On 24 May 1953, the Swedish motor vessel Andaman was on passage from Gothenburg to Calcutta when she collided in thick fog with the Panamanian freighter Fortune near the South Goodwin Lightship. Canterbury Divers describes her as a 4,765 ton Swedish motor vessel with a beam of nearly 20 metres and a draught of about 7 metres, while other shipping references place her at 4,742 gross tons. Either way, she was a sizeable post-war cargo ship, and when the collision came it was serious enough for her to begin sinking almost at once.
Andaman had been built in Gothenburg in 1947 by Götaverken Cityvarvet for the Swedish East Asia Company, A/B Svenska Ostasiatiska Kompaniet. Lloyd’s Register Foundation archive entries confirm her year of build and record an official number of 8859, while shipping histories note overall dimensions of roughly 439 feet in length, 58.6 feet in beam and 21.2 feet in depth, with oil engines rated at 1,260 nominal horsepower. She belonged to that solid generation of modern Swedish motorships built for long ocean trade in the years immediately after the war.
The collision happened about three miles south of the South Goodwin Lightvessel. The RNLI account states that Dover lifeboat launched at 3.15 in dense fog after word came through that Andaman had collided with Fortune. By then the Fortune had anchored near the South Goodwin Buoy, while Andaman was already sinking and her crew were taking to the boats. The steamship Arthur Wright picked up the survivors and the Dover lifeboat later landed all 38 men safely ashore. So, despite the violence and speed of the sinking, there was no loss of life.
As for cargo, the open sources I could verify do not give a dependable manifest for her final voyage, so I’m not going to make one up for dramatic effect. She was travelling on a long commercial run from Sweden to India, which strongly suggests general cargo rather than anything glamorous, but that part remains unconfirmed from the sources I found. The wreck itself is described in diver chatter as sitting in about 50 metres, and the Deal wreck database lists Andaman among Goodwin-area losses compiled from Admiralty and conservation data, though without a clean public extract of the full entry. So the honest version is this: Andaman is a deep Channel wreck, a post-war Swedish motorship lost in fog, with all hands saved, and with some of her story still frustratingly buried in the sort of records humans insist on scattering across fifteen archives.
