Apia (typhoon)

On March 11, 1889, seven warships sailed to the shores of Samoa to demonstrate the power of the “great” sea powers. The USA was represented by a squadron of ships: Vandalia, Nipsic and Trenton; Germany - gunboats Olga, Eber and Adler. The flag of Great Britain fluttered on the warship of Calliope. However, a sudden hurricane thwarted this demonstration.

March 13, in the afternoon, the barometer needle began to fall rapidly, foreshadowing a hurricane. And indeed, soon a violent storm with rain fell on the port. The wind blew from the sea. Usually, in anticipation of a hurricane, ships left the harbor: in the open sea it is easier to maneuver and resist the elements. This time they didn’t. US Admiral Lewis Kimberley decided not to withdraw his ships from the port. Following his example, the commanders of other ships also remained in place. They hoped to be anchored ^[1] .

Meanwhile, the hurricane intensified. Gigantic waves breaking into the port began to rock the ships, which were dangerously close to each other. Olga and Adler were the first to be in disrepair. In a collision, they received serious damage to the hulls. Then Nipsik struck Olga, and a chimney was cut off near his very deck. Thick black puffs of smoke poured out of the hole. They lay down on the deck, filled the engine and boiler rooms. The stokers tried their best to keep the steam in the boilers. At all costs it was necessary to ensure the operation of the machines. People gasped in smoke.

The first disaster occurred on March 15. On this day, the hurricane reached its limit. At five in the morning, Eber, the smallest ship of the German squadron, became the first victim of the elements. The commander of the ship ordered to raise the anchors and get out of the channel into the open sea. Gigantic, like mountains, waves surged around. At some point, the ship was on the crest of one of them. A wave caught Eber and threw him on the reefs. A strong blow to the side shook the hull. The wave went further, and Eber, deprived of her support, quickly flew down. Before he could even reach balance, the ship, like a billiard ball, was driven into a depression in the underwater part of the reef by a blow of a new wave. In the blink of an eye, he disappeared from the water surface. Out of more than ninety crew members, only one lieutenant and four sailors escaped. Half-dead they were thrown onto a reef, and then another wave carried far to the shore.

The second victim was Nipsik. At seven in the morning, he lost all his anchor chains. In a wave, the ship was thrown towards the shore. He got lucky. Having sat in the shallow water of a sandy beach, Nipsik was not very affected. The crew hastened to retire farther from the ship’s crash site. Nevertheless, eight people died: they were carried away by a tidal wave into the sea.

At eight in the morning, a catastrophe happened with Adler. Seeing that the anchors no longer hold and the ship rushes to the reefs, the commander of Adler, in order to avoid the fate of Eber, chose the moment when the ship was on the crest of a wave and cut the anchor chain. He hoped to rush through the reef and get into the open sea. Such a maneuver required accurate calculation and luck, but the maneuvers of the ship were almost entirely determined by the hurricane. As a result, Adler was thrown onto the flat part of the reef and capsized on the port side. Almost the entire Adler team was saved: only two sailors who decided to swim to the shore died in the waves. Lying on a reef, Adler was in relative safety. Even the most terrible ramparts could not move the ship from its place and carry it out into the open ocean. Half of the crew went down to the reef and found reliable protection behind the hull, while the rest remained on board. The German consul Knappe tried to file a lifeline to Adler. He was assisted by the Samoans - those people whom the Germans shot a couple of days ago. Finally, one of the officers came ashore from Adler. He said that almost a hundred crew members remained on the ship. The Samoans rushed into the raging sea and again extended a lifeline to Adler. But soon he broke off and the German sailors all day and the whole next night had to sit on the overturned ship a few hundred meters from the coast ^[2] .

By eight o’clock in the morning, only three surviving ships remained in the port: Vandalia, Olga and Calliope. They were almost there. Commander Kalliope, fearing that in the end his ship would collide with a neighbor, saw the only possibility of salvation in taking the ship to the open sea. To do this, he first had to overcome the narrow, about 46 meters wide, section of the canal leading to the sea. The passage was dangerous, as it was between the reefs and the previously flooded vessels. But the commander took a risk. In full swing, he led the ship into the canal. Sometimes it seemed that the waves and the wind are stronger than ship engines, and Calliope will not rake. However, the English ship was slowly moving toward the goal. There was one more obstacle in his way. It was necessary to overcome the site at the exit of the canal, where Trenton was half-flooded at the anchors. This American ship was doomed. Water flooded his body, the firebox of the boiler went out. At the exit from the canal, the passage was approximately twice as wide, but the ocean shafts turned out to be especially powerful here. However, the English ship safely overcame the danger and went into the open sea.

The U.S. squadron commander, who was on Trenton, Admiral Kimberley later said that it took two hours for Kalliope to travel half a mile. Although the English ship did not escape damage — he had lost anchors and chains, had broken boats, torn rigging and rigging — he remained intact. His body was not injured, the engines were in good condition.

At 11 o'clock in the morning, Vandalia suffered a sad fate: the ship came across reefs, having received many holes through which ocean waves surged. The sailors tried unsuccessfully to extend a life line to the shore, but they died one by one.

Raging waves and the wind also dealt with Trenton. At 15 o’clock in the afternoon the American ship lost all its anchor chains and raced uncontrollably along the bay. Soon he crashed into a half-flooded Vandalia, which had already lost 43 people. The surviving sailors of Vandalia moved to Trenton. In the end, Trenton became the sixth and last victim of a hurricane. The American ship plunged into the water at the gun ports, but lost only one sailor.

Olga was most fortunate: the ship that rammed Trenton twice managed to safely miss the reefs and run aground in the western part of the bay. This was the only ship that did not have human casualties ^[3] .

A tropical cyclone raged for another day, but on March 17 he finally died down. On March 19, Calliope returned to the port of Apia. A sad picture appeared before the eyes of sailors crowding on the deck. More recently, the formidable ships Olga, Adler, Nipsik, Vandalia and Trenton, as well as seven merchant ships were defeated by a hurricane. Many coastal schooners lay ashore or sank in a port. From the gunboat Eber was not a trace. 147 people died on warships: 96 Germans and 51 Americans. Under the blows of ocean waves, more than a hundred Samoans also died, trying to save the German sailors from Adler.

Trenton and Olga were subsequently chalked, repaired, and continued to serve. Adler lay untouched on the reef for several decades. His skeleton was dismantled after the Second World War.

Scottish writer Robert Stevenson described these events in his work A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa ^[4] .

• "Last Paradise" - Sting Miloslav
• Where and when did the fleet standoff end in defeat of both sides of the typhoon?
• SMS Adler (Gunboat, 1885-1889 )
• Tadeusz Klimczyk. Huragan na Samoa. “Morza, Statki i Okręty”. 4/2002. ISSN 1426-529X.
• John Rousmaniere: After the Storm: True Stories of Disaster and Recovery at Sea. Camden, ME: 2002. ISBN 0-07-137795-6 .
• Jack Sweetman: American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the US Navy and Marine Corps 1775 - Present. Third Edition. Annapolis, MD: 2002. ISBN 1-55750-867-4 .