Aylevarroo

In the autumn of 1917 the steamship Aylevarroo disappeared with the loss of all twenty crew.

The ship was built in 1903 by C. S. Swan & Hunter Ltd, Newcastle (Yard No.285) for Donald SS Co, Bristol, by charter to Atlantic Fruit Co, later to United Fruit Company (now Fyffes). She stretched 227 feet from bow to stern, and 31 feet port to starboard (68.5 m x 9.4 m.)1 Weighing in at 830 tons (1,299 gross), she carried a triple-expansion 250 horsepower engine with a calculated speed of 12.5 knots. Her hold was nearly 14 feet deep, allowing plenty of room for what was to be her main cargo - bananas. The Lillie was sent to the east coast of the United States, to haul fruit from the Caribbean for the United Fruit Company. In 1915 the Limerick Steamship Company purchased the Lillie, from the Donald Steamship Company of New York. In 1916 the vessel underwent a refit and was re-registered in Limerick as the Aylevarroo. Her new name was taken from an agreeable location on the north shore of the river Shannon near her home port.

Then, in the autumn of 1917 the ship sailed from Liverpool and disappeared without trace. Neither she nor any of her crew, were ever found. On 21 November 1917, Lloyd's recorded that the Aylevarroo was missing and presumed sunk by torpedo... However, it was World War I and the authorities were somewhat economical with

the facts. The families of the lost sailors were left guessing as to what had happened. Rumour had it that the ship was overloaded and had been overwhelmed by the sea during a terrible storm at the 'meeting of the waters' beyond Holyhead, North Wales. The ship sailed into history and was forgotten. Then one day, the relatives of Jack Earlys, a crew member, decided to try and see if they could find her. All we had to go on was a time - a midnight sailing from Liverpool sometime in the autumn of 1917, some old rumours, and the name of the ship..... Merseyside Maritime Museum allowed access to the Port of Liverpool Dock Registers, not normally available to the public. Many volumes, each with nearly five thousand entries, chronicle the decades of dock traffic in the Port of Liverpool. There, in one of them, they found the final entry for the Aylevarroo. The vessel had sailed shortly before midnight on the evening of 6 October 1917, bound for Tralee and then her home port of Limerick. She carried a small general cargo, with her holds filled to only one tenth their capacity. So much for the Aylevarroo being overloaded.

The Aylevarroo had sailed for her home port on the river Shannon on the west coast of Ireland. To get there she would have steamed from the river Mersey, through Liverpool Bay, across the Irish Sea and then around Ireland by either the northern or southern routes. The search area was narrowed down to the North Wales coast, the Irish Sea and all of the Irish coast. Whichever way she went, she never arrived.

Using sea charts provided by Anglesey County Council, orbital photographs supplied by NASA, the White Star Line tide tables for 1917, and the technical specification for the Aylevarroo from Lloyd's Register, they were able to calculate where the ship was likely to have been at any time on either of her probable routes. One location would prove to be significant - the steamer should have been passing Ballycotton, east of Cork on the southern coast of Ireland, at about 6.15 am on Monday, 8 October 1917.

Then some luck. A single article about the Aylevarroo appeared on the internet. It was a short tale which told of the ship being torpedoed off the southern coast of Ireland.

Then more. Searches of shipwreck information sources were proving reasonably successful. The Aylevarroo was listed in several, but the information was always incomplete. The indication was that the steamship had been torpedoed in the

Atlantic off Ballycotton on 8 October 1917 by a German U-boat, SM U-57. Could there have been any witnesses to this?

Obviously, the crew of the Aylevarroo knew all about it, but they were all dead. It was unlikely that a log entry would have been made during the panic of a torpedo attack. In any case the ship's log would have gone down with her when she sank. If it still existed, it would be totally inaccessible. Ballycotton has had its present lighthouse since 1851. If the sinking occurred there, then perhaps a vigilant lighthouse keeper heard an explosion or saw a ship in distress and entered it in his operations log. The Commissioners of Irish Lights were asked the question, but they advised that their surviving records for this period contained no relevant information. If the Aylevarroo had been sunk by a U-boat, then there would have been eyes watching through a periscope. The commander of the submarine would have made an entry in his log. Thus, they had to find the war diary of SM U-57. This was achieved with great help from Germany's U-boat archive, uboat.net. They were given access to the relevant pages of the war diary which recorded the details and positions of attacks on two British vessels, the Richard de Larrinaga and an unknown 'dampfer' (steamer), near Ballycotton on 8 October 1917. The only ship not accounted for on that day was the Aylevarroo. They had found her final position before she sank into the depths. It was wartime and the seas were beset with German U-boats intent on sinking British shipping. German U-boat SM U-57 was on patrol in the Atlantic off the south coast of Ireland. The craft was carrying eight torpedoes, each nearly twenty foot long and with a warhead equipped to penetrate the hull of a warship. Kapitnleutnant Georg was now thirty one years old and commander of the submarine. The Aylevarroo was an Irish registered vessel. However, Ireland was then still part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the ship was sailing under a British Flag. She was a legitimate target and the stern was struck by a C 06 AV torpedo launched against her at 6.08 am on that fateful morning. They were seven minutes out with our estimate as to the time the vessel would have been off Ballycotton. She vanished beneath the sea in minutes and all 20 of her crew perished. The war diary records that the weather was good with a light sea and a gentle breeze from the west. So much for the storm.

The wreck of the Aylevarroo lies off Ballycotton in what is a ship's graveyard. Local fishermen know the names and positions of the many dozens of hulks resting on the ocean floor in the area. All of them, that is, except the Aylevarroo. There are rocky formations on the bottom where she sank. Perhaps the rocks have hidden her for all these years. In any case, they found their grandad's resting place.

The Aylevarroo's master was Captain John Tracey, from Rosses Point near Sligo. Perhaps a line from 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' by Sligo's poet, WB Yates, would be appropriate: "And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow." As for the SM U-57, she sunk fifty five ships for a total of 91,680 tons and one warship, HMS Genista, at 1,250 tons. Her greatest success was the sinking of the British vessel Rovanmore, at 10,320 tons, in October 1916. The submarine survived the war and was scrapped in Cherbourg in 1921. Kaptlt Georg later received the highest German war decoration, the Pour le Merite (the Blue Max), as the commander of SM U-101. He died in 1957 at the age of seventy one.

So can we actually find the wreck itself? We have the exact co-ordinates of the attack, but searching on the ocean floor for a small freighter which sank so long ago is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Maybe she was blown to bits during the attack, maybe she has broken up since. We don't know. However, we have had a look from the surface and followed up a report of something on the bottom that reflects sonar. Perhaps we should go and have a look, its only two hundred and fifty feet down.

John Colivet There is a memorial in Jersey Maritime Museum, New North Quay, St. Helier with
the following inscription: There are no roses on sailors graves, Nor wreaths upon the storm tossed waves, No heartbroken words carved on stone, Just shipmates bodies floating there alone, The only tributes are the seagulls sweeps, And the teardrop when a loved one weeps. Great War 1914-18

There is also a memorial at Tower Hill in London with following inscription

COLIVET, John. Chief Officer. S.S. "Aylevarroo" (Limerick) Died 7 October 1917. Aged 55. Son of the late John and Augustina Le Breuiller Colivet. Born in Jersey.

The Maiden Voyage of The Lillie, aka, the Aylevarroo

"From Coaly Tyne to Caribbean" (anonymous, 1903)

CHAPTER 1. When, after much inquiry and wandering in South Shields among the grimy lanes and streets beside the river, we stepped on to the ferry steamer, whence in a few moments we should first see the vessel that was to carry us to the Tropics, we felt the liveliest curiosity and interest. For several exasperating seconds the river view was hid by the bulging stern of a barque, but at last we moved, and lo! All around stretched coaly Tyne with crowds of masts and funnels on his bosom, and tall coal-staithes and neverending huddles of re-brick houses on his banks. Sunday though it was, the landscape was bathed in coal-smoke, while out on the river, the centre of the picture to our eyes, gay with bunting and conspicuous in the glory of white hull and yellow funnel rode a brand-new steamer beside a bunch of dirty colliers. No need to ask her name. "Eh! Now!" said a Tynesider at our elbow; "thons a bonnie boat: Shell be galn to some far country!" Nor was our interest abated when we got on board. The Orient and ever far Cathay confronted us. The swarthy faces on her decks were Greek and Chinese. Besides the outlandishness of the crew we felt, as we roamed about inquisitively, the strange influence of the Tropics in the character and shape of everything: -- the many huge ventilators, the great deck awnings, the spacious airy state-rooms. The porthole of the room allotted to us became a "--Magic casement opening on the foam of "perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn," [John Keats - Ode to a

Nightingale] although it actually looked out, at the moment, upon a dirty German tramp moored alongside, the master and crew of which could never gaze enough through wide eyes, at our strange new craft and her Celestial crew. Then passed a day or two of waiting, filled with preparation and puzzling about the little comforts and superfluities likely to be needed on the voyage. At length, however, the inexorable hour of departure, with the adieux of envious friends, arrived, and the Lillie cast loose and steamed down the river to the sea. The morning was gloomy. An easterly breeze, or "haar", was setting in. On either bank and on the river the smoke hung thick: in both North and South Shields the houses melted away into dusky vapour, while the moist air borne on the wind condensed into fog against the land. As we passed out through the piers several herring boats ran in with bellying lug sails. "Thons Scotchmen!" said the ancient-looking pilot, a Northumbrian, adding very gravely; - "they always bring the fog!" -----" The devil they do!" quoth the skipper in reply, bristling up (he was a Scottish-American): - "And I suppose, in consequence, bang goes sixpence, and a surgical operation is needed on the Scotchmans head with all the other blankety English parrot-cackle! Eh!" We steamed out beyond the three mile limit to get rid of the ashes and clinker in the engine-room, the discharge of such being forbidden near the land. Then we ran back and adjusted compasses. Some difficulty was experienced here, the fog becoming so dense that the marks on shore only a mile away were at times invisible. At last a tug was seen coming out with the builders party: these clambered hurriedly aboard: the tug sheered off and danced about on the waves beside us, till a tall man on her bridge, focussing a huge camera upon our ship, had taken one or two snap-shots, not without some impatient growling on our part at the distant, unconscious, artist. Then at 11 a.m. we began to run up and down the measured mile to test the speed of the Lillie." The marks were tall poles on shore at Tynemouth and Whitley. Our first run was Northeast against the flood-tide and an easterly swell and wind of perhaps 14 miles an hour. Soon after we passed the Northern mile posts we circled round, and, giving warning signal to the engine-room to get up a head of steam, we again ran the mile, this time with the tide and sea. And thus we continued for six hours, there being, at each mile-running,

much looking at stop-watches, and comments. Once or twice the run proved fruitless because of the mist veiling the mile-posts completely. The chill seawind and fog made the day cheerless: several visitors were sea-sick, while to our lady passengers, invisible through illness, it was indeed a day of trial. However, to the rest of us, the reward of a good stomach came in the shape of a hot lunch in the cabin, fortified by which and inspired by the generous wine of France, the customary toast of Success to the Lillie: The Builders: The Owners: The Captain etc were duly undertaken and answered. The six hours trial soon passed. Then the Lillie stopped a mile off the pier: the word All Visitors Ashore was passed round, and the builders tug again received our friends after vigorous handshakings. Mounting the bridge our captain now became the master of his ship, and, blowing a series of hoarse farewells on the siren to our guests, who were waving hats and shouting Goodbye and Goodluck, we steamed off southward on our long voyage to the Spanish Main. Chapter 2 [following trial run data] Thursday, May 28. I think there must be specific germ of sea-sickness which lurks aboard ships and attacks man and the higher animals until they become immune. If so, the Lillie at starting must have had of these an enormous cargo. A curious malaise, like a sea- (plus a wee touch of tobacco-) sickness, attacked most of us. The ladies of course suffered greatly yet even the engineers were ill. -----"The common or garden type of sea-sickness," said one. -----"The giddy whirl about at the end of each measured mile caused it," said another. -----"New Paint," diagnosed a third, for the Lillie for few days smelled like a painters shop. -----"Riotous eating and drinking before starting," said a fourth, with memories of the trial-trip lunch, perhaps. -----"I know," quoth the skipper, "those shore chaps showered about the oil perfectly regardless in the engine-room yesterday. Now its cooking and roasting there, and well be ill till we get the engine cleaned up." I myself was obliged to rise at 4 a.m. to pay my devotions to Father Neptune; and I

looked about me when I became more composed. We had passed Flamborough Head and were now crossing The Wash, or Lynn Deeps. There was an easterly swell, while a breeze obscured the horizon. The vast traffic on the East Coast was evident in the number of ships, steamboats, and fishing sloops we encountered. Soon we sighted the Newarp Light-ship outside Yarmouth Roads, but the land lay hid in the haze, to the westward. As the day advance, we ran down into the narrow part of the North Sea where the swell abated. In the afternoon we were abreast of the Thames, off the Kentish Knock, and as the evening wore on we reached the straits. Over the land a yellow after-glow showed where the sun had sunk behind a screen of dusky cloud. In the lazy twilight all detail faded slowly out and evening wrapped the land in soft shades, from which the clustered lights of Dover and Folkestone towns shone bright. A huge P. and O. liner, coming out of the Thames, had swiftly overtaken us, and melted into the darkness ahead. Beside us under full sail but hardly moving against the tide, was a barque with painted portholes, standing down channel - a grey tower of canvas, like a ghostly ship of old. Then from the East, out of the night, the French lights began to flash. But our party - for in the smooth sea the ladies had come on deck to view these historic waters where Caesars galleys swam - our party had eyes mainly for the home-land, now almost sunk in the western shades, and for her waning lights from Foreland and Dungeness. Somebody should now have recited Kiplings fine lines, written probably here: The Coastwise Lights of England Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees, Our loins are scourged beneath us by the swinging smoking seas: Oer reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness and voe The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go. Or perhaps, instead of the virile Kipling, this from the High Priest of Nature and Spirituality, Wordsworth, written moreover on a sunset in these straits of Dover an hundred years ago. Calais Beach, 1802 It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free: The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration: the broad sun

Is sinking down to rest in its tranquility: The gentleness of heaven is on the sea. Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder everlasting. It was our last sight of home, though at the time we did not think so, as we counted on steering close to Saint Catherines in the Isle of Wight to signal our name in passing, next morning. Chapter III Friday 29 May. 5:40 a.m. We are now opposite the Isle of Wight. Rainy, grey day: no horizon, sea and sky a grey blur. Nothing visible. Impossible to pass close to Saint Catherines: - too misty. Perhaps we shall have a chance at Prawle Point, or meet some homeward bound steamer which will report us. The afternoon of this day turned out warm and we had a happy party at afternoon tea on the bridge, the first of many such. The health and comfort of our little community are now much improved. We are now pretty well shaken down as it were in our new home. We have sized one another up mentally and settled into definite relationships and planes of living for the voyage. At the dining table our performances are doing us credit and Nanki Poo justice. Nanki Poo is our Celestial major-domo, or steward. Bland, of course, like Bret Hartes Heathen Chinee, Nanki is nearly perfect. Perfection however on this planet, whirling in its vast orbit through immensity of time & space, is unnatural. Vanished types proclaim the law of unending progress upward towards, never attainment of, perfection, or finality. Perfection in another, indeed, is hateful to man. Nanki Poo thought he had become perfect and so carried his nose high. But Pride cometh before a fall: a Righteous Retribution was near. At supper Nanki served the master with an unlucky cup of tea which was not so hot as it might, could, would, or should have been. A Cape-Hatteras-like swift change from calm to storm spread over the masters face: his eye kindled, his voice became fervent, his eloquence burning. Quoth the skipper, sulphurously: -----"DAMNONIA* MESOPOTAMIA BALLYBALHAGGARDY BUMP!

[an incantation oft used by ship captains.] O! malign and wicked steward! Who hath bewitched thee? Didst thou not know that we desire not our tea cold, but warm, yea even hot? Regard me O! Nanki! and tremble! for I invoke Jupiter himself to witness the oath I swear this day - to put thee in irons for a pestilent son of a gun if thou hand me such a cup in future!" "Well, as I was saying" - quoth the skipper serenely, after this thunderous interruption and not without a merry twinkle in his eye; - "the old country isnt what it was. Its on the downgrade. You should see the state of Glasgow and Newcastle! Public houses crowded every night with men and women. Fancy! Women in crowds drinking helter-skelter at the bars! Thinking no shame, by Gosh, of entering a liquor store! What did that fellow, Byron, say? - Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said This is my own, my native land? Well, Im ashamed of mine!" Here, noticing the momentary slip of ascribing the authorship to Byron instead of Scott had I almost intervened, with the best intentions of course, but luckily I restrained myself "Else had I on my wrist worn gyves In deepest cell beside where dives the dolphin, where the hungry rat Licks whiskers - sharpens teeth at fat on human bones." (Shakespeare) As the Old Play hath it. For the skippers thunder-tones yet filled the air, and the skippers lightnings flashed from his eye. Yet through all the hurly-burly the visage of Nanki altered not, even by a demme-semi-quiver: the yellow face was an impassible mask. The nerves of Chinamen are said to be perfect. As already related, a function of the highest social importance was inaugurated to-day, and, like all really great and good institutions, without any fuss. It was of course tea and small talk on the bridge. Yet the drawbacks of a life on the ocean were felt even here by our lady friends. "A ship, Sir," said the great Dr. Johnson; " - a ship, Sir, is worse than a prison, for you may escape from the latter!" cut off from civilization as we were, neither Scandal nor Talk about the Newest Bonnet in Church could be used to sweeten the tea, only the mere material called sugar.
Extract The voyage had lasted 17 days, the distance run being 4610 miles. It was a voyage

unique in one respect. The Officers, one and all, had never sailed so far in such serene weather and over such calm seas. In all those thousands of miles the vessel had not plunged her bow deeper than the hawse-holes. And when, to the agreeable experiences of along voyage in fine weather and over smooth seas, there are added the recollections of days made more pleasant by the genial society and kindly thoughtfulness of Captain and Officers, the passenger may well with satisfaction say to himself: - LO! HERE IS A POSSESSION OF WHICH FATE CANNOT DESPOIL ME - THE REMEMBRANCE OF HAPPY DAY!

Material appears courtesy of...

Commissioners of Irish Lights Cunard HM Coastguard Isle of Anglesey Borough Council Lloyd's Register of Shipping Metropolitan Borough of Wirral - Wallasey Central Reference Library NASA The Trustees of the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside (Merseyside Maritime Museum) Tyne & Wear Archives Services uboat.net - Germany's U-boat archive http://www.e-a-r-l-y.freeserve.co.uk/ayle_credits.htm