Burmah (ship)
ship which disappeared en route from London to New Zealand in 1859/60
Burmah was a passenger ship, which disappeared en route from England to New Zealand in 1859 or 1860.
Last voyage
Burmah was chartered by Willis, Gann & Co. The ship left London for New Zealand on 30 August 1859. Burmah was seen by the ship Regina on 17 November, about 14 days sailing distance west of New Zealand, at 48°S 97°E. Regina passed icebergs the day after it passed Burmah. Burmah never arrived at New Zealand and was officially declared lost by Lloyds on 6 May 1860.
Burmah was carrying passengers and an assortment of breeding livestock.
The novelist Samuel Butler was booked to travel on Burmah to New Zealand, but he changed to a different ship, Roman Emperor, at the last moment, and therefore avoided the loss of Burmah.
“Burmah (ship)” enters the record as ship which disappeared en route from London to New Zealand in 1859/60. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Burmah, ship and disappeared can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Burmah (ship)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Burmah, ship and disappeared provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4999361. Authority coordinates are -48.000, 97.000. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1859 and 1860.
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This entry incorporates text from “Burmah (ship)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.