Carlos de Eizaguirre

The steamship was built in the shipyards of Sir Raylton Dixon & Co. Ltd at Middlesbrough, England. It had two triple expansion engines constructed by The Wallsend Slipway Engineering Co. Ltd, Newcastle. It had achieved a speed of 14.48 knots in favourable seas and 13.9 knots in calm seas or rough seas.[2]

The ship was launched on 5 December 1903 with the name Leopoldville, belonging to the Compagnie Maritime Belge du Congo, destined for the route to the Belgian Congo. In 1908, it was purchased by an English company, the African Steamship Company Ltd., and was renamed the Landana. Finally it was acquired by the Compañía Trasatlántica in 1910, that changed its name to Carlos de Eizaguirre. It was named after a prominent Spanish banker, and former director of the shipping company, Juan Carlos de Bailly Eizaguirre (1817-1900). It sailed from Cardiff on 9 November 1910 to Cádiz, where it arrived 13 November. After some modifications, it left for Barcelona, where it began sailing along the route to the Philippines in March of 1911. Its first captain was Luis Sopelana Gil García.[2]

First class provided a dining room, smoking room, library-writing room, ladies' salon and cabin accommodation for 85 passengers, with bathrooms and toilets. Second class had cabins for 45 passengers, with a dining room and smoking room. In steerage there were two dormitories for third class, one for each sex. First class tickets cost 1680 pesetas, with food and lodging and up to 250 kilos of luggage. For third class, the fare was 605 pesetas, or 455 pesetas for criados indígenas (indigenous servants).

The steamship sailed the route from Barcelona to Manila in the Philippines. The usual route was through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, then through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to the Philippines, with shore calls in Ceylon and Sumatra. However, in its second voyage, the Suez Canal was closed due to World War I for non-allied ships, resulting in those ships having to sail around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope.

The ship sailed from Barcelona on its last voyage on 21 April 1917, with scheduled stops at Cadiz, Las Palmas, Cape Town, Durban, Singapore and Manila. There were initially 35 passengers, of which seven were in first class, 23 in second class and five in third class. It put in at Cadiz to pick up more passengers. Fifteen passengers joined the ship, three in first class, one in second class and 11 in third class. It sailed from Cadiz in the morning of 27 April. The ship arrived at Las_Palmas on 30 April 1917 where it had to await supplies of coal. Seven passengers left the ship and two joined. It thus did not leave Las Palmas until 7 a.m. on 5 May. The ship was making nine knots per hour with a scheduled arrival in Cape Town of 25 May where it was to pick up more coal. Amongst the passengers at this point were 11 women, of which two were single, and five small children between the ages of three and five.[1]

The captain, Fermín Luzárraga, had postponed entry into the port due to a storm which had created rough seas, and he did not want to enter the port before dawn. The ship was proceeding at 5 knots by this stage, partly in an effort to save coal. The delay proved to be fatal, as the ship ran into the mine at 3:30 a.m. on 26 May 1917, whilst all were sleeping. The steamship collided with a mine some 25 miles off the coast of Cape Town at 33° 46’ S and 17° 59’ E.[1] The mine impacted the second hold of the ship, on the starboard side and below the waterline. An explosion split the boat in two and resulted in its sinking in scarcely four minutes. Only one of the eight lifeboats was able to be launched. A total of 134 people died: 84 crew and 50 passengers. Only eight bodies were recovered, some of them having been devoured by sharks. Twenty-five people survived, being the occupants of the number 6 lifeboat and engine room assistant Alejandro Fernández, who leapt into the water and spent 32 hours clinging to a floating wooden plank. Of the survivors, 23 were crew, and only two were passengers.

The news arrived at the shipping company's offices by telegram some eleven hours after the event, but the information was not made public due to the uncertainties of being able to meet potential damages and loss claims, as they did not have insurance against acts of war. They instead sent to their various offices coded telegrams that said: "Termidor permutar transformado riel cerca de joya Robben" ('Eizaguirre' totally lost near Robben Island). On 28 May, the first rumours of the tragedy began to arrive in Barcelona. One of the directors of the company determined then that "we shall treat this with all reserve and we shall say that we are dealing with a normal accident". When news was finally published in the press it used the shipping company's version of events. In an internal company memo it was stated that «given the press censorship regime of the government, we can abstain of publishing details of the probable cause of the accident". Therefore, La Vanguardia and El Noticiero Universal published that "for the most part opinions coincide in not admitting the possibility that the ship collided with a drifting mine taking into account the enormous distance between the site of the accident and the mined areas. In general, it is believed that the 'Eizaguirre' must have found itself in one of those storms that are currently occurring at the Cape of Good Hope, foundering or striking against something underwater".

Whilst the media repeated the official version, the board of the Trasatlántica — lead at the time by the second Marquess of Comillas, Claudio López Bru — met with the president of the government, the Liberal Manuel García Prieto, to try and present a claim against the United Kingdom on the basis that it was a British defensive mine that caused the sinking. However, the British Admiralty denied this claim and alleged that the sinking was due to a mine laid by the German merchant raider SMS Wolf. As a result they could not undertake more detailed investigations, even though the Times of the 9th of March the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Edward Carson, admitted that they had placed mines in the region. The shipwreck caused an uproar in the city of Barcelona generating scenes of panic in the port on the part of families of the passengers.