SS Cymric

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RMS Cymric at Liverpool with tender SS Magnetic.
Career (UK)
Name: SS Cymric
Owner: White Star Line
Builder: Harland and Wolff, Belfast
Launched: 12 October 1897
Maiden voyage: 11 February 1898
Fate: Torpedoed by German U-boat U-20 on 8 May 1916.
General characteristics
Tonnage: 12,552 gross register tons (GRT)
Length: 585 ft 5 in (178.44 m)
Beam: 64 ft 3 in (19.58 m)
Speed: 15 knots
Capacity: 150 1st class passengers
1,160 3rd class passengers

SS Cymric was a steamship of the White Star Line built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast and launched on 12 October 1897. She had originally been designed as a combination passenger liner and livestock carrier, with accommodations for only First Class passengers. During the stages of her design layout, it became clearer to the designers at Harland and Wolff that combining passengers and livestock had become rather unpopular, so the spaces designated for cattle were reconfigured into Third Class accommodations. She departed Liverpool on her maiden voyage on 29 April 1898, arriving in New York City on 9 May 1898. She spent the first five years of her career on the White Star Line's main passenger service route between Liverpool and New York, until 1903 when she was transferred to the less traveled Liverpool-Boston route, which she sailed on for nine years before being returned to the Liverpool route in 1912.

During both the Boer War and the First World War she was pressed into service as a troop transport. On 8 May 1916 she was torpedoed three times by Walther Schwieger's U-20, which had sunk RMS Lusitania a year earlier.[1] Cymric sank the next day with the loss of five lives, 140 miles northwest of Fastnet.[2]

While the general location of the wreck of the Cymric is known, the wreck has not been found.[citation needed]

References

  1. "White Star Liner, Cymric 1898-1916 sunk by U-20". Titanic and Other White Star Line Ships. Retrieved 2012-09-11. 
  2. "Cymric". Ships hit during WWI. uboat.net. Retrieved 2012-09-11. 

External links

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