SS Gairsoppa

SS Gairsoppa was a British cargo steamship that was built in 1919 and sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. 85 of her complement were killed, and only one person survived. When she was sunk, her cargo included an estimated 7 million ounces of silver bullion. In 2012 and 2013 a US company recovered part of the bullion, and in 2014 the Royal Mint struck 20,000 silver coins from it.

Gairsoppa was a War Standard "B" type steamship: one of a set of designs ordered by the UK Shipping Controller in large numbers to replace merchant ships lost during the First World War. She was launched as War Roebuck, but renamed before she was completed. The British India Steam Navigation Company (BI) owned and managed her throughout her career.

The ship was named after either the village of Gerusoppa in Karnataka, southern India, or the Jog Falls near Gerusoppa, which India's British rulers called Gairsoppa Falls. Gerusoppa was once the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire, and has the remains of a 16th-century Jain temple.[1]

Building

Salvage

Silver bullion

In 1989 the UK government invited tenders to salvage Gairsoppa's silver bullion.[19] Deepwater Recovery and Exploration Ltd submitted the only bid received. In 2011 the Government awarded a contract to a US company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, to find and salvage the estimated 7000000 ozt of silver from Gairsoppa, and also 600000 ozt of silver from the wreck of another BI ship, SS Mantola (1916), that a U-boat had sunk in 1917,[20] and whose wreck is only about 60 nmi from Gairsoppa's.

On 25 September 2011 Odyssey announced that, using an ROV, it had found and identified Gairsoppa's wreck.[21] It is on the seabed at a depth of nearly 4700 m. The New York Times published on its website a video that Odyssey had made of the wreck.[22] Odyssey stated that it believed the wreck held a total of about 240 short ton of silver.[23]

In July 2012 it was reported that Odyssey had recovered 1400000 ozt of silver in 1,203 ingots, and landed them at Bristol in England. Odyssey was to keep 80 percent of the value and 20 percent would go to HM Treasury.[23] On 23 July 2013 it was reported that Odyssey had recovered a further 1,574 ingots, totalling almost 1800000 ozt. This increased the cumulative total of silver salvaged to 110 short ton, a record for both the amount of precious metal salvaged, and the depth from which it was raised. This represented 99 percent of the insured bullion that Gairsoppa was carrying. Lloyd's record of war losses suggests that other Government-owned silver, uninsured, may have been aboard the ship. However, Odyssey stated that it had not found any of the uninsured silver.[24]

Correspondence between the Royal Mint and the Bank of England in 1941, after Gairsoppa was sunk, reveals that it was feared that they were within two months of running out of silver, and might have to suspend the minting of new silver coins.[8]

462 of the original silver ingots, minted at the Royal Mint's Bombay location, were made available to the purchasing public.[25][26][27] In September 2013 some of the silver was delivered to the Royal Mint, now based in Llantrisant, Wales, to be minted into coins.[28] In April 2014 the Royal Mint announced that it would strike 20,000 commemorative 1/4 ounce coins from the silver, each with a face value of 50 pence, but priced at £30.[8]

Mail and other artefacts

Other artefacts that Odyssey recovered from Gairsoppa included artefacts used by the crew,[29] and bags of mail destined for the UK. The great depth of the wreck preserved the mail from the decaying effects of oxygen, light, and heat. However, being submerged in water for seven decades also made the mail very fragile. There were 717 letters: the largest amount of mail yet recovered from a shipwreck. It took four years to conserve them; stabilising them; reassembling letters that had fragmented; and transcribing their texts. The mail was restored by two conservators at AOC Archaeology in Edinburgh[30] and two at the Postal Museum, London.[31] In 2018 the museum displayed some of the mail and other artefacts in an exhibition called "Voices from the Deep".[7][32][33]

class	War Standard B type cargo ship
tonnage	, ,
length	412.0 ft overall 399.3 ft registered
beam	52.2 ft
draught	25 ft
depth	28.5 ft
decks	2
power	517 NHP or 3,000 ihp
propulsion	1 × triple-expansion engine 1 × screw
speed	11.7 kn
capacity	4 passengers
crew	84 + 2 DEMS gunners
armament	DEMS in WW2

Building

Peacetime career

Loss

Lifeboat voyage

Monuments

Richard Ayres

Salvage

Silver bullion

Mail and other artefacts

Bibliography

References