SS Maine (1914)
The wreck known locally as the Perrier Wreck is believed to be the small steel steam coaster SS Maine, lost off Dover on 2 April 1914 after a collision with the Spanish vessel José de Aramburu. She should not be confused with the larger and better-known SS Maine sunk off Devon in 1917. This Maine was a much smaller coastal cargo steamer, recorded in local wreck references as a 439 GRT steel vessel, around 50.5 m long with a beam of about 7.4 m, built in 1900.
Her final voyage ended near the Dover harbour approaches, with the UKHO holding a 1914 record titled “Sinking of SS ‘Maine’ off Knuckle Light. Detached mole, Dover harbour.” The recorded cause of loss was collision. Contemporary shipwreck summaries state that Maine collided with José de Aramburu in the English Channel and sank, with her crew rescued by the Spanish vessel. No deaths are currently recorded in the accessible casualty summaries, so this appears to have been a material loss rather than a fatal sinking.
The wreck’s local name comes from the cargo remains rather than the ship’s official identity. Divers know the site as the Perrier Wreck because of the bottles found across the wreckage, including embossed bottles associated with Perrier and “Eaux Artificielles”. I have not yet found a formal cargo manifest, so the safest wording is that bottled water formed an identifiable part of the cargo remains on the seabed, rather than claiming a fully documented cargo of Perrier unless further archive material confirms it.
For divers, that gives the site a neat little story. This is not a dramatic wartime torpedoing or a naval battle site. It is a pre-war Channel collision wreck, sitting in one of the busiest and most awkward stretches of water in Britain. Its interest lies in the combination of Dover shipping history, early twentieth-century coastal trade, collision loss, and the surviving artefact trail left by its cargo. It is a wreck where a modest coaster, a navigation accident, and a cargo of bottled water somehow created one of Dover’s more memorable local dive names.
