SS Mayaguez
ship built in 1944
SS Mayaguez was a U.S.-flagged container ship that is best known for its 12 May 1975 seizure by Khmer Rouge forces of Cambodia, which resulted in a confrontation with the United States at the close of the Vietnam War.
Service history
The Mayaguez was first launched in April 1944 as SS White Falcon, a U.S. Maritime Commission C2-S-AJ1 freighter built by North Carolina Shipbuilding Company of Wilmington, North Carolina.
After World War II, the ship was sold to Grace Line and renamed the SS Santa Eliana. Seeking to containerize its coffee bean traffic from Venezuela, in 1960 Grace had the Santa Eliana and her sister ship Santa Leonor lengthened and widened by the Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock Company and converted into the first U.S.-flagged, all-container ships devoted to foreign trade, with a capacity of 382 containers below-deck plus 94 on-deck. With Grace Line's plans repeatedly frustrated by longshoremen opposition in both Venezuela and New York, the ship was sold in 1964 to the American container line Sea-Land Service and renamed SS Sea, and then SS Mayaguez (named after the city of Mayagüez on the west coast of Puerto Rico) in 1965. Her sister ship was renamed Land and then Ponce (after the city of Ponce on the south coast of Puerto Rico).
In 1967, Sea-Land began regular container service under contract to the Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) in support of American forces in Southeast Asia, with the Mayaguez being one of many Sea-Land ships employed. In 1975 the Mayaguez was sailing a regular route: Hong Kong – Sattahip, Thailand – Singapore. On 7 May 1975, about a week after the fall of Saigon, Mayaguez left Hong Kong on what was said to be a routine voyage.
Capture and recovery
The "Mayaguez incident" took place between Democratic Kampuchea (today known as the Kingdom of Cambodia) and the United States from 12 to 15 May 1975, less than a month after the Khmer Rouge took control of the capital Phnom Penh ousting the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic.
The public source identifies “SS Mayaguez” as ship built in 1944. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mayaguez, ship and built.
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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 Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3430308. The Library of Congress control number is n87871767. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1944, 1960 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Mayaguez” 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.