On doomed deck
Captain Courageous... John Vincent looks at the story of the Flying Enterprise, its mystery cargo and heroic Danish master.
The Flying Enterprise shipwreck was a big, big story back in the winter of 1951-52. Older national newspaper men were still talking of it when I arrived in the West Country as a reporter nearly quarter of a century later... about how heroic Captain Kurt Carlsen stayed on his sinking freighter for 13 days after it was caught in a terrible storm 400 miles off Land’s End on Christmas Day.
It eventually sank 37 miles from safe harbour at Falmouth, Cornwall, minutes after he was forced to abandon ship.
Story and dramatic pictures made news around the world and Carlsen received a ticker-tape parade on his return to New York.
Maritime historians are still debating the incident today as it was revealed that as well as pig iron, coffee, peat, cars, antiques, typewriters and naphthalene, the ship was carrying a secret consignment of zirconium. This was said to be destined for the world’s first nuclear pressurised water reactor – a prototype for the one that would propel the first nuclearpowered submarine, the USS Nautilus,
launched in 1954.
All this provided tentative answers about why one man had risked his life for an ordinary merchant ship, why American destroyers had rushed to guard the ship day and night and why those involved in the rescue had been visited by FBI agents soon after the ship was lost. We may never know the full story but memories of the extraordinary incident were revived by the emergence at a Charles Miller maritime sale of two Flying Enterprise relics: the life preserver worn by Capt Carlsen and the lifebuoy used by Capt Ken Dancy, of the tug Turmoil
which towed the stricken vessel back towards Falmouth. The artefacts – given by Capt Dancy to Jock Drennan, landlord of a pub in the port – fetched £1,050 when sold as a single lot.
At the same sale, bustlength portraits of Trafalgar hero Lord
Nelson and his mistress, Emma, Lady Hamilton (the latter wearing a turban), by society portraitist John Downman (17501824), who visited the Nelson household at Merton, London, in 1802, realised £9,920.
Other highlights included an early Victorian armchair made from the timber of HMS Temeraire, of Battle of Trafalgar fame, which went for £5,210; the bridge bell from Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition ship Discovery sold for £2,230; a bell from the Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine K-524 realised £1,985; and a brass badge from the HMS Bulldog, which captured a complete Enigma machine and codebooks from a German submarine in 1941, fetched £745. On a local note, a watercolour by Sheffield-born Thomas Bush Hardy (1842-1897), Shipping by the Guidecca, Venice, made £1,490.
But back to the Flying Enterprise .In 1960, about a quarter of the $800,000 cargo was salvaged by an Italian company but under a confidentiality clause further details of the contents were not released. In 2001, a Danish expedition rediscovered the wreck, which now lies in 276ft of water. Danish-born Capt Carlsen died in 1989, aged 75.