HMY Mekong
Open-knowledge reference entry
The luxury yacht HMY Mekong was originally built in 1906 as the Maund, a luxury steam-yacht. At 903 tons, the ship was 213 feet (65 m) long with a beam of 30 feet (9.1 m). A 204-horsepower (152 kW) steam engine gave her a top speed of 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph). The luxurious vessel was built for Adam Mortimer Singer of the sewing machine company. It was then sold to a French noble, the Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Montpensier, who renamed it Mekong after the Mekong River, in the French colony of French Indochina.
World War 1 service
The Texas newspaper El Paso Herald on 16 October 1914 reported that when war broke out Montpensier gifted it to the British Royal Navy representatives in Tokyo. They accepted his offer on 5 August 1914 but "begged" him to sail it to the British colony port of Weihaiwei in China. In the tradition of British privateers, they armed his ship with "three little guns made more for ornament than use, and but one man on board who knew how to fire them." On their maiden raiding voyage, while the ship was still commanded by the Duc de Montpensier's American Captain Henry E. Morton, they came across a German merchant ship SS Hamametal (4,000 GRT). The German ship tried to run but quickly surrendered when fired upon. Hamametal was taken as a prize ship and it and the Mekong sailed to Weihaiwei.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMY Mekong” 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.