The SS Gairsoppa was a British steam merchant ship built in Jarrow and launched in 1919. After a long civilian career, she saw service during the Second World War. She was named in honour of the town of Gerusoppa on the banks of River Sharavati in Karnataka, India, which due to its easy access to water transportation and as a distribution centre for crops including pepper, was the commercial capital for centuries. She sailed with several convoys, before joining Convoy SL 64 in February 1941. Gairsoppa left the convoy when she exhausted the majority of her fuel and was making her way to Galway, Ireland, when a German U-boat fired a torpedo that sank her with the loss of 85 lives. The wreck of the Gairsoppa was discovered in 2011, and it was announced that an operation to recover its cargo of silverbullion, with an estimated value of £150 million, would begin in 2012. On 18July 2013 Odyssey Marine Exploration, of Tampa, Florida, reported that it had recovered 48 tons of silver.
Description
Gairsoppa was long, with a beam of. She had a depth of and a draught of. She was propelled by a 517 nhptriple expansion steam engine driving a single screw propeller. The engine was built by Palmers. It had cylinders of, and diameter by stroke. It could propel the ship at.
Attached to convoy SL-64 under master Gerald Hyland, she was returning from India to Britain in 1941 with a cargo of silver ingots destined for the Royal Mint, pig iron and tea. She joined the 8 knot convoy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, but while in a heavy storm and running low on coal off the coast of neutral Ireland, Gairsoppa split off from the convoy and set course for Galway harbour at a reduced speed of 5 knots. A German Focke-Wulf Fw 200 aircraft circled her at 08:00 on 16 February, and at 22:30, under the command of Ernst Mengersen, spotted her. Torpedoed on the starboard side in No. 2 hold, she sank within 20 minutes, claiming the lives of 85 people. Her last reported position was, southwest of Galway Bay. The wreck lies below the surface. It was thought that three lifeboats launched, but only one in the charge of the second officer, R. H. Ayres, with four Europeans and two Lascars on board, made it away; the rest of the crew was lost. By the 13th day only the second officer, the radio officer, and one seaman gunner remained alive. Ayres and his boat reached the Cornish coast two weeks later at Caerthillian Cove in the parish of Landewednack. The boat capsized before the Lizard lifeboat could reach them, and only the second officer was pulled from the sea alive. Two of the men aboard, Robert Frederick Hampshire, and an unknown Indian seaman, died trying to get ashore. They are buried at St Wynwallow's, Church Cove, Landewednack. Ayres was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his attempts to rescue his fellow sailors; he lived until 1992.
Memorial
The eleven crew members who died are commemorated on the 51st panel of the Tower Hill Memorial, and the seventy lascars who did not survive the Gairsoppa's sinking are commemorated on the Chittagong War Memorial.
Recovery
In 1989, the British government invited tenders to salvage the cargo and received just one, from Deepwater Recovery and Exploration Ltd. After a further tender in January 2010, the government awarded a US company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a two-year contract to find and salvage the of silver, which when the ship was lost was worth £600,000. On September26, 2011, Odyssey Marine confirmed the identity and location of the Gairsoppa after less than two months of searching. The wreck of the ship was found on the sea floor at a depth of nearly off the coast of Ireland. Footage of the wreck was provided by the company on September26, 2011 and published on the NYTimes.com website. Odyssey Marine later reported that its recovery effort in 2012 yielded 1,218 silver ingots weighing approximately, and that a further recovery effort had commenced operations on May29, 2013. Odyssey Marine believes the site contains a residual 1,599 insured silver ingots and an unknown, possibly substantial, amount of uninsured silver. Odyssey will retain 80% of the value of any recovered cargo, with the remainder going to HM Treasury. On July23, 2013 it was reported that a total of 61 tons of silver bullion had been recovered from the wreckage, with an estimated value of £137 million. In 2014 the Royal Mint issued 20,000 commemorative Quarter Ounce Britannia coins, each coin struck with a denomination of 50p, using a portion of the silver recovered. “Voices from the Deep” – Date: 29 March 2018 – 13 January 2019 - a new exhibition at The Postal Museum London showcases some of the 85 documents, 226 envelopes, sets of stamps, cheques, photographs, postcards, Christmas cards etc recovered by Odyssey Marine Exploration from the wreck of the Gairsoppa.
