West Ridge (ship)


West Ridge is a merchant ship that was lost in July 1883 carrying coal between Liverpool and Bombay. In May 2018 it was reported that the wreck of the ship had been found in 2015 during the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. A maritime archaeologist at the Western Australia Museum said that the evidence indicated that the likely cause of the loss of the ship was an explosion.

History

West Ridge was built in Glasgow in 1869. She was an iron barque of. The ship was lost in July 1883 when en route from Liverpool to Bombay carrying a cargo of steam coal. Her captain at the time was John Arthurson from Shetland and her crew included sailors from Britain, Scandinavia, Ireland, and Canada. All 28 crew were lost. A subsequent enquiry ruled out a common hazard among coal carriers, an explosion of gas from coal fumes, as the cause of the loss as the ship, finding that West Ridge was "particularly well-ventilated". Between August 1878 and June 1886, 302 British-registered vessels carrying coal were lost at sea.

Discovery

On 19 December 2015, searchers for the lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 using sonar discovered wreckage at a depth of on the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean, to the west of Australia. After marine archaeologists consulted shipping records and newspaper reports they determined that the ship was probably the West Ridge. Coal recovered from the site was found to be of British origin, and the dimensions of the wreck matched those of the West Ridge. The ship would have weighed between 1,000 and 1,500 tons.
Ross Anderson, curator of maritime archaeology at the Western Australian Museum, said that the possibility that the wreck was Kooringa or Lake Ontario, also lost in the area, was less likely. Although an explosion was discounted by the loss enquiry, Anderson said that "The evidence points to the ship sinking as a result of a catastrophic event such as an explosion, which was common in the transport of coal cargos."