SS Warrimoo

DATE OF LAUNCH: May 28, 1892

DATE AND LOCATION OF LOSS: May 18, 1918, Mediterranean Sea, off Bône, French Algeria

DATE LOCATED: unknown

SHIP DETAILS: SS Warrimoo was a passenger and refrigerated cargo liner that was launched in 1892 in England for Australian owners, was later owned by two of New Zealand’s foremost shipping companies, and finally belonged to a Singaporean company.

Swan, Hunter built Warrimoo at Wallsend on the River Tyne, launching her on May 28, 1892 and completing her that July. Swan, Hunter also built a sister ship, Miowera, which was launched on July 25 and completed in October.

James Huddart ordered Warrimoo and Miowera for his New Zealand and Australian Steam Ship Company to run a Trans-Tasman service between New Zealand and Australia. Warrimoo’s maiden voyage was a cruise to the fjords of Norway before she was delivered to the Southern Hemisphere.

In 1893 Huddart created the Canadian-Australian Steam Ship Company to operate a liner service between Australia and Vancouver, British Columbia, and he transferred Warrimoo and Miowera to this new service.

In 1897 the New Zealand Shipping Company bought both Warrimoo and Miowera. In 1901 the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand bought Warrimoo.

Warrimoo was a troop ship in the First World War. In February 1915 she took the Māori Pioneer Battalion overseas as part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

In 1916 Khiam Yik & Co Ltd of Singapore, a company controlled by Tan Kah Kee, bought Warrimoo. She continued to carry troops.

CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE LOSS: In May 1918 Warrimoo was part of a convoy carrying troops from Bizerte (Tunisia) to Marseille (France). The destroyer Catapulte collided with her; some of Catapulte’s depth charges broke loose, fell into the sea and detonated, sinking both ships. 58 of Catapulte’s crew and one person aboard Warrimoo were killed.

DISCOVERY AND FINDINGS: unknown

INTERESTING FACTS: In January 1900 The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Warrimoo crossed the Equator on December 30, 1899.

However, it was later claimed that Warrimoo reached the intersection of the International Date Line and the Equator at midnight on December 31, 1899. This would have placed her bow in the Southern Hemisphere in summer on January 1, 1900, her stern in the Northern Hemisphere in winter on December 31, 1899. She would therefore have been simultaneously in two different seasons (winter and summer), in two different hemispheres, on two different days, in two different months, in two different years, in two different decades, in two different centuries. (The “centuries” referred to by the writer would be the 1800s and the 1900s, rather than the customary 19th and 20th centuries.)

The story was still in popular print circulation in 1942. It was popularized by an article in the magazine Ships and the Sea in 1953 and was in online circulation on social media in 2021. However, the navigational technology of the time was not accurate enough to have fixed her position so precisely. Whether Warrimoo ever achieved the feat claimed cannot be verified.