Qualla: Alondra Shipwreck

Alondra Shipwreck: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was the day before the New Year, 1916, and Kedge Rock was waiting in the dark. The Alondra, a 300-foot steel steamer making her way through the North Atlantic with the Yeoward Bros. house flag at her mast, struck the rock at full force. Sixteen men managed to get away in one of her own lifeboats, pulling at the oars in seas that should never have been pulled against. Every one of them drowned before they reached shore. Another man died aboard. The wreck sat broken on the rocks of southwest Cork, and Baltimore, a fishing village with no lifeboat of its own, became the unlikely staging ground for one of the more remarkable rescues of the First World War at sea.

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Alondra Shipwreck: A Ship from Port Glasgow

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Alondra had been launched on 9 July 1899 from the yard of David J. Dunlop at Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, built for the London-based Rio Tinto Company. She was a passenger and cargo steamship of steel construction, roughly 300 feet long, 40 wide, 20 deep, rigged as a two-maste...

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Alondra Shipwreck: The Archdeacon's Boat

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A lifeboat station had been promised for Baltimore in 1913, but the engines for the boat were still tangled up in wartime shortages. So when Archdeacon John Becher learned what had happened on Kedge Rock, he had no lifeboat to launch. He gathered a crew anyway and set out in a lo...

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Alondra Shipwreck: The Wreck Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today the Alondra lies in relatively shallow water -- between roughly five and twenty metres -- where the rock holds her broken hull in place. She has become one of the staple dive sites of Roaringwater Bay, alongside the German submarine U-260, scuttled in 1945, and the bulk car...

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Alondra Shipwreck: Kedge Rock, Still

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rock is still out there. It does not appear on any of the more dramatic maps of the coast -- it is not Fastnet, not the Stags -- but for the small boats that pass it on the way out of Baltimore Harbour, it remains exactly the kind of low, ugly hazard that takes ships in bad w...

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