SS Carnatic
British steamship
SS Carnatic was a British steamship built in 1862-63 by Samuda Brothers at Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs, London, for the P&O. She operated on the Suez to Bombay run in the last years before the Suez Canal was opened. This route gave a fast, steamship-operated route from Britain to India, connecting with similar steamships running through the Mediterranean Sea to Alexandria, with an overland crossing to Suez. The alternative was to sail round the Cape of Good Hope, a distance at which steam ships were not, in the early 1860s, sufficiently economical to be commercially competitive with sail.
As one of the first British steamships to use a compound engine, Carnatic achieved a much better fuel economy (at 2lbs of coal per indicated horsepower-hour) than most other contemporary steamers. P&O had a number of compound-engined ships built in the first half of the 1860s: Poonah (1863), Golconda (1863) and Baronda (1864).
In 1869, she ran aground on a coral reef in the Red Sea and broke apart the following morning, with the loss of 30 lives. Her wreck was rediscovered in 1984 and is now a popular scuba diving site.
Ship history
The ship was laid down on 30 January 1862, and was originally to be named Mysore. She was launched as Carnatic on 6 December 1862, and completed on 25 April 1863. The composite construction hull (iron-framed and wooden-planked) was fitted with square-rigged sails and a 4-cylinder compound inverted steam engine by Humphrys & Tennant, providing 2,442 hp (1,821 kW) to a single propeller.
The public source identifies “SS Carnatic” as british steamship. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Carnatic, British and steamship.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “SS Carnatic”, the useful work is to connect “british steamship” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
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 Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1043906. Authority coordinates are 27.581, 33.926. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1862, 1863, 1864 and 1869.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “SS Carnatic”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow SS Carnatic primary sources, SS Carnatic archive and Carnatic research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “SS Carnatic”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “SS Carnatic” 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.