SS Maine

The 3,616 gross tons SS Maine was laid down in 1904 at the D. & W Henderson, Shipbuilders, yard in Partick, Scotland.  Starting life humbly as Job No.440, she was commissioned with this long-established shipbuilding firm by the Sierra Shipping Company of Liverpool.

D. & w: Henderson themselves had initially been founded as a marine engineering venture by David and William Henderson, two of four brothers in the 1850s. Another brother, Thomas, was responsible for founding the Anchor Line in Glasgow in 1856. In the mid-1860s D. & W: Henderson purchased the defunct shipbuilding yard of Tod & MacGregor at Partick, and their business went from strength to strength in the great era of shipbuilding. Eventually the firm was bought by Harland & Wolf (famed builders of the Titanic) of Belfast in 1917.

The hull of Job 440 was launched in January 1905 and she was completed in July that year.  She was given the official number 120821 and was named Sierra Blanca.  The newly christened ship was 375 feet in length, with a beam of 46 feet. The Siera Blanca was constructed in the traditional and classic way of a cargo workhorse of her time -straight stem, cavernous foredeck holds, bridge superstructure amidships with a single-storey deckhouse behind above the engine-room.  Aft of the engine- and boiler-rooms, and superstructure above, lay more cargo holds.  She was a functional, well-designed cargo ship, built for hauling substantial cargoes around the seas.

In 1913 she was bought for £38,500 by the Atlantic Transport Company who renamed her Maine.  She would sail the seas under this name for only a further four short years until dawn on 23 March 1917, when she would be sent to the bottom, another victim of an unseen U-boat, UC-17.  Today she is one of the finest dives in the South Devon area, attracting hundreds of divers to her each year.  The wreck is owned by the Torbay branch of the British Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC).

More details on the SS Maine are contained in Dive England's Greatest Shipwrecks.