The ship was 974 feet long, the length of three football pitches end to end, and on her last voyage she was carrying 119,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude oil. Her name was the Torrey Canyon - borrowed from a location in California, where her owners' parent company was based - and she became, by accident, one of the most famous ships of the twentieth century. On 18 March 1967, at full economical speed, she hit a granite peak called Pollard's Rock on the Seven Stones reef between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly. Then the Royal Air Force tried to set her on fire from the air.
She was built in 1959 at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, originally rated for 65,920 long tons of cargo - already a large ship by the standards of her era. In the early 1960s Sasebo Heavy Industries in Japan sliced her in half and inserted an extra section, almost doubling her capacity to 118,285 long tons. By 1967 she was an LR2-class Suezmax tanker - long, narrow enough at 125 feet of beam to fit the Suez Canal, with 68 feet of draft when loaded. Owned by the Barracuda Tanker Corporation, a Liberia-registered subsidiary of the Union Oil Company of California, she was chartered to BP for the run between the Persian Gulf and northern Europe. The supertanker era was just beginning; the world had not yet worked out what to do if one of these things ran aground.
On 19 February 1967 the Torrey Canyon left the Kuwait National Petroleum Company refinery at Mina al-Ahmadi with a full cargo of crude. Three weeks later she rounded the Canary Islands and pointed at Milford Haven in Wales. Her master, Captain Pastrengo Rugiati, had a deadline: catch the tide at Milford Haven on the morning of 18 March, or lose five days waiting for the next window. Late in the run he chose a shortcut between the Cornish mainland and the Isles of Scilly. The inquiry later found that the steering selector had been left on autopilot without the helmsman realising, so the turn to clear the Seven Stones never happened. At about 8:50 a.m. on 18 March the Torrey Canyon struck Pollard's Rock at almost 16 knots. She did not stop. She slid up the granite and broke her bottom open along most of her length.
The salvage attempts failed. The ship began to break up. The British government, with no playbook for an oil spill of this size, decided to try to burn the remaining cargo where it sat. On 28 March 1967, Fleet Air Arm Blackburn Buccaneers from RNAS Lossiemouth dropped 1,000-pound bombs on the wreck. RAF Hawker Hunters from RAF Chivenor followed with cans of kerosene to feed the flames. High tides put the fires out, so more sorties followed - de Havilland Sea Vixens from Yeovilton, more Buccaneers from Brawdy, and Hunters from RAF West Raynham dropping napalm. By the time the Torrey Canyon finally sank, the strikes had used 161 bombs, 16 rockets, approximately 14,000 litres of napalm and 50,000 litres of kerosene. The smoke columns were visible from Cornwall.
Roughly 95,000 to 119,000 tons of crude reached the sea - one of the largest spills the world had ever seen at that time. Black tide hit beaches in Cornwall, Brittany and the Channel Islands. The cleanup, using foam-filled booms that the Atlantic swell tore apart, and detergents now known to have caused as much ecological damage as the oil itself, gave the world its first hard lesson in modern oil-spill response. Soldiers from 9 Independent Parachute Squadron RE were sent to clear Cornish beaches by hand. On Guernsey, the oil was scooped into sewage tankers and pumped into a disused quarry, where bioremediation work continues even now. The Liberian inquiry blamed Captain Rugiati. International law followed: the 1969 Civil Liability Convention and a string of MARPOL rules trace their lineage directly to this wreck. The hull lies at 30 metres on Pollard's Rock, half a century settled, gradually rusting back into the reef that destroyed her.
Wreck site at approximately 50.0417°N, 6.1288°W, on Pollard's Rock at the southern end of the Seven Stones reef, in open Atlantic water 15 nm west of Land's End and 7 nm east-northeast of the Isles of Scilly. Best viewed at 2,000 to 4,000 feet AGL when the breakers over Pollard's Rock are visible as a line of whitewater. The Sevenstones Lightship lies about 2.5 nm to the north-east as a useful visual reference. Nearest airports are St Mary's (EGHE) to the west-southwest and Land's End (EGHC) to the east. The wreck itself rests at 30 metres depth and is now a popular dive site; watch for support vessel traffic in summer.