SS Cristóbal Colón was a Spanish ocean liner built for the Compañía Transatlántica Española (CTE; the “Spanish Line”) by the Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval (SECN) at Ferrol. Launched on 31 October 1921 and completed in 1923, she measured and about in overall length and was among the largest passenger ships built in Spain in the early interwar years. She ran on the company’s Spain–Cuba–Mexico–New York services until she was wrecked on the North Rock reefs of Bermuda on the night of 25 October 1936. No lives were lost; the abandoned hull, later used as a bombing target in the Second World War, is now the largest known shipwreck in Bermudian waters.
Design and construction The liner was ordered as part of CTE’s postwar renewal of the northern Spain–Caribbean–New York service and was built at SECN’s Ferrol yard, the first transatlantic passenger steamer completed there. She was a near-sister of Alfonso XIII (later renamed Habana). Spanish accounts give her launch date as 31 October 1921 and completion in 1923.
As completed she was a steel, twin-screw turbine steamer with a cruiser stern, a cellular double bottom, and ten watertight bulkheads. Register dimensions were about between perpendiculars, beam and a moulded depth of about ; overall length was about . Three steel decks and a shade deck were fitted. Provisional register tonnage in 1923 was about ; the settled figures used thereafter were and .
Machinery consisted of coal-fired cylindrical boilers under forced draught and four Curtis–Parsons single-reduction geared steam turbines driving two shafts. Service speed was about . Lloyd’s classed her after completion, with machinery surveys recorded into 1936. Early radio letters were MBPZ; by the mid-1930s the international call sign was EADU. Direction-finding wireless was fitted by the mid-1920s.
Passenger accommodation was arranged in several classes for more than 2,000 people, with a designed crew of about 243.
Career From 1923 the ship worked CTE’s Line 1 from Cantabrian ports (Bilbao, Santander and Gijón) to Havana, Veracruz and New York, in company with SS Alfonso XIII. Francisco de Cossío’s company history, as quoted in later Spanish maritime writing, stated that she set a speed record among Spanish and foreign steamers on that line and that the Spanish sovereigns visited the ship at Santander. In April 1933 La Vanguardia still advertised her on the Cantabrian–Cuba service, leaving Gijón on 28 April and A Coruña on 1 May for Havana and Veracruz via New York.
Collision with River Orontes On 2 May 1929, while leaving New York for Spain with about 1,000 passengers, Cristóbal Colón rammed the anchored freighter River Orontes in fog in the Narrows. The Orontes, a 4,300-ton ship of the American Levant Line (a Cunard subsidiary), was waiting with public-health and immigration officers aboard. Captain Eduardo Fano Oyarbide commanded the liner; Captain T. W. Hall commanded the cargo ship. Harbor pilots J. E. McCarthy and R. Oldmixon had been aboard the Colón after she left the pier at 11:30 a.m.
Fano said the fog closed suddenly and the freighter “loomed up” before he could stop. The Spanish stem tore plating on the port after well deck and opened No. 4 hold below the waterline. No one was injured. Fano kept his bow in the gap and pushed the cargo ship into shallow water off Bay Ridge, where her stern settled on the bottom. Tugs later pulled the ships apart; the liner carried away a ten-foot piece of the freighter’s hull and a length of coaming. Cunard announced a suit against the Spanish Line for the damage and for delay while the liner was dry-docked.
The liner returned to her pier at Coenties Slip. Inspection found no damage below the waterline. Immigration authorities then refused to let passengers land. Most were Spanish, Cuban, or Mexican travelers booked to Spain without a United States stopover privilege; a first announcement that American first-class passengers might go ashore was withdrawn. Out-of-town papers reported about eight hundred people “held prisoner” on board. Maduro, the line’s New York agent, expected the ship to sail the same day; if she could not, International Mercantile Marine Company offered to send the passengers to Vigo in Homeric or Belgenland.
Spanish Civil War At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the ship was at Veracruz under Fano. The Republican government requisitioned CTE. Later in 1936 she was at British ports; one Spanish account describes passengers being refused permission to land at Southampton after the company was seized. In October she loaded about 1,600 tons of coal at Cardiff and cleared for Veracruz with no passengers and a crew of about 160, including six stewardesses. Contemporary and later writers stated that the voyage was intended to collect arms for the Republican side, a claim the master did not confirm at the time.
Wreck On the night of 25 October 1936, steaming at about , Cristóbal Colón ran onto the reef about east of North Rock, north of Bermuda, at approximately . Captain Crescencio (also given as Crescencia) Navarro Delgado was in command. He blamed the stranding on the North Rock beacon, which had been unlit for repair. A Bermuda court of inquiry held that he had also failed to use wireless navigational warnings and to distinguish the working lights at Gibbs Hill and St. David’s Head. Four years later a syndicated American navigation feature still used the wreck as an example of the care required on the Bermuda approach, stating that the steamer piled up on the northern reefs in October 1936 in the absence of signals from the North Rock beacon. No lives were lost in the stranding.
Lloyd’s agent at Hamilton cabled that the ship was aground on the north-east reefs with a hole believed to be in No. 3 hold, and soon afterward that the crew had left her with eight feet of water in the boiler room. Attempts to tow her off, including work by the cruiser , failed. Merritt-Chapman & Scott offered a daily-hire salvage contract that was not signed. Underwriters treated the ship as a constructive total loss. A survey dated 4 March 1937 by James H. Silvestre of St. George’s reported the hull hogged and broken abaft the bridge, hanging from the foremast aft.
The male crew were landed on 29 October; the six stewardesses later. After weeks in Bermuda they left on Christmas Eve 1936 in the Pacific Steam Navigation Company liner Reina del Pacífico. A 1941 Bermuda magazine article later reported a rumour that returning crew were shot by the Nationalists; that report is not independently documented in the sources cited here and should not be stated as fact.
Salvage, looting and later damage Bermudians stripped fittings from the wreck despite customs notices. Several men were prosecuted in the colonial courts in late 1936 and 1937. Movable property that could be secured was sold. The wreck remained a navigation mark. In 1937 the steamer Iristo struck nearby reef after her master took the stranded liner for a ship under way. Bermuda authorities later ordered masts, funnel and other upright structure removed so the hulk would not be mistaken for a vessel in the channel.
The September 1940 American reprints still described the Colón as piled on the northern reefs, as a lesson in pilotage, and did not report that the hulk had already been used as a bombing target. Later Bermuda official and popular accounts state that Allied forces used the abandoned liner for bombing or gunnery practice during the Second World War, after which the hull was broken across the reef; a contemporary 1939–1945 operations order naming unit and date has not been produced in the sources below. A Spanish summary dates American air practice on the remains to early 1940. Further demolition has been attributed to a postwar contract with the Bermudian diver Teddy Tucker.
Wreck site The remains lie on both sides of the reef in about of water and are scattered over roughly of seabed. Visible features include boilers, turbines, shafts, rectangular portholes, winches and, at the stern, a bathtub. Unexploded practice ordnance has been reported among the debris. The site is a protected, buoyed location in Bermuda’s historic-wreck programme, with a no-fishing radius, and is used as reef-fish habitat.
See also Spanish cruiser Cristóbal Colón Compañía Transatlántica Española Antonio López (shipwreck)
References
External links Bermuda Department of Environment and Natural Resources — Cristobal Colon Bermuda 100 wreck site Lloyd's Register, 1924, steamer entry Newspapers.com image of the 9 September 1940 Hickory Daily Record reprint