The Persier (Wreck)

 interesting place, invisible

She was a ship which died in the night, and nobody saw her going. Or knew where she was, although her cargo of food, which had been intended for the starving in newly liberated Belgium, now rolled and tumbled in the backwash on beaches in South Devon.
Waxed packets of powdered egg, jars of meat concentrate, tins of sausage and wooden boxes of much bigger tins packed with meat and ham, sealed emergency rations of biscuits, chocolate, Horlicks tablets, chewing gum, cigarettes and boxes and boxes of Sunlight soap - all were there, with bales of blankets, for the taking. And much was taken with thanks by the locals.
Even so, the ship, which had been torpedoed off the Eddystone on 11 February, 1945, remained undiscovered until May 1969, when four divers from Plymouth Sound BSAC hooked into what they thought would give them a new reef to dive. They found the intact wreck of the 5832 ton Belgian steamer Persier.
When she had been launched as a British Standard Ship at Newcastle in 1918, she had been named War Buffalo. The bell still bore that name when those first divers recovered it.
The Persier had sailed from Cardiff with convoy BTC 65 on 8 February, was torpedoed in her port side by U1017 three days later, and started to list at once. Abandon-ship drill took only six minutes, but it went terribly wrong.
Number 1 lifeboat was lowered while the ship had too much way on her and spilled everyone into the water. The engines restarted themselves and lifeboat 3 was drawn into the ship’s propeller and was chopped to pieces. Lifeboat 1 was now righted, but that too went into the still-spinning prop.
Of the 63 men aboard, including convoy commander Commodore Edmund Wood and his staff and three signallers, 20 were lost. The survivors were those who managed to scramble onto Carley floats and were picked up by other ships which, against convoy orders, had stood by the Persier in mountainous seas and force 7 winds.
The Persier was last seen drifting into the night, stern high, bow down. Tugs called out from Plymouth searched for her in vain.