On the night of 27 November 1940, fire broke out in the engine room of a ship loaded with hundreds of sea mines. Her crew had barely an hour to scramble ashore before the flames reached the cordite. When the explosion came, it tore HMS Port Napier apart and rained burning debris across Loch Alsh, the narrow stretch of water between mainland Scotland and Skye. Remarkably, no one was killed. Eighty-five years later, her hull is still there, rusting on its side in the dark Highland water, with at least one four-inch gun and the trolleys that once moved her deadly cargo scattered across the seabed.
Port Napier was meant to carry refrigerated cargo, not weapons of war. She was the third of four near-identical motor ships ordered by Port Line from Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson's Wallsend shipyard on the Tyne, named for the New Zealand port her sister Port Jackson had originally served. Launched on 23 April 1940, she was a handsome twin-screw vessel with five-cylinder Doxford diesels good for sixteen knots. But the world had changed since her keel was laid. France had fallen six weeks earlier. The Royal Navy needed minelayers to seal off the northern approaches against U-boats and surface raiders, and Port Napier never carried a single commercial cargo. The Admiralty requisitioned her before she could enter merchant service, fitted her with two four-inch guns and a clutter of Oerlikons, and adapted her holds to take 600 naval mines. She was commissioned as HMS Port Napier on 12 June 1940 with the pennant number M32.
Kyle of Lochalsh, on the mainland side of the narrows, was a sleepy fishing village before the war. The Royal Navy turned it into Port ZA, the operational base of the 1st Minelaying Squadron, with Port Napier and four sister auxiliary minelayers berthed there under destroyer escort. The work was unglamorous and grim. The squadron laid the Northern Barrage, a deep belt of mines stretching across the gap between Scotland's Orkney Islands and Iceland that was meant to deny German submarines access to the Atlantic. Each sortie meant slipping out of the loch with hundreds of contact mines stacked in the holds, sailing into the open North Atlantic in winter darkness, releasing them on precise grids, and returning to reload. Port Napier was new to this work in the autumn of 1940. She had been on station only a few months.
Late on 27 November 1940, an engine room fire took hold. The crew fought it but could not contain it, and the ship was loaded with mines. Each mine carried a substantial charge of TNT; cordite for the guns was stored elsewhere aboard. The captain ordered the crew off, and they made it ashore in the darkness. When the fire reached the magazines, the explosion was heard for miles across the Highlands. Windows broke in Kyleakin on the Skye side of the loch. Burning wreckage scattered across the water and onto the beaches. The ship rolled onto her port side and sank in shallow water close inshore. That the entire crew survived was extraordinary, and a quiet credit to whoever made the call to evacuate when they did.
Port Napier never moved again. The Admiralty considered salvage and then thought better of it, given the mines still aboard. The ship lies in around twenty metres of water just off the south shore of Loch Alsh, her port side visible at low tide. Divers can swim through gaps where her plates have rotted away, past the trolleys that once shuttled mines along her decks, past at least one of her four-inch guns still mounted aft of the forecastle. Plumose anemones, ghostly white, encrust the timber decking. Scallops live in the silt. The wreck is one of the most accessible in Scotland for recreational diving, a peculiar legacy for a ship that never reached the open sea under her own designed purpose. Most of her mines were eventually removed by Royal Navy clearance divers in the 1950s, but a few stragglers are said to remain in the silt.
Wreck position: 57.27 N, 5.69 W, on the south shore of Loch Alsh just east of the Skye Bridge. The narrow blue water between Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland and Kyleakin on Skye is a clear visual cue at any altitude. Nearest airport is Inverness (EGPE) about 75 nm east; Plockton airstrip (EGEO) sits just a few miles north. The Cuillin mountains of Skye dominate the southwest skyline. Cloudbase here often sits low over the lochs, but on a clear day the wreck's outline is sometimes visible from the air through shallow water at low tide.