She answered to seven names before the end. Barlby, Noemi, Noemijulia, Irish Hazel, Empire Don, Irish Hazel again, and finally Uman. Each name belonged to a different owner, a different flag, a different chapter of a long working life that began in a County Durham shipyard in 1895 and threaded its way through two world wars and a third, smaller, dirtier one. To stand on the shore of the Bay of Nouadhibou and look out at the hulks rusting in the shallows is to look at the kind of fate ships like her meet: not a dramatic sinking, but a slow surrender to salt, sand, and forgetting.
On 4 October 1895, a cargo steamer slid into the water at the yard of R. Ropner & Son in Stockton-on-Tees, England. She was launched as Barlby, yard number 312, and completed that November. At 290 feet long with a beam of 47 feet, she was a workaday tramp steamer of nearly 3,750 tons deadweight, driven by a triple-expansion steam engine that pushed her along at a modest eight knots. There was nothing glamorous about her. Ships like Barlby were the trucks of the sea, hauling coal, grain, and ore wherever cargo waited, and the world ran on thousands of them.
By the 1930s she had become Noemijulia, flying under Greek and then British ownership, and she was earning a reputation. In October and November 1935 she ran aground twice in the rivers of the Danube delta in Romania, refloated both times. That same autumn her name reached the British Parliament. A member asked whether the Board of Trade knew her radio installation was defective and what was being done about it. The answer was awkward: the Board did know, and had asked that she be detained if she called at any country bound by the 1929 safety convention. By January 1936 she was held at Antwerp, still unrepaired. A ship that cannot call for help is a danger to her own crew, and the record makes plain she was being run hard and cheap.
On 23 August 1937, the Spanish Civil War found her. Sailing from Marseille toward Barcelona, Noemijulia was attacked by two Nationalist aircraft some fifteen nautical miles off Cape Creus on the Catalan coast. Both bombs missed. She sent out an SOS, was escorted to safety at Port-Vendres in France, and survived. A year later, on 15 August 1938, her luck nearly ran out in port at Valencia, where an air raid dropped a bomb just fourteen feet from her bow. It punched roughly fifty holes in her port side but did not finish her. For an ageing tramp steamer caught in someone else's war, she had a remarkable habit of staying afloat.
The Second World War kept her busy. In 1941 she was sold to Irish Shipping and renamed Irish Hazel, snatched from prospective scrappers. Because wartime Dublin had so little steel, she was almost entirely rebuilt rather than broken up. She crossed the Atlantic in convoy, was requisitioned by Britain's Ministry of War Transport in 1943 and renamed Empire Don, and ran cargoes through the Mediterranean to Genoa and Livorno in the final months of the war. Returned to her Irish owners in 1945, she became Irish Hazel once more. A vessel built for the Victorian coal trade had outlasted empires and survived a second global conflict, still carrying cargo.
Sold to Turkish owners in 1949 and renamed Uman, she worked the Black Sea coast until 6 January 1960, when she ran aground at Kefken Point on a voyage from Zonguldak to Istanbul and was declared a total loss. That is the end the records give her. But ships like Noemijulia have a second, more haunting afterlife in the Bay of Nouadhibou, on Mauritania's Cap Blanc peninsula, where for decades unwanted hulls were abandoned rather than scrapped. Over three hundred wrecks rust there in the shallows, one of the largest ship graveyards on Earth. Their hulls have become reefs, drawing fish and the fishermen who depend on them. It is a fitting image for a vessel like her: not an ending so much as a slow return to the sea, name by name, plate by plate.
The Bay of Nouadhibou and its ship graveyard lie along Mauritania's Cap Blanc (Ras Nouadhibou) peninsula near 20.9°N, 17.0°W, where hundreds of rusting hulls dot the shallow water and the largest wrecks rest near the peninsula's tip. The nearest airport is Nouadhibou International (GQPP). The bay is shallow and calm, often hazy with Saharan dust; clearest views come on days when the harmattan settles. SS Noemijulia herself was built far to the north on the River Tees in England and met her documented end in the Black Sea off Turkey.