Qualla: SS Elbe

SS Elbe: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At 5:30 a.m. on 30 January 1895, most of the 354 passengers aboard SS Elbe were still asleep when the SS Crathie struck her port side hard enough to flood whole compartments at once. Twenty minutes later the liner was gone, and the only survivors were 20 people crammed into a single lifeboat 50 miles from any shore. Below the waves with Captain von Goessel were the women and children he had ordered to assemble on the lee side - because the rope blocks on the derricks were frozen solid, and the boats they were waiting for could not be lowered.

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SS Elbe: A River-Class Star

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Elbe came down the slipway at John Elder & Company's Govan yard on the Clyde on 2 April 1881, the first of eleven express liners Norddeutscher Lloyd named after German rivers. She was a straight-bowed, four-masted, two-funnelled fast ship - 15 knots out of a three-cylinder compou...

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SS Elbe: The Collision

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The North Sea was at its January worst: freezing wind, mountainous seas, and the kind of darkness that swallows lights. Elbe had left Bremerhaven that day and was firing warning rockets to mark her position. The SS Crathie, a 475-ton steamer carrying 12 hands and a cargo of gener...

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SS Elbe: Anna Boecker

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Of all the souls aboard, only one of the twenty survivors was a woman. Anna Boecker was a quiet young lady's maid, travelling to Southampton with her elderly employer. When the first lifeboat capsized she ended up in the freezing water; everyone else from it scrambled back onto t...

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SS Elbe: The Court at Rotterdam

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three hundred and thirty-two people died with the Elbe - by some counts 334. The court that convened in Rotterdam in November 1895 found the Crathie wholly at fault, but the verdict that shocked Europe was the captain's: Alexander Gordon was merely censured for steaming away from...

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SS Elbe: The Wreck Below

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She lay undisturbed for nearly a century. In the early months of 1987 a group of Dutch amateur divers found her on the seabed, salvaged a small quantity of porcelain, earthenware, and glassware, and used the marked pieces to confirm what they had found. Today the Elbe is a hush i...

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