The Gothenburg began far from the tropics. Built of iron at Millwall on the Thames and launched in 1854, she ran between England and Sweden before sailing out to Australia in 1862. There she worked the Tasman crossing to New Zealand, then the Australian coastal trade, rigged as a barquentine with a single funnel set well aft, driven by a modest two-cylinder engine. She was considered one of the more modern vessels in Australian waters, dependable enough that people chose her gladly. In November 1874 her owners took a government contract: ten round trips between Adelaide and the colony's far outpost at Port Darwin, a thousand-pound payment riding on each completed run.

She left Port Darwin in mid-February 1875, her captain, Robert Pearce, under orders to make best possible speed. The cargo was heavy with consequence: roughly three thousand ounces of gold bound for an Adelaide bank, and a passenger list that read like a register of the young Northern Territory's officialdom, returning home from the frontier. Pearce took the inner route, the sheltered passage between the Queensland coast and the reef, calmer than the open sea but threaded with reefs only half charted. As the ship pressed south the weather worsened. Wind and rain rose, cloud blotted out the sun, and a cyclone closed around her in waters where a captain needed to see.

She struck Old Reef and stuck fast. Pearce tried everything: lightening the bow, shifting ballast and passengers aft, dumping cargo, finally reversing the engine hard to wrench her off. She came half free, then holed herself badly and slewed broadside to the waves, worse off than before. Around midnight the rising sea drowned the boiler fires, the engine died, and water poured down the hatchways. The end came fast and merciless. Lifeboats capsized as seas broke over them. A survivor remembered the water on the lee side covered with human heads bobbing like corks. Some passengers carrying their life savings in money belts refused to let the gold go, and went down quickly with it.

Only twenty-two people lived, twelve crew and ten passengers. All twenty-five women and children aboard drowned, and every ship's officer. The dead included Thomas Reynolds, a former Premier of South Australia, and his wife Anne; the French Vice-Consul Eduard Durand; a circuit court judge and crown solicitor; a newspaper editor; and several Overland Telegraph men. In Darwin a magistrate, Edward Price, learned he had lost his wife and six children in a single stroke. Most of the crew came from Melbourne, leaving eleven widows and thirty-four children destitute in Victoria. Never before had so many of a colony's senior figures died together. The grief reached deep into Adelaide and Darwin alike, and the loss touched ordinary families as surely as eminent ones.

The survivors who reached Holbourne Island killed a turtle to eat, and decades later one of them inscribed the names of the saved on its shell, a quiet act of remembrance now held in the South Australian Museum. Streets across the Darwin suburbs of Millner and Coconut Grove carry the names of the drowned, so that a northern city still murmurs the dead of 1875. Only after the Titanic sank, thirty-seven years on, were British ships finally required to carry lifeboats enough for everyone aboard. The Gothenburg herself lies on Old Reef, southeast of Townsville, her iron hull and square boilers going slowly to coral, a protected grave that divers may visit but must not disturb.