SS West Saginaw
1919 ship scrapped in 1961

West Saginaw was a 5,758 GRT Design 1013 cargo ship that was built in 1919 by Northwest Steel Company, Portland, Oregon, United States. She was built for the United States Shipping Board, passing to the United States Maritime Commission in 1936. In 1941, she was transferred to the British Ministry of War Transport and renamed Empire Cougar.
She spent the war sailing between the United Kingdom and the Caribbean, mostly sailing via the United States with some voyages made via Africa. She carried coal or fertilizer outbound, and returned with sugar. Empire Cougar was sold post-war and renamed Aurora. In 1948, she was sold to Panama and renamed Cougar, In 1951, she was sold to Italy and renamed Favola, serving until she was scrapped in 1961.
Design
The ship was built in 1919 by Northwest Steel Company, Portland, Oregon. She was yard number 35.
The ship was 409 feet 8 inches (124.87 m) long, with a beam of 54 feet 2 inches (16.51 m).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7394543. Authority coordinates are 42.333, -59.650. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1013, 1919, 1936 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS West Saginaw” 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.