SS Xantho
ship wrecked off the coast of Western Australia
SS Xantho was a steam ship used in the colony of Western Australia as a pearling transport and mothership, as a tramp steamer, carrying passengers, including Aboriginal convicts and trade goods before she sank at Port Gregory, Western Australia in 1872. She was powered by a horizontal trunk engine, and was the first steamship to operate in north-western Australia.
Although the wrecksite remained marked on charts, it was largely buried and forgotten until 1979 when it was rediscovered and re-dentified. Subsequent investigations by the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australian Museum, in concert with the Museum's Department of Conservation and Restoration saw the trunk engine recovered in 1985. In the ensuing years it was gradually restored for display at the museum.
Operational history
Xantho was built in 1848 as a paddle steamer by William Denny & Brothers. The vessel was used by the Anstruther and Leith Steamship Company for crossings of the Firth of Forth between Leith and Aberdour. In 1860, she was sold and relocated to Scarborough, North Yorkshire. In July 1864, Xantho was sold again, and her register transferred to Wick, from where she was permitted to take excursions to sea.
In early 1871, Xantho was sold to metal merchant Robert Stewart of Glasgow, who replaced the paddle engines with a second-hand Crimean War-era two-cylinder, non-condensing trunk engine built (or assembled) in 1861 by John Penn.
“SS Xantho” enters the record as ship wrecked off the coast of Western Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Xantho, ship and wrecked can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7394568. Authority coordinates are -28.187, 114.236. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1872, 1979, 1985 and 1848.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Xantho” 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.