Qualla: Cadmus (Ship Name)

Cadmus (Ship Name): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cadmus founded Thebes, killed a dragon, and gave Greek mythology its letters. He was also a popular ship name. Between 1813 and 1942 at least six different vessels carried the name across the world's oceans - East Indiamen, Yankee whalers, a New York packet that carried the Marquis de Lafayette to America, a cargo steamer torpedoed by a U-boat off Flamborough Head, a Norwegian banana boat sunk by a German submarine off the Gulf of Mexico. The waypoint here, twenty nautical miles south by east of Flamborough Head in the North Sea, marks where one of them went down in 1917 with all 22 crew somehow surviving.

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Cadmus (Ship Name): The 1818 Packet and General Lafayette

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The most storied of the Cadmuses was built in 1818 in New York. She was a packet ship - a working transatlantic vessel sailing the New York-to-Havre route in regular service, the trans-oceanic equivalent of a scheduled train. In 1824 she carried General Lafayette to New York at t...

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Cadmus (Ship Name): The Other Whalers and the East Indiaman

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1813 Cadmus was launched at Sunderland and traded with the East Indies under license from the British East India Company until 1827. She then made two voyages as a whaler in the British southern whale fishery before being lost in 1835. A 1816 Cadmus, built at Medford, Massach...

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Cadmus (Ship Name): SS Cadmus and the U-Boat South of Flamborough

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SS Cadmus, the 1911 cargo steamer, is the one tied to this North Sea location. Built at West Hartlepool for John Gaff & Co. of Glasgow and Sydney, she was bought in 1915 by Christian Salvesen & Co. of Leith and armed with a twelve-pounder gun on her poop deck for the war. On 18 O...

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Cadmus (Ship Name): The Banana Boat

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last Cadmus in the record was a Danish-built motor ship of 1926, launched by Kjobenhavns Flydedok & Skibsvaerft in Copenhagen and owned by L. Harboe Jensen & Co of Oslo. She was chartered to the United Fruit Company. On 1 July 1942, sailing from Tela, Honduras to Galveston wi...

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