SS Cambria (1869)
ship
SS Cambria was a British cargo-passenger steamship wrecked off the north-west of Ireland on 19 October 1870 with the loss of 178 lives.
Ship history
The iron-hulled ship was built at the Robert Duncan & Co. shipyard in Port Glasgow for the Anchor Line, to operate on the trans-Atlantic route. She was launched on 1 March 1869, and sailed on her maiden voyage on 8 May, sailing from Glasgow, and calling at Moville in County Donegal, Ireland, before heading across the Atlantic to New York City.
Sinking
Cambria departed New York on 8 October 1870 under the command of Captain John Carnighan, carrying a general cargo, a crew of 74, and 105 passengers, on only her twelfth Atlantic crossing. Around 11.00 pm on 19 October the ship was sailing in heavy seas when she struck Tor Beg rock, half a mile north-west of Inishtrahull Island, which is about 6 miles north-east of Malin Head. Lifeboats were launched, but the only survivor was a passenger named John M'Gartland. He had left the ship aboard a lifeboat with about 15 other passengers. The boat almost immediately capsized and all the occupants were thrown into the sea. When M'Gartland regained consciousness he found himself clinging to the boat, which had righted itself.
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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 Dec 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1028187. Authority coordinates are 55.450, -7.233. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1870 and 1869.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Cambria (1869)” 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.