Laid down at Harland and Wolff, Belfast, as Dominion Line's Alberta,
this ship was transferred to White Star during construction and was
launched in 1908 as Laurentic. Laurentic and her sister Megantic were
used by their owner and their builder as an experiment. Although
otherwise identical, they were outfitted with different propulsion
systems. Megantic had a conventional arrangement of twin screws powered
by quadruple expansion engines, while Laurentic was given a novel triple
screw system, with triple expansion engines powering the wing propellers
and exhausting into a low pressure turbine linked to the center propeller.
Laurentic's arrangement proved to be both faster and more economical. As
a result, that system was chosen for use in White Star's Olympic-class
liners.
Laurentic served on only one route, Liverpool-Canada, during her White
Star career, which began with a Liverpool-Montréal voyage on 29 April
1909. (Her running mates were Megantic and Dominion Line's Canada and
Dominion. Together they provided a weekly service to Montréal in summer
and Halifax or, occasionally, Portland in winter.) In Montréal when
World War I began, Laurentic was immediately commissioned as a troop
transport for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. After conversion to
armed merchant cruiser service in 1915, she sank off the northern coast
of Ireland on 25 January 1917, less than an hour after striking two
mines. Laurentic's sinking accounted for the largest loss of life ever
in a mining: only 121 of the 475 aboard survived.
But the story of Laurentic doesn't end there. Many sunken ships are the
subject of rumors about treasure being on board, but Laurentic is one of
the relatively few cases where there actually was treasure. In addition
to her passengers and crew, the ship was carrying about 3,200 bars of
gold worth £5 million ($25 million). In what Anderson describes as
"[o]ne of the world's most amazing salvage operations," Royal Navy
divers made some 5,000 dives to the wreck between 1917 and 1924. At a
cost of only £128,000 ($640,000), they succeeded in recovering all but
about 25 of the bars. The Royal Navy returned to the site in 1952 to
recover the rest.
Sources: Anderson's White Star; Williams' Wartime Disasters at Sea;
Haws' Merchant Fleets; Bonsor's North Atlantic Seaway; Kludas' Great
Passenger Ships of the World.
