SS Wairuna, originally called D/S Schneefels, then SS Gibraltar and SS Polescar, was a cargo steamship that was launched in Germany in 1913. She had a varied career spanning three decades under successive German, British and New Zealand owners before being scuttled in the North Atlantic in 1945.
Building
The ship was built by Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft[1] of Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein. She was launched on 13 November 1913 and completed on 1 January 1914.[3] She had nine corrugated furnaces with a combined grate area of 148 sqft that heated three 185 lbf/in2 single-ended boilers with a combined heating surface of 6956 sqft.[1]
The ship was launched as D/S Schneefels for the Deutsche Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft Hansa (DDG Hansa). D/S stands for Dampfschiff, just as "SS" stands for "Steamship" in English. DDG Hansa gave many of its ships names ending in -fels ("rock"), (e.g. D/S Freienfels, D/S Uhenfels