When war broke out in September 1939, Inanda joined Convoy OA 7 out of Southend and sailed for the Caribbean. What had once been a commercial milk run became a gauntlet. The convoys that carried sugar, rum, and raw materials from the West Indies to Britain were the arteries of a wartime economy, and German U-boats knew it. Inanda made the crossing repeatedly through 1939 and 1940, threading between Antigua, Saint Kitts, Grenada, Trinidad, Barbados, and Halifax before the long Atlantic run back to Liverpool or London. On one voyage she served as the convoy's rescue ship. On another, her captain was appointed Vice Commodore of the convoy -- a sign of the trust placed in experienced merchant officers to keep the formation together through waters that grew more dangerous by the month.

In August 1940, Inanda reached London after a transatlantic convoy. The Royal Navy hired her for use as an ocean boarding vessel -- one of the armed merchant ships tasked with intercepting and inspecting neutral shipping for contraband. She never got the chance. On September 7, 1940, she was berthed at London Docks when the Blitz arrived. German bombers hit the docks in one of the first major air raids on London, and Inanda went down at her berth. It was a humiliating end for a ship that had survived months of Atlantic convoy work, sunk not by a torpedo in open water but by a bomb while tied to a pier. But the Inanda was not finished. She was salvaged, rebuilt as a cargo ship, transferred to the Ministry of War Transport, and given a new name: Empire Explorer.

Empire Explorer returned to the Caribbean routes she knew as Inanda. In early 1942 she sailed from Southend with Convoy FN 632, loaded general cargo on the Tyne, and made her way to Saint Kitts by mid-March. She spent five weeks working through the West Indies, reached the Cape Verde Islands, crossed to Halifax, returned to the Clyde, and sailed again for Demerara, arriving on June 21. On July 8, 1942, she departed Trinidad carrying 200 bags of mail, a thousand long tons of pitch, and four thousand long tons of sugar -- bound for Barbados. The people who loaded her holds, who sorted the mail and secured the cargo, were doing the same work merchant sailors had done on these routes for centuries. The war had changed the stakes, not the labor.

In the early hours of July 9, at coordinates 11 degrees 40 minutes north, 60 degrees 55 minutes west -- Caribbean waters between Trinidad and Grenada -- U-575 found the Empire Explorer. The German submarine, under the command of Gunther Heydemann, torpedoed and shelled the cargo ship. She went down carrying her sugar and mail and pitch into the warm Caribbean. Of the 78 people aboard -- 70 crew members and 8 DEMS gunners stationed aboard to man her defensive armament -- three crew members were killed. The 75 survivors were rescued by HMS MTB 337 and landed at Tobago. Those who died serving on Inanda and Empire Explorer are commemorated on the Tower Hill Memorial in London, their names inscribed alongside thousands of other merchant sailors who kept the supply lines open at the cost of their lives. The Inanda had been popular enough in her peacetime career to appear on postage stamps issued by Barbados and Saint Kitts and Nevis -- a cargo liner remembered not for what she carried but for the routes she sailed and the people she connected.