The Suffolk was a product of the industrial north of England. Launched on July 25, 1899, from the Sunderland Shipbuilding Company at South Dock on the River Wear, she was completed by November and sailed her sea trials on the 20th. Her steel hull was built on the deep-frame principle, with cellular water ballast tanks fore and aft. J & E Hall supplied her refrigeration equipment, which used compressed carbon dioxide to cool portions of her number 2, 3, and 4 holds, insulated with mineral wool and chilled with brine. Her refrigerated capacity was enough for 130,000 carcasses of mutton. She also carried passengers in first- and second-class berths, and for cargo handling she had ten steam winches and numerous derricks. A three-cylinder triple-expansion engine, built by the North Eastern Marine Engineering Company in Wallsend, drove her single screw.

Suffolk's first voyage was a circumnavigation of commerce. She left Sunderland in November 1899 loaded with frozen game, 3,200 tons of steel rails, and general cargo, reaching Fremantle in February 1900 after averaging 11 knots. In Western Australia she discharged steel plate for a water project at Coolgardie and cable to be laid between Cottesloe and Rottnest Island. Carpenters in port fitted her upper cargo decks to carry 800 horses. She steamed to Queensland, loaded frozen meat and wool at Gladstone and Broadmount, then continued to Brisbane and Sydney. At Broadmount she made minor history: she was the first ship to load frozen meat from refrigerator cars brought by rail, eliminating the old method of sending it downriver by tender. A special passenger train carried businesspeople from Archer Creek to watch the operation. She delivered her horses to South Africa and returned to London by late July.

For her second trip, Suffolk left London on August 10, 1900, and reached Fiume on August 22 to embark horses for the war. She could take only 930 of the 1,000 intended. Sixty-three crew, 66 hostlers, and a veterinary surgeon rounded out the complement. She bunkered at Tenerife, called at Cape Town on September 22, and continued the same day for Port Elizabeth. At 4:40 the next morning she passed 11 nautical miles off Cape Agulhas. Captain Cuthbert changed course twice, but the fixes were wrong. He had failed to account for the strong currents that run along this stretch of coast. Through the night of September 23-24, no one verified the ship's position. No soundings were taken. Second Officer Charles Stokes was inexplicably absent from the bridge in the critical minutes before the grounding.

When the Suffolk struck the rocks off Tsitsikamma Point, her number 3 hold hit first. Numbers 4 and 5 holds and the stokehold were also damaged. The engine room flooded, extinguishing the boiler fires and leaving the ship without power. Two other steamships arrived -- the Elder, Dempster vessel Lake Erie and the smaller Inchanga -- but neither could tow the Suffolk free. After deliberation, Captain Cuthbert ordered the ship abandoned at 12:30 in the afternoon. The crew and hostlers transferred to the Lake Erie. The horses were released from their stalls and given a chance to swim to shore, but the distance and the surf were too much. None made it. The Suffolk sank at 3:50 that afternoon. Lake Erie landed the survivors at Port Elizabeth that evening.

The Court of Inquiry sat in Port Elizabeth from October 3 to 9, 1900. Its findings were damning. The Suffolk had lacked a large-scale Admiralty chart of the coast between Mossel Bay and Cape St. Francis. She carried no copy of African Pilot, Part III, the navigation guide for that stretch of shore. Captain Cuthbert had set the course incorrectly on September 23, failing to account for the area's currents. No soundings had been taken during the night to check the depth beneath the hull. Stokes had left the bridge. The lookout had failed. The court found Cuthbert, Stokes, and the lookout all negligent. Cuthbert's Master's certificate was suspended for six months. Stokes's certificate was cancelled outright. The lookout, an able seaman, was severely censured. The Suffolk, one year and two months old, lay broken on the rocks of the Tsitsikamma, her horses lost to a coast that punishes navigational carelessness without mercy.