Dive This Wreck Some wrecks arrive in history with gunfire, explosions and grand naval drama. Hydaspes did not. She slipped into disaster in a bank of Channel fog, with whistles sounding,…
Some wrecks come with a grand title, a tragic story and enough paperwork to keep a maritime historian quietly twitching for a week. Then there’s the Varne Wreck.It’s called the…
Her career was brutally short. On 28 November 1864, Mindora collided in the English Channel with the Khersonese, another outward-bound sailing ship, reportedly on passage from London to Calcutta. Contemporary shipwreck listings place the collision about 8 nautical miles south-west by west of South Foreland, with Mindora sinking and the other vessel abandoned in a sinking condition. For divers, this is a proper Victorian mystery wreck: a young barque lost almost as soon as her story began, a collision in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, and a seabed site that still gives up small clues from a long-vanished age of sail.
