Does anyone remember a television documentary series from the 1970s called “Connections”, presented by James Burke? In each program he would trace a thread of history through a series of closely linked events, weakly linked events and just plain coincidences to explain the complicated reasons why certain things we take for granted had come about. A sort of historical trivial pursuit.
Every now and then I get to play something along those lines with shipwrecks.
The 3555-ton Conch was built in Stockton in 1892 for the Shell Transport and Trading Company. On 3 June 1903 the Conch was on the way from Novorossisk to Madras, via Colombo, when it struck Akarta rock off the SriLankan coast.
Th Conch went down resting against the rock, spilling oil and becoming Sri Lanka's first oil tanker wreck. This wasn't the only oil tanker called Conch to have come to grief. A 5620 ton tanker of the same name was built in 1909 by Swan Hunter and operated by the Anglo Saxon Oil Company.
On 8 December 1916 this Conch was steaming up the English Channel on its way from Rangoon to London with a cargo of 7,000 tons of benzene when it was torpedoed and sunk by UB23, 12 miles south of Anvil point in Dorset.
The SriLankan Conch was not the first steam powered oil tanker. That distinction belongs to the Gluck Auf, built in the UK in 1886 and I have absolutely no idea what became of it.
Neither was it the first to be wrecked. The first steam powered oil tanker to be wrecked in UK waters, and possibly the first to be wrecked anywhere in the World, was the 2026 ton Blesk, built in Gothenburg 1890.
On the 2 December 1896 the Blesk was on its way from Batoum in the Black Sea to Hamburg when the Eddystone lighthouse was mistaken for a light on the north coast of France. The course was corrected a little to the north and the Blesk steamed straight in to the Greystone to the east of Bolt Tail on the South Devon coast.
A few plates, all that remains of the Blesk, are diveable in 10 metres of water, though I confess that at the time of writing this I have not dived it.
