‘LOST’ STEAMER ARRIVES AT AUCKLAND PORT

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 May 1947, Page 3

‘LOST’ STEAMER ARRIVES AT AUCKLAND PORT

(PA.) AUCKLAND, May 2. A ship which the world believed for 24 hours last month to be on fire and abandoned in the Caribbean Sea on her voyage from Newport, Monmouthshire, to Auckland, the federal Line steamer Somerset reached Auckland this afternoon after an exceptionally smart passage of 30 days. The announcement of the fire was issued by Lloyd’s of London on April 14 and corrected 24 hours later when it was found that the ship in distress was the American tanker Fisher’s Hill Members of the Somerset s crew were not aware when she arrived that world-wide publicity had been given to her imagined loss. At first they ere incredulous or amused, but when members opened air-mail letters from Britain expressing the anxiety of relatives, their attitude swiftly changed to annoyance. The letters indicated that the apparent maritime disaster had been prominently displayed in the English newspapers and that until the-correction was announced the company’s London office was flooded with telephone and mail inquiries. The Somerset went to the assistance of a ship actually on fire, the American tanker Fisher’s Hill, and the ship’s crew assume that the error in identification must have occurred in the flood of radio messages, passing between land station and shipping during the emergency. <■ '