Image: Silver bars from the SS Gairsoppa on the deck of the salvage vessel Seabed Worker. Photo: Odyssey Marine Exploration
By Metro Mode
Nearly five kilometres beneath the Atlantic it lay for over 70 years – the silver cargo from the British cargo ship SS Gairsoppa! Here is the story of the ship that was torpedoed in 1941, the sole survivor and the salvage operation that set a world record.
It almost sounds like an adventure film: a British cargo ship laden with silver sunk in the middle of the Second World War, disappearing into the darkness of the Atlantic and lying there for seven decades. But the story of the SS Gairsoppa is entirely true – and it ends with what has been described as the deepest and largest recovery of precious metal from a shipwreck ever.
A long journey from Calcutta
SS Gairsoppa was built in 1919 at Palmers shipyard in north-east England and was owned by the British India Steam Navigation Company. The ship, which was around 125 metres long, was named after the Gairsoppa Falls in south-west India and spent most of its life in service around India and South East Asia, according to Odyssey Marine Exploration’s history of the ship.
In 1940, Gairsoppa was requisitioned into service by the British Ministry of War Transport, and in December that same year she left Calcutta bound for Britain. In her holds were thousands of tonnes of pig iron, tea and general cargo – and a large quantity of silver. In Freetown in Sierra Leone she joined convoy SL 64, but heavy weather and rough seas meant she could not maintain speed. With her coal running low, she left the convoy in mid-February 1941 to make her own way to Galway on Ireland’s west coast.
Read the full article on METROMODE:
https://metromode.se/en/kultur/silverskatten-fran-ss-gairsoppa-110-ton-silver-ur-havets-djup/
