Article received from Mr Gabriel Athiros, editor of
"The Cape Odyssey"
At 10 o'clock on the evening of 17 January 1901, the sound
of the recall signal being fired from the HMS Doris, flagship of
the Naval Commander-in-Chief at Simon's Town, Rear-Admiral
Sir R.H. Harris, brought her crew hurrying back on board as she
proceeded to put to sea. The hurried activity was in response to
a report that the cruiser, HMS Sybille was
aground on the rocks south of Lamberts Bay on the Cape west
coast, and the Doris was rushing to her assistance.
The HMS
Sybille was a twin screw, second-class cruiser of 3400
tons, built in 1890 by R. Stephenson of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Her
9496 horsepower triple expansion engines could produce a top
speed of 20 knots. One of twenty-one Apollo class cruisers built,
she was first commissioned at Devonport on 8 January 1895 for the
Mediterranean Station under Captain Gerald W. Russell. There she
served until returning to Devonport in 1898, where she was paid
off on 18 March of that year. She remained out of commission
until 3 October 1900 when she was commissioned at Portsmouth to
relieve the HMS Barossa at the Cape of Good Hope Station, under
the command Captain Hugh P. Williams.
After an uneventful voyage, the Sybille
arrived in Simon's Town from England on Saturday 12 January
1901, where she was coaled immediately and put to sea again on
Monday 14 January, bound for Lamberts Bay. Upon arrival the
captain, junior lieutenants and the naval brigade - about 50 men
in all - went ashore. This was because Lamberts Bay was used as a
military base, which necessitated the deployment of a detachment
ashore. The Sybille was left under the command of the first
lieutenant, Mr H.H. Holland, and navigating lieutenant, Mr H.
Cayley.
Almost immediately, the weather, which was most unusual for
January, showed signs of deteriorating. The north-wester which
had prevailed on the voyage up the coast, freshened to a gale,
and faced with the fact that the anchorage at Lamberts Bay
offered very little protection to a vessel of the size of the
Sybille, Lt. Holland as the officer in command
of the vessel decided it would be prudent to put to sea. The
anchor was accordingly raised and, at 10pm on the night of 15
January, the Sybille steamed out of the bay into increasingly
rough seas, and heavy squalls. Sharing the anchorage that night
were two other vessels, the Royal Navy Torpedo Boat No. 60 and
the transport City of Cambridge (Transport No. 15), both of which
opted to ride out the weather.
At
about 2am the following morning, the weather having moderated
somewhat, the Sybille put about and proceeded to steam back to
Lamberts Bay. It was later found that unbeknownst to crew and the
officer of the watch, Sub-Lieutenant A.G.A Street, the rough
weather and the southerly set of the current had pushed the
vessel some six miles south of what they believed their position
to be. At 4.30 on the morning of 16 January the Sybille struck a
reef near the farm at Steenboksfontein, about three miles, or
five kilometres south of Lamberts Bay. The order was immediately
given the reverse the engines in an attempt to get her off, but
to no avail, and when it became clear that the vessel was stuck
fast and filling rapidly, the watertight doors were shut, and
preparations made to abandon ship.
Amid the heavy seas pounding the vessel, some of which were
breaking above her funnels, her company made a number of attempts
to get a line ashore, but without success. The outlook may have
been grim indeed for the crew, who had taken refuge in the
rigging and on the forebridge, had the wreck not been spotted by
the HMS Tartar and the City of Cambridge, the latter having left
Lamberts Bay en route to Cape Town at 4am after an uncomfortable
night. In the meantime, Captain Williams had learned of the loss
of his ship, and within two and a half hours of the wreck had
come out from Lamberts Bay in a tug. With the greatest difficulty
a line was attached to the Sybille, and the two
hundred and fifty odd members of the crew aboard were rescued
without mishap, although the sea conditions meant that the
operation took until 2pm that afternoon. The last man to leave
the ship was Lt. Holland.
The
only casualty was a nineteen-year-old ordinary seaman, W.H.
Jones, who sustained fatal internal injuries when he was swept
across the deck by the heavy seas and crushed against one of the
vessel's 4.7-inch guns. He was later buried ashore, and his
grave can be seen in a small cemetery in Lamberts Bay. The
rescued crew, most of whom had escaped with nothing more than the
clothes they wore, were taken aboard the City of Cambridge, which
had remained near the wreck to render assistance while the Tartar
had gone on to Saldanha Bay to raise the alarm. From there the
crew were taken to Lamberts Bay.
The Doris arrived at the site of the wreck late on the
afternoon of 17 January, after leaving Simon's Town at 4.30am
that morning. The seas were found to be too rough for her to get
close to the Sybille, so she proceeded to Lamberts Bay from where
the following day Rear-Admiral Harris disembarked and rode to the
wreck on horseback. It was soon abundantly clear to Harris that
the Sybille was beyond hope of salvage, and that
she would be come a total wreck. He found her lying on an even
keel, but broadside on to the seas and completely awash, the
water in her hull rising and falling with the tides. In the two
days since running aground she had been pushed two to three
hundred metres closer to the shore by the force of the sea, and
her bottom had been torn to pieces on the reef.
However, it looked likely that her two 6-inch and six 4.7-inch
guns could be salvaged; along with the torpedoes she was
carrying. Her Maxim guns, rifles, and pistols, and the money,
which was on board, were salvaged the day she ran aground and
taken back to Lamberts Bay. In the days following Admiral
Harris' visit, many of her fittings, including her anchors
and cables, her torpedoes and stores, and all but one of her
heavy guns were salvaged. Under the leadership of Lt. Holland a
working party undertook the mammoth task of transferring the
guns, some of which weighed more than seven tons, from the wreck
into lighters, after which they were towed to Lamberts Bay. All
of this material was placed aboard the City of Cambridge and
later dispatched to Cape Town.
As one would expect, the loss of one of it's vessels was
viewed as a very serious matter indeed by the Royal Navy, and was
the subject of a Court Martial held aboard the HMS Monarch, the
port guard ship, in Simon's Town on 26 February 1901. Facing
the court, which included Captain Williams as prosecutor, were
Lt. Holland, Lt. Cayley, Sub-Lt. Street, and Chief Gunner Tapper.
Although the evidence led clearly showed the exemplary fashion in
which the disaster was managed after the fact, the crew rescued
and the vessel salvaged, the court found evidence that there had
been serious lapses in navigation and the handling of the vessel
after she left Lamberts Bay on the night of 15 January. There was
evidence that despite the rough seas and prevailing gale, no
attempt had been made to calculate the vessel's position, and
no thought given to the likelihood that a current may have been
running. As it turned out, the captain of the City of Cambridge,
in evidence to the court, reported that he had noted a strong
southerly current of 3-4 knots running at the time of the
wrecking. The sentences handed down to the four men were
remarkably light, and although they were all dismissed from the
Sybille, and three of them forfeited some
seniority, they all escaped with severe reprimands but no worse.
Of the four, only Lt. Cayley resigned his commission as a result
of the Court Martial, the remaining three continuing in the
service of the Royal Navy.
The Sybille Today:
At 11am on the morning of 16 January 2001, a small group of
people made up of Lamberts Bay residents and South African Navy
personnel assembled on the beach near the site of the wreck. They
were there to witness a wreath-laying ceremony by Admiral of the
South African Navy, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the
loss of the Sybille.
Since the fateful day she ran aground one hundred years ago,
the wreck of the Sybille has not fared well. The very exposed
nature of the reef she came to rest on ensured that she broke up
rapidly in the heavy surf. More recently, the human element
intervened when despite the fact that at the time of her loss all
money aboard was recovered, stories circulated that she was
carrying a fortune in sovereigns. Numerous divers have also since
salvaged large quantities of non-ferrous metal from the wreck,
including one of her propellers, some of this work involving the
use of explosives, which further destroyed the site.
Most recently, divers also recovered
the second and only remaining propeller of the Sybille, but it
has since been donated to SAHRA who wish to see it conserved, and
permanently displayed Lamberts Bay.
Finally, the story of the Sybille would not be complete
without making reference to an incident widely touted as the only
naval engagement of the South African War. According to reports,
a Royal Navy vessel was involved in an exchange of shots with a
Boer commando while patrolling the west coast. Both the Sybille
and the HMS Partridge have been linked to this incident, but it
now seems to be generally accepted that the vessel involved was
in fact the Partridge rather than the Sybille.
