Loch Vennachar - Farewell Beautiful Lady

THE MYSTERY OF THE CLIPPER SHIP LOCH VENNACHAR - In the first week of September 1905, the clipper ship Loch Vennachar disappeared just two days before she was due to complete her voyage from Glasgow, Scotland, to Adelaide, Australia. She was last spoken to on the 6th of September and requested to be reported as "All well!" The final sighting of the ship occurred at dusk the following day, when she was seen by the crew of an outward-bound schooner. Expected to arrive at Port Adelaide on the 8th or 9th of September, Loch Vennachar was soon reported overdue. Aboard were twenty-eight men and boys, only one of whom was ever found-his body badly decomposed and recovered months later. It would be another seventy years, five months, and eighteen days before the ship herself was finally located. Loch Vennachar was a 1,482-ton iron sailing ship, built in 1875 at the yard of James and George Thomson at Dalmuir on the River Clyde. Her principal owners were James Aitken and James Lilburn, who managed a fleet of vessels named after the lochs of Scotland. Belonging to a Glasgow Shipping Company, she sailed the Scotland-Australia route for thirty years. Under his command, Loch Vennachar survived hurricanes, dismastings, collisions and even a sinking. Farewell Beautiful Lady is the story of Loch Vennachar and those who sailed in her, from her launch to her tragic loss off of the coast of Kangaroo Island, and of the events that followed her rediscovery in 1976 by members of the Society of Underwater Historical Research.