pranksters playing on the public sympathy generated by the loss. Others, however, contained details about the ship and her crew that had not been published, including correctly spelled names of junior officers, the configuration of the engine room, and the day-by-day record of her loading at Liverpool. These details could in principle have been obtained by determined hoaxers from dock workers or family members, but the multiplicity of the messages and the consistency of certain details have continued to attract attention.

For another case in which the disappearance of a vessel produced a series of message bottles whose authenticity has been debated for more than a century, see our entry on the Octavius, the supposedly ice-locked ship of the Northwest Passage.

A Maritime Pattern

The Naronic disaster sits within a recognisable pattern of late Victorian Atlantic losses, including the City of Glasgow in 1854, the President in 1841, and the Pacific in 1856, all of which were modern steamships that vanished on the North Atlantic crossing without survivors. None of these losses required paranormal explanation. The North Atlantic in winter has always been capable of swallowing large modern vessels in conditions that no contemporary technology could have survived.

What distinguishes Naronic in the cultural memory of the period is the bottles. They produced, in the months after the loss, a kind of public seance in which the dead crew appeared briefly to speak from the ocean, in fragments and through obvious distortions, but in numbers and consistencies that resisted easy dismissal. The Liverpool press of 1893 treated the bottles as a national mystery. Family members of the lost crew received the messages, where they bore identifiable names, with a complicated mixture of grief and conviction.

The Modern Record

No wreck of the SS Naronic has ever been located. The position of her loss is unknown to within hundreds of miles. The lifeboats recovered by the Coventry were the only physical artefacts of the ship ever recovered other than the message bottles themselves. The bottles have, in most cases, been lost in turn, although one of the Virginia messages is preserved in the collections of the Maritime Museum of Liverpool and the Lahinch bottle is held by the National Museum of Ireland.

For students of nineteenth-century Atlantic disappearances, the Naronic case offers a particularly clear example of how the loss of a modern industrial ship in mid-ocean could pass quickly into the territory of folklore, and how the gap between the known facts and the persistent need for an explanation can be filled, in the absence of bodies, by a small handful of pieces of paper drifting in glass.

Sources

• Board of Trade (UK). Court Inquiry into the Loss of the SS Naronic, 1893.
• Liverpool Daily Post, contemporary coverage, February-November 1893.
• Eaton, John P. and Charles A. Haas. Falling Star: Misadventures of White Star Line Ships. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.
• Maritime Museum of Liverpool. Naronic file, MMM Archive.