1920 SS Afrique disaster

The French mail liner sailed on 9 January 1920 carrying a consignment of 30 million gold francs intended to finish the cathedral at Dakar. On 10 January water entered the hold by the boiler room and the source of the leak was never identified, with reports differing on the hour it began. In heavy weather she struck the steel lightship marking the Rochebonne shoal at about 10 pm, and shortly after 3 am on 12 January she pitched forward and went down off the Vendee coast, less than 23 miles from Les Sables d'Olonne. Accounts of the toll give 568 and 570, and one states that 192 of the dead were African tirailleurs.

Date
1920-01-12
Deaths (Wikipedia list, low end where it gives a range)
568
What the pin marks
Where she sank in the Bay of Biscay, near the Plateau de Rochebonne, as the cited page positions it.
Where the position is published
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Afrique_(1907)

Category: Disasters & Incidents

Tags: mail liner, storm, rochebonne, bay of biscay, 1920

Coordinates: 46.28169, -2.26103

Part of Peacetime shipwrecks that killed 500 or more people since 1900

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