I can’t look at the pictures of Norwich City taken before its stormy, fiery midnight encounter with Gardner Island without John Masefield’s small poem
“Cargoes” echoing in my brain. “Dirty British coaster …” wrote Britain’s Poet Laureate, and this is what I’m reminded of looking at those photos. I’m glad I wasn’t one of those unfortunate seamen aboard her that night, or any other night.
Built as
Normanby, her “new” name,
Norwich City, can be seen in
pictures, painted in white, a little way back from the bow. But in neither of the pictures from the New Zealand Survey Expedition of 1938 (this one of the
starboard side, this one of the
port side) can I discern any of those white letters remaining on either side. Did the ferocity of the fire bake the paint off, so that the name was completely gone, eventually causing Captain Coleman of USS
Bushnell in late 1939 to have to do research to learn her name (so that the shipwreck could be properly listed in the Navy’s published “sailing directions”)?
It’s been noted that both Harry Maude (in 1937) and the New Zealanders were at some point able to know she was named
Norwich City. Ric thinks that Harry Maude’s knowledge must have come from something he could see onboard, intimating that resources on Ocean Island were inadequate to have informed him of this later when he wrote his post-visit report while there. Then, when Maude arrived with the first of the colonists while the New Zealanders were at work on Gardner the next year, it’s thought that Maude could have informed them of the shipwreck’s identity.
But now this thought comes to my mind. Both the PISS initial visit that Maude and Bevington made in late 1937, as well as the Kiwi visit in late 1938, resulted in reports (
Bevington's and
Hay's) that say they tied their own vessels off to the wrecked hulk’s stern. Most ships I’ve seen have their name and city of registration painted on the stern. Might this have been how they were informed of her name, assuming the fire didn’t bake that off, too?
Then, in January 1939 (as noted by Petty Officer M. H. Hay), “One day a severe storm blew up and it was too much for the wreck on the reef. She just crumpled up, the stern half breaking off and disappearing into the deep water on the outside of the reef.” (I’ll bet those Kiwis were glad they weren’t tied off to her stern that day!) Later that year, when USS
Bushnell arrived, with the bow scorched and the stern missing there would then not be any indication of the beached ship’s name.
But in July 1937, the stern with her name on it would have been there for any curious castaways to learn her name.