Statendam (II) Historical

The SS Statendam was laid down at Harland & Wolff in Belfast in 1914 — the same shipyard that had built the Olympic and the Titanic two years before. Holland America Line had ordered her as the flagship of a new era: 32,234 gross tons, two funnels, room for more than 2,400 passengers in three classes. She was to be the largest ship the line had ever operated.

She never made a single voyage under the HAL flag.

When war came in August 1914, construction slowed and then stopped. By 1915, the British Admiralty had requisitioned her unfinished hull and renamed her HMS Justicia. The planned first-class dining rooms, the grand staircase, the promenade deck outfittings — none of it was ever installed. She was repainted gray and configured for troopship service, and spent her operational life carrying soldiers across the North Atlantic rather than the passengers she had been built to carry.

On July 19, 1918, U-boat UB-64 found her west of Ireland. She survived the first attack and was taken under tow. UB-124 found her the following morning. HMS Justicia went down on July 20, 1918, in approximately 68 meters of water about 35 miles northwest of Malin Head. Ten men did not come home.

Holland America Line mourned a ship that had never served them. The name Statendam would be assigned again — to a new hull launched in 1929 — but the second Statendam existed only in the ledgers: ordered, built, requisitioned, lost. She flew the White Ensign. She never flew the HAL flag.

— In the Wake editorial

I've dived the Justicia three times. She lies on her port side in 68 meters, spread across roughly 230 meters of seafloor west of Malin Head, the two enormous boilers still upright and recognizable, the propeller shaft extending into the silt. She is enormous — you can spend forty minutes on a single dive and still not see all of her.

What stays with me is not the size. It's the name.

When you research a wreck, you find the operational record first — the crossings, the tonnage, the cargo manifests. The Justicia's record is all troopship: gray paint, military configuration, soldiers who were never passengers. But if you go back to the Harland & Wolff order books, you find the original designation. She was the Statendam. She was built for Holland America Line. She had first-class staterooms and dining rooms on the plans. She had a grand staircase designed.

None of it was ever fitted. The war came before the interior was complete, and the requisition order came before a single piece of marquetry was installed. She went to sea as a troop carrier and she never came back as anything else.

I thought about that on my third dive, ascending slowly along the hull, the bow disappearing into the blue below me. The ship under my fins had carried soldiers across the North Atlantic. But the ship in the blueprints had carried families — immigrants going one direction, tourists going the other, people crossing for a wedding or a new beginning. She never got to be that ship. She was the Statendam that Holland America ordered and the Justicia that the war made her, and the distance between those two things is the whole of her story.

— Kieran B., Donegal, written 2019