LOSS OF KOBENHAVN.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 254, 24 September 1935, Page 7

LOSS OF KOBENHAVN.

BELIEVED TO BE SOLVED. DISCOVERY OF SKELETONS. LONDON, Sept. 23. The Morning Post’s Johannesburg correspondent says that whitened skeletons in the desert and a wrecked ship’s boat are believed to be all that remains of the Danish training ship Kobenhavn, which was lost en route to Australia with 60 souls in 1928. An expedition returning from SouthWest Africa says that it encountered, 400 miles north of Swakopmund, one skeleton and then six skeletons seven miles away. Half a ship’s lifeboat lay smashed on the beach. A party apparently took refuge from biting winds and sent one to search for water, of which the nearest is 50 miles away.

There was nothing to identify the remains with the Kobenhavn except a piece of naval cloth and the fact that the boat was of Scandinavian type. The skulls are apparently Nordic. The Danish Consul is investigating in the hope of solving one of the greatest modern sea mysteries.

The Kobenhavn, a steel five-masted barque of 3901 tons, the world’s largest sailing ship, with 70 cadets on board, loft Buenos Aires on December 12, 1928, for Australia. The Kobenhavn was rated at Lloyd’s as a steamer, as she had an auxiliary engine and a screw. She was built in 1924, by Ramage and Ferguson, Limited, of Leith, and was owned by the Atlantic East Asiatic Company of Copenhagen, after which city she was named. She was 368 feet in length, and carried wireless. The Kobenhavn was last spoken some hundreds of miles northwest of the Tristan Da Cunlia g*oup of islands, which lie nearly halfway from Capetown to Buenos Aires, in the South Atlantic.

On May 28, 1929, the captain of the Halcsius, in a wireless message from Tristan Da Cunlia, said the islanders on January 21 had sighted a five-masted sailing vessel, seemingly in distress. She had a flying jibsail. The sea was very rough, and the islanders were unable to launch a boat. There were no traces of wreckage, and it was presumed that the vessel cleared the island. On June 26 the captain of the East Asiatic Company’s ship Mexico sent a cabled report to Copenhagen stating that it had been established that the missing ship passed Tristan Da Ounha on January 21. One mast was broken, and only a few sails were set. The ship was low in the water. She proceeded southward, and disappeared in a fog. The inhabitants searched, but found no wreckage. A prolonged search was carried out by order of the Danish Government, but no trace of the ship was ever found.