Neck Bremen (1898/12)

Scorpion Bight

The ship Neck was built of iron at Vegesack on the River Geeste, Germany, for the firm of Gildemeister & Ries of Bremen and registered in that port. It had two decks. The Lloyd’s Register of 1896-97 contains the notation ‘Missing since April 1896’.

There is no evidence that the wreck of the Neck occurred in Western Australian waters, but it is included in this book as it is one of the mysteries of the sea that came to light in this State.

THE LOSS
On 6 December 1898 the acting telegraph station manager at Eyre sent a telegram to the Post-master General in Perth, R.A. Sholl:
Reported last evening that upper part of deck-house, bearing name of Neck, Bremen, washed ashore, Scorpion Bight, twenty-eight miles east. Not been beached more than a day when discovered on 3rd inst. (quoted in West Australian, 7 December 1898: 4h).

A few days later the local Eucla newspaper reported:
Another of those painful uncertainties with which ocean life is unfortunately so closely allied has been brought to notice by a discovery made by Mr J.W.W. Graham at Scorpion Bight, 28 miles east of Eyre, of a considerable quantity of wreckage consisting chiefly of the upper part of a deckhouse and attachments. The name “Neck Bremen” is done in raised woodwork on each end of the structure, the dimensions of which are about 11 feet long by 9 feet wide. When found it had only been ashore for a day or two at most. Being made of teak throughout it is impossible to conjecture the length of time it has been in the water. No wreckage belonging to this vessel was found at any other point than the one mentioned, nor any evidence to show whether the vessel to which it belonged was a steamer or sailer (Eucla Recorder, 10 December 1898: 6a).

There is a gap of two and a half years from the time the Neck was posted missing until the deckhouse and other wreckage was found at Scorpion Bight. It was considered to have been ashore for only a day or two, but there was no way of ascertaining how long it had been in the sea. It would appear, however, that the deckhouse had not been submerged for any great length of time or this would have been commented on in the report. Even teak will show considerable evidence of deterioration if it remains underwater for a year or two.

There are a number of possibilities regarding where the vessel was wrecked. With the combined currents flowing in the southern Indian Ocean and Southern Ocean from west to east, any floating material from a wreck which occurred anywhere east of the Cape of Good Hope could be carried as far to the east as Scorpion Bight or even further. This current (part of the Indian Ocean Gyre) has an average rate of half a knot. If the Neck was wrecked on one of the islands in the Southern Ocean such as Prince Edward, Amsterdam, St Paul or the Crozet islands, a lot would depend on how long it took for the deckhouse to break away from the iron hull before it started drifting. Another possibility is that the ship was overwhelmed by one of the storms common in those waters, and that subsequently the deckhouse broke loose and with other wreckage drifted to Scorpion Bight.

Although the report states that no other wreckage was found but that at Scorpion Bight, there are many isolated sections of the south coast of Western and South Australia where material may have come ashore and never been found.