SS Castor (1894)

The SS Castor was a Dutch iron screw steamship, launched on 18 June 1870 by A. & J. Inglis of Glasgow for the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Stoomboot Maatschappij (Royal Netherlands Steamship Company). She was registered at Amsterdam and measured about 77 metres long, with a 9.9 metre beam, 1,500 gross tons, two boilers and a two-cylinder compound engine. Earlier in her career she even worked Atlantic passenger routes, before settling into Mediterranean and Baltic cargo service, because apparently one lifetime of honest work wasn’t enough for a Victorian steamer.

On 28 July 1894, Castor was on passage from Smyrna, now Izmir, to Amsterdam, having called at Algiers, when she was caught in dense fog off Dungeness / Folkestone and collided with the German barque Ernst. She was struck amidships and sank, but her 25 crew and 3 passengers were all saved. Her cargo gives this wreck its real intrigue: 14 Greco-Roman sculptures and inscriptions, packed in two crates for the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. Divers later recovered several second-century marble pieces from the wreck, including sculptured heads and funerary monuments. Today, Castor is a cracking dive with a rare story: a Dutch steamer, a Channel collision, and classical antiquities lying in the silt like history had dropped its handbag