SS Ausonia (1909)
steamboat
SS Ausonia was a British passenger ship that was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine SM U-62 620 nautical miles (1,150 km; 710 mi) west south west of the Fastnet Rock in the Atlantic Ocean on 30 May 1918 with the loss of 44 lives, while she was travelling from Liverpool, United Kingdom to New York City, United States with general cargo.
Construction
Ausonia was launched as Tortona for the Cairn-Thomson Line at the Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd. shipyard in Wallsend, United Kingdom on 18 August 1909, and completed the following month. The ship was 137.3 metres (450 ft 6 in) long, had a beam of 16.5 metres (54 ft 2 in) and a depth of 8.9 metres (29 ft 2 in). She was assessed at 7,907 gross register tons (GRT) and had a pair of triple expansion engines producing 888 nominal horsepower, driving twin screw propellers. The ship could reach a maximum speed of 14 knots (26 km/h; 16 mph) and had four masts and one funnel. As built, she had the capacity to carry 37 1st-class and 1,000 steerage passengers.
Early career
For her maiden voyage she sailed from Middlesbrough on 22 October 1909, calling also at Quebec, en route to Montreal. Tortona departed Montreal on 20 November 1909 for Livorno with stops in Quebec, Naples and Genoa. She made her first crossing from Naples to Portland in March 1910, and went on to serve on the Naples – Quebec – Montreal and London – Quebec –Montreal routes.
“SS Ausonia (1909)” enters the record as steamboat. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ausonia and steamboat can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q779651. Authority coordinates are 47.983, -23.700. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1909 and 1910.
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