Elbe came down the slipway at John Elder & Company's Govan yard on the Clyde on 2 April 1881, the first of eleven express liners Norddeutscher Lloyd named after German rivers. She was a straight-bowed, four-masted, two-funnelled fast ship - 15 knots out of a three-cylinder compound engine - with berths for 179 first-class passengers, 142 in second, and 796 in steerage. Bremen to New York via Southampton was her standard run, and she made it for fourteen years, almost always sold out below decks with families bound for the United States from the towns and villages of Central and Eastern Europe. She slipped down to Adelaide twice in the late 1880s. She had begun, by the mid-1890s, to feel small and thirsty next to the next generation of liners. Then came that January night.

The North Sea was at its January worst: freezing wind, mountainous seas, and the kind of darkness that swallows lights. Elbe had left Bremerhaven that day and was firing warning rockets to mark her position. The SS Crathie, a 475-ton steamer carrying 12 hands and a cargo of general goods from Rotterdam to Aberdeen, never altered course. Her first mate had wandered off the bridge to chat with crewmen in the galley, leaving the lights and the lookout unattended. When the smaller ship's bow opened the liner's port flank, the sea poured in. Captain von Goessel ordered the boats away. One went over packed beyond capacity and immediately capsized. Twenty people made it into a second. Most of those still on deck were women and children, waiting at boats that would never come.

Of all the souls aboard, only one of the twenty survivors was a woman. Anna Boecker was a quiet young lady's maid, travelling to Southampton with her elderly employer. When the first lifeboat capsized she ended up in the freezing water; everyone else from it scrambled back onto the sinking ship and went down with her. Anna kept herself afloat, alone in the dark, until the men in the surviving boat spotted her in the troughs and hauled her over the gunwale. For five hours after the Elbe disappeared, those twenty people endured below-zero air and seas that the boat could not absorb. No distress rocket had been seen by anyone. They were drifting toward death when a Lowestoft fishing smack called Wildflower happened on them at first light. Her skipper William Wright later said they would not have lasted another hour.

Three hundred and thirty-two people died with the Elbe - by some counts 334. The court that convened in Rotterdam in November 1895 found the Crathie wholly at fault, but the verdict that shocked Europe was the captain's: Alexander Gordon was merely censured for steaming away from a sinking ship with hundreds aboard. He said he had feared his own ship would sink and had heard no cries for help. The legal blame landed on the absent first mate. Kaiser Wilhelm II sent each member of Wildflower's crew a gold-and-silver watch engraved with his monogram and a five-pound note - thanks for the eighteen Germans, one Austrian, and one English pilot they had pulled out of the storm. The Suffolk skippers and their boat became, briefly, famous all over the German Empire.

She lay undisturbed for nearly a century. In the early months of 1987 a group of Dutch amateur divers found her on the seabed, salvaged a small quantity of porcelain, earthenware, and glassware, and used the marked pieces to confirm what they had found. Today the Elbe is a hush in the sand a few dozen metres down, somewhere off the Dutch coast - quiet enough that if you sail over her on a calm day, you would never guess what lay below. The story endured longer in Suffolk than anywhere else: a letter posted from Bremen, salvaged from a passenger's pocket and still intact, was passed around as a relic of the night the Wildflower met the lifeboat.