History's Unluckiest Ships? 4 Ships That Were Doomed to Fail

some ships go on to have long and happy careers serving faithfully and reliably and carrying thousands in safety some ships on the other hand seem doomed even with good pedigrees and competent management some ships just never rise to the level of success that their fleetmates see and other sinking circumstances that can just seem plain bizarre ladies and gentlemen I'm your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs and this is the true story of four of history's most unlucky ships [Music] number four the city of Rome they say if you shoot for the moon and fail at least you'll still land Among the Stars when it comes to the city of Rome just wasn't the case rarely does a ship fail so badly that it's rejected outright by its owner but unfortunately the city of Rome despite being one of the most beautiful vessels ever made was one of those ships the Inman line has been virtually forgotten to history dwarfed by other giants like Cunard and White Star Line but in their Heyday they were a serious transatlantic Contender they're actually building some of the world's largest and fastest ships in 1878 their competitor the GUI online introduced the Arizona an absolutely influential ship that basically blew all the competition out of well the water pun intended Inman couldn't be left behind so in the classic tradition of Atlantic one upsmanship they decided to introduce the largest and fastest ship in the world the ship would carry 521st class passengers in luxury and 810 in steerage Not only would she be the biggest and the fastest but should also be lit entirely with electrical lighting which was a massive deal for 1881. to pull this off and be the Smash Hit That Inman needed she'd need power enough to crash through the ocean at a blistering 18 knots and haul over 3 800 tons of cargo the company turned to trusted shipbuilder barrows who drew up plans for a gorgeously proportioned ocean liner with three Smart Smoke Stacks and an elegant profile they originally intended to give the ship two propellers but in the end decided that only one would be enough to drive the ship at the desired speed because the city of Rome would have a secret weapon see until then the primary material used in ship construction had been iron it was durable but extremely heavy steel was a relatively new Wonder material that provided a much higher strength to weight ratio city of Rome would be light quick massive and luxurious simply a Triumph Then There came some bad news barrows the shipyard was having trouble finding enough steel to complete the project they convinced Inman line that the cast and difficulty would be too much and that they should just use iron instead Inman eventually agreed but nobody seemed to take into account this change of material and the impact it would have on the ship's final design the result was a disaster city of Rome was vastly overweight and sat extremely low in the water once it was completed not only that but her steam engines produced just 75 percent of the required power it meant that the Inman lines intended Triumph was low in the water heavy and terribly slow after just six Crossings the Inman line rejected the ship because it was underperforming so badly barrows would be held accountable and a huge court case followed which the shipyard eventually lost the city of Rome was returned to her Builder and became an embarrassing white elephant she was modified by barrowers and made lighter giving her a nice speed boost and her management was taken over by the anchor line at last the ship was doing the original 18 knots as specified but carried only a fraction of the cargo and passengers she'd been meant to even worse angle iron lacked a suitable running mate so the ship was put on the slightly less glamorous Glasgow to New York Route with ships only half her size ship went on to hit an iceberg and then suffer a series of mechanical failures before finally being pulled from service in 1902. this ship was designed for greatness and should have been the largest and fastest ship of her day but a single design change doomed her to obscurity and failure number three the Iberia now onto what is probably one of the most beautiful ships on this list but also seemingly the most cursed Iberia was a ship with a very good pedigree she'd been built by one of History's Greatest shipbuilders and was the last a series of good and popular ocean liners and yet somehow it never seemed to quite achieve the same level of success as its contemporaries and after a series of mishaps and collisions was the first of its generation to be scrapped here's what happened Iberia was built after the end of the second World War by the master shipbuilders at Harland and wolf famous of course for building the Titanic but also responsible for literally hundreds of other good and successful ships during the second world war British Merchant shipping took an absolute walloping at the hands of the German Navy with hundreds of cargo ships and liners being sunk by U-boats mines and aircraft British shipbuilding was some of the best in the world but at the end of the day it was still a relatively small island nation the war had taken a toll and it would take some time to replenish the losses one line that was hit particularly hard was p and O who mainly operated ships from Britain out to the far east as well as Australia they lost a lot of shipping to the enemy so when the war ended they were Keen to start again especially since there was an immigrant boom thousands were looking to flee the ravages of Europe to start new lives in Australia and New Zealand piano would take them there but first it needed ships enter the SS Himalaya an absolutely spectacular ocean liner that was so influential for the company they would launch a whole series of ships afterward in its image they all differed a little bit next came true San and then Arcadia I can't tell you enough how beloved and successful all these ships were in fact shusan is one of my favorite ships of all time they were considered happy ships meaning that their crew were content and the mood on board was just generally good not only that but they'd all been built by some of the best shipbuilders in the world Himalaya and Tucson at Vickers Armstrong in England and Arcadia at John Brown in Scotland who built the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth then it was Harlan and Wolf's turn I got the contract to build a running mate to Arcadia which was an almost identical sister ship and she was called Iberia now just consider the formula that's at play here you have three well-built and popular ships all making a name for themselves and being built by some of the best of the best shipbuilders Iberia followed the pattern exactly but apparently there was something wrong with her for one her career was marred out of the gate on a maiden voyage passing through the sewers Canal one morning in 1954 the ship grounded on the soft sand and began to lean over passengers in the Dining Saloon held on as the ship healed 15 degrees over and they could look down at the sea through the portholes and windows on the low side of the ship Iberia was freed and she continued on to Sydney Australia she made it just over a year into this regular Voyage itinerary when she collided with a tanker resulting in some nasty damage on her upper superstructure which took 17 days to mend before she could get underway again it was a dramatic start to her career but things were only just getting started by 1961 Iberia had its regular route extended out across the Pacific and she'd been installed with air conditioning the ship's Electronics must have been overloaded because she suffered a total blackout off New Zealand then just a year later the ship grounded in the sewers Canal for a second time this time damaging her propeller shaft requiring some serious repairs that same year the ship was in the Suez Canal again when disaster struck a Lifeboat Broke Free of its mounting and crashed to the deck killing a sailor it didn't end there though soon after while she was leaving Auckland Harbor the ship's cooling failed when the generators broke down after somehow ingesting salt water this took up a whole week while the issue was figured out before they realized she'd need to sail onto Hawaii to get a new generator fitted in 1964 the ship stabilizers which were then newly installed failed which caused the ship to take on a dangerous list and nearly capsized in a high sea then in 1966 her turbine couplings broke off Japan requiring more serious repairs the ship just suffered one breakdown after another in 1967 the ship collided with a dock in Portugal and then just a year later in 68 she suffered yet another Total Blackout Now by this point piano were rightfully miffed by the Troublesome ship and they switched her to a relatively simpler route sailing only as far as Sydney and on the first round of this new route though disaster struck again the worst of the lot her fuel lines broke causing a stoke-old fire that led to another Total Blackout then her main engines failed and she began leaking fuel piano pulled Liberia from service to figure out what was going on then she spent most of 1968 and 69 laid up before being finally put back into service and she sailed proudly out only to suffer immediately and other stabilizer failure all of this is the more ridiculous when you consider that the other ships built before Iberia were functioning brilliantly but beyond that Iberia was just never as popular or alike as the other ones even though I think she was the best looking by the 1970s all of the sisters were a little old and needed to be gradually retired from service but it was Iberia the newest the troubled younger sister that was pulled from Service First and scrapped in 1972. by contrast Arcadia which had been built at around the same time served another 70 years for piano Holland and wolf must have really dropped the ball on that one unfortunately that's not the first time they'll show up on this list number two the Britannic now this is the second Harlan Wolf built ship on this list the Britannic story shouldn't be any surprise to anybody who's familiar with this channel but it's not very often you stop and think about just how unlucky this ship really was you'd think I might have put britannic's sister Titanic on this list but I think that ship was more of a victim of poor decision-making on her Commander's part Britannic has got to go down in history of one of the most unlucky ships to ever set off so many lessons have been learned and implemented after Titanic sank in 1912 and Britannic was destined to become one of the greatest ocean liners of all time but instead her future was robbed by a random chance encounter and she sank Into Obscurity when Titanic sank in April 1912 it destroyed the hopes of its owners the White Star Line and shook the confidence of the shipping industry as a whole Titanic was meant to be the very latest thing in safety but now the White Star Line found themselves in a bit of an awkward situation construction on the third proposed sister ship Britannic was already well underway and its kill had been laid and skeleton was being built white star decided to overhaul Britannic introducing some pretty drastic design changes over a sister Titanic when finalized Britannic could easily have survived the kind of damage inflicted on a doomed sister by the iceberg for one thing the ship was widened to make room for a second inner skin which would prevent any scraping or bumping damage along the length of the ship from flooding six of the ship's watertight bulkheads were raised much higher up in the hull so water couldn't just flow over the top as it had on Titanic almost 50 lifeboats were fitted as opposed to Titanic's 20. now the safety features weren't the only thing that was overhauled the ship was designed to be much more luxurious than its sister Titanic and if it ever set to see it would have definitely become the toast of the transatlantic trade with its tasteful elegant Interiors crowned by a palatial grand staircase which unlike Titanic britannics featured a spectacular pipe organ that was a grand plan but everything unraveled when the first world war broke out Britannic had already been delayed because of all the changes that needed to be made after Titanic sank but then after the war erupted she was mothballed nobody knew exactly what to do with an ocean liner of that sheer size work on the ship crawled along at a snail's pace but then britannic's first run of bad luck started she was requisitioned in 1915 by the admiralty to be turned into a hospital ship the ship was stripped of any at all peacetime fittings and luxury she was meant to carry and painted all white with red crosses the cavernous interior rooms were turned into Hospital Wards and the way she sailed on her first mission to evacuate horribly wounded troops from the bloody meat grinder of the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey she set off into submarine infested waters and her crew hoped with white paint and Crosses would deter any attack from the enemy Britannic sailed for six long months as a hospital ship dodging enemy submarines and warships and hoping to avoid minefields after a series of successful yet tense voyages Britannic had completed her Charter and carried thousands in safety she returned quietly to Belfast where she was built to be converted back into a passenger ship white Starline received 75 000 pounds as compensation and then the work began for a few months workers streamed up and down gangways reinstalling all the luxuries and fittings the wood panels and the Gilt lights white star's Mammoth new ship had survived the war and earned a credit to its name things were looking up but then in August 1916 the admiralty came knocking Britannic was needed once again she was transformed into a hospital ship all over again and sailed out on her fourth hospital ship Voyage in September now this run wouldn't be as smooth as the others the ship ran into a massive storm on the way to Naples and was a bit of a port end for things to come in November that year the ship was sailing on her sixth Voyage with 1065 people on board when she was rocked by an explosion out of all the millions of square miles of ocean Britannic just happened to have sailed right into a mine laid by a German submarine she began to take on water flooding many of the watertight compartments but here's the thing she could survive this kind of damage the ship had got all those modifications after Titanic sank she could stay afloat with six of her forward compartments flooded as opposed to Titanic's IV but then as the bow began to Sag lower into the water all of the portholes which had been left open by nurses to air out the wards against orders began to take in water the ingest of water through the portholes was enough to Doom the ship within an hour Britannic was at the bottom of the ocean and had taken 30 people with her despite all those improvements on safety and standards over Titanic the next great white star liner was doomed by incredibly bad luck Not only was she requisitioned after retirement from Navy service but she then just happened to sail right into an enemy mine when nurses were airing out the wards very unlucky indeed number one the SS Great Eastern I've spoken about izombard Brunel on this channel before and the guy was essentially the genius he started out engineering Railways and bridges and then in the 1830s he thought hey I bet I could use the same engineering principles to design ships so he did after two successful passenger ships he then went out and designed the Great Eastern whose sheer scale and size is just baffling the ship was built in 1858 it became the world's largest ship now took the record from the SS atrato which came in at just under 3500 gross registered tons and here's the thing the Great Eastern boasted 18 915 gross registered tons a record which wouldn't be surpassed for 43 years until 1901. this thing was so big that journalists mocked it at the time because the general consensus was why would you ever need a ship that big well brunell's grand scheme was to design a ship who could steam all the way to Australia and then back to Britain which is an epic track she could do that Voyage averaging between 10 and 14 knots but it would need 15 000 tons of coal alone to power her steam engines it seemed ridiculous even on paper the ship would need to be six times larger by volume than any other ship that had ever been built before Nell collaborated with Naval architect John Scott Russell to design and build the beast but the early days of the construction were marred with disagreements between the pair then the first run of bad luck occurred the ship's launch failed it killed two men wounded several others and then became stuck on the Cradle they would have to wait two months for the next high tide to wash the ship into the water launched a second time and finally finished Great Eastern sailed out on its sea trials Brunel proudly proclaimed that I've never embarked on any one thing to which I have so entirely devoted myself into which I've devoted so much time thought and labor on the success of which I've staked so much reputation but then the unthinkable happened Brunell collapsed from a stroke and died the ship's greatest advocate and the Very man who dreamed her up was now gone in the end Great Eastern would never sail to Australia it was figured it would be easier and more profitable to runner between Britain and the United States during construction should actually bankrupted and ruined her original backers the Eastern steam navigation company after costs blew out so she was laid up for a year until purchased and finished by the Great Eastern ship company having bankrupted one company and had its Ida to drop dead the Great Eastern set out awkwardly already the underdog because the general public didn't know what to make of a ship that big it was simply too much and too soon in 1859 before her maiden voyage the ship was steaming along when she was rocked by a massive explosion after a steam valve was left closed that killed five men patched and repaired the Great Eastern was at last ready for its maiden voyage in 1860. the first leg went off well enough except that on arriving in New York the ship damaged the pier on Landing then angered the gathered crowd when a one dollar entry fee was charged to visitors and the standard rate at the time was just a quarter 25 cents in 1861 the ship was caught in a massive hurricane just out of Liverpool and trapped in the stormy ocean for three days the ship was badly damaged with both of her paddle Wheels torn away and her sails ripped to shreds and arriving safely in Port at last the ship's Wheels spun back so hard and fast that it killed a man in 1862 steaming into New York off Montauk Point a huge gash was ripped in the ship's Hull when it happened to run into an Uncharted Rock there was no Dry Dock in the world big enough so it required specialist repairs including the construction of a coffer Dam around the hull which cost the company 350 000 which was a fortune at the time in fact since coming into possession of the Great Eastern the owners had been hemorrhaging money and the ship had been bumping into docks piers and other ships at anchor the entire time by 1864 only three years since its introduction the ship was auctioned off at a bargain to work as a cable laying vessel the transatlantic Telegraph cable is one of the wonders of the modern world the Great Eastern carried 22 450 kilometers of the stuff that's almost 14 000 miles it was an unglamorous job but the huge ship pulled it off well chugging along and laying cable behind it but then more than halfway across the ocean on the first trip the cable end inadvertently broke and couldn't be located or repaired for another year after a few years of cable laying the ship was refitted again as an ocean liner but still proved massively unprofitable she was laid up awaiting a buyer for years with some proposing to lay Dynamite around the hull to blow it up in 1885 16 years after being pulled from service grinnell's Dream Ship was turned into a Showboat and floating billboard covered in slogans the old girl still had some life in her though in 1886 she sung and badly damaged a tug and then collided with a steamship the year after finally the Great Eastern was scrapped between 1889 and 1890 a process which took 18 months but even then it wasn't smooth sailing it was extremely slow going because of the ship's intricate interior construction leading to a labor dispute by the workers all up the Great Eastern once envisaged as a Monumental step forward into the future by her designer became little more than a floating white elephant and a massive money sink she damaged or sank 10 ships in her career and caused massive amounts of damage but I don't think the world was ready for a ship of that scale back then to set into what should have been a pretty glorious Tale ladies and gentlemen it's your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs thank you so much for watching this video please think about liking and subscribing to the channel could support my channel on patreon you'll find the link down in the description until then stay safe stay happy and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 418,048

Keywords: great ocean liners, maritime history, ocean liners, famous oceanliners, ships documentary, history of ships, engineering, history, ships, documentary

Id: mGhLWmRSKIY

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023