SS Narkunda
steamship

The SS Narkunda was a passenger ship commissioned in 1920 by the British shipping company, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, which carried passengers and mail from Great Britain to Australia and later to the Far East. From 1940 she served as a troop ship until she was sunk on 14 November 1942, on the Algerian coast during a German air raid.
Story
The steamship Narkunda was ordered in 1913 and built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The First World War significantly delayed the construction of the ship. It was not until 25 April 1918 that the 16,227 GRT "Narkunda" could be launched at Harland & Wolff. Her sister ship, also commissioned in 1913, the SS Naldera (15,825 GRT), was built by Caird & Company in Greenock, Scotland, and was launched in December 1917.
The 177.22 meter long and 21.16 meter wide passenger and mail ship Narkunda had three funnels, two masts and two propellers and was powered by quadruple expansion steam engines, that could attain up to 17.5 knots. The passenger accommodations were designed for 426 passengers in first and 247 passengers in second class. The Narkunda and the Naldera were P&O's first three-funnelled ships, the first with a rounded cruiser stern, and also the largest ships of the shipping company up to that point. The Narkunda left on 30 March 1920 on her maiden voyage.
The public source identifies “SS Narkunda” as steamship. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Narkunda and steamship.
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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 Jan 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1123984. Authority coordinates are 36.867, 5.017. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1940, 1942 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Narkunda” 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.