Saturday, 11th of February, 1893
The S.S. Naronic, a White Star Line steamship, leaves Liverpool, UK, bound for New York City.
The Naronic is a small ship – only 6,594GRT, and with a top speed of just 13kt.
The Naronic is no speed-demon, no size-queen, and is no comparison with the White Star’s larger, grander oceanic greyhounds – the enormous superliners of the late Victorian era.
She is a cargo ship. Specifically, she’s a livestock carrier, designed to ship British livestock to the United States. This is why she is prefixed “S.S.” (“Steamship”), and not “R.M.S.” (“Royal Mail Steamer”), as she carried no mail from either the USPS, or the Royal Mail service.
The S.S. Naronic in 1892
Aboard the Naronic are 74 persons: Fifty crew, and two dozen passengers – mostly livestock men, horsemen, and a handful of fare-paying travelers who occupy the few cheap passenger-cabins available on board.
The ship sails past the southern coast of Ireland and is never seen again.
To this day, nobody knows what happened to the S.S. Naronic, its crew, its cargo, or its livestock.
If messages-in-bottles are to be believed, the ship struck an iceberg on the 19th while sailing through heavy, snowing seas in the middle of the night, and sank with all hands. The crews of other ships passing through the area where it’s believed the Naronic likely sank, reported seeing icebergs when they were questioned at the official inquiry into the Naronic’s loss.
In the 1890s, ships did not carry wireless telegraph mechanisms on board. The new-age radio systems which ships like the Titanic, Olympic and Majestic carried would not be commercially available until 1898 at the earliest. As a result, ship-to-ship distress messages could not be sent, except by distress rockets or flares shot into the air, in the hopes that some passing ship might see them, and render aid. This means that whatever the crew of the Naronic faced between Liverpool and New York – they faced it alone and helpless, likely in the middle of the night, and in freezing temperatures and heavy seas.
Two lifeboats from the Naronic were discovered floating at sea by passing ships, but no other wreckage, nor any dead bodies, have ever been found. The fate of the Naronic, and those aboard her, are a complete mystery, which will likely never be solved.