History of the steamship

In September 1897, a steamship built at the Harland & Wolff shipyard was launched in Belfast (Ireland). Initially, the ship was called “Winifreda”, but went down in history under the name “Mesaba”.

For almost 15 years the Winifred-Mesaba was an ordinary steamship. Initially, the ship belonged to the American “Atlantic Transport Line”. This company operated transatlantic passenger and cargo flights. For several years, “Mesaba” flew under the Belgian flag, experiencing a number of collisions with other steamships (at that time this was not an uncommon phenomenon). And in 1912, she was listed as a reserve ship on the trade line between Great Britain and the USA.

“Titanic” got a chance to survive

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, then the largest ship in the world, sailed from Southampton for New York. Everyone knows how his first and last voyage ended: on the night of April 15, he hit an iceberg and sank, taking the lives of almost one and a half thousand people.

It is less well known that the Titanic could and should avoid colliding with an iceberg. On the same April 1912, one of his rare commercial voyages was carried out by the “Mesaba” ferry, which was then owned by the Red Star Line company. The captain of Mesaba, north of the Titanic, correctly assessed the ice conditions and a warning radiogram was sent to the ship (and all eastbound ships). He read the following:

From “Mesaba” to “Titanic” and all the ships are heading east. At latitudes 42° – 41°25′ N and longitudes 49° – 50°30′ W, heavy ice floes and numerous large icebergs as well as ice fields were observed.

While the “Titanic” passengers were having dinner at the time, the ship’s radio operator urgently sent messages, mostly of maritime enthusiasm, to different parts of the world. He was so busy that he did not take the “Mesaba” radiogram to the captain. Moreover, when the “Mesaba” radio operator sent the next message in which he wanted to confirm that the information was personally delivered to the captain, his colleague from the “Titanic” ignored him. Two hours later, the Titanic collided with an iceberg.

The other fate of the steamer that tried to save the Titanic is known to us: during the First World War, the ship was part of convoys. And on September 1, 1918, the German submarine UB-118 fired a torpedo and sank the “Mesaba” in the Irish Sea. 20 crew members died, including the captain.

How did they find “Mesaba”?

Researchers from the University of Bangor (England) report that they have found “Mesaba” on the seafloor. They did this with multi-beam sonar, a tool of roughly the same importance for a marine archaeologist from aerial photography to landscape archaeology. Multi-beam sonar allows superstructure details to be mapped in sonar images of the seabed in such detail that they can be detected.

In total, 273 ships were scanned and marked on the map using sonar at the bottom of the Irish Sea. After finding a shipwreck, the researchers cross-check the find with the UK Hydrographic Office’s shipwreck database and other sources.

Some of the ships, of course, remain unrecognizable in any case. Some, such as Mesaba, have been misidentified in the past, so revalidation is required. Previously, it was only possible to reliably determine which ship was lying on the seabed during direct operation under water. This is a very expensive pleasure, limited not only financially, but also in the number of trained underwater archaeologists.

The steamship “Mesaba” at the bottom of the Irish Sea / Photo by Bangor University

A multi-beam sonar solves this problem: it shows the sunken ship in enough detail to be identified.