Vigrid was new in 1917. She had been built two years earlier at the Bergens Mekaniske Verksted yard in Bergen, on the Norwegian west coast, launched on 29 October 1915 and completed the following month with yard number 191. She measured 74.5 metres between perpendiculars with a beam of 11.5 metres and was powered by a single triple-expansion steam engine of 885 indicated horsepower. The assigned code letters were MLRT. Her early career belonged to Anton Barth von der Lippe's company in Tonsberg, and in August 1917 she was sold on to a Bergen broker named Johan Waage, whose firm bore her own name: D/S A/S Vigrid. She had four months left.

On 31 December 1917 she was sailing from Barry, the great coal port at the head of the Bristol Channel, to Rouen on the lower Seine. Her cargo was 2,102 tons of Welsh steam coal, the kind of fuel that drove French railways, French factories, and to no small extent the French armies still in their fourth winter on the Western Front. She had H. M. Jensen as her captain and a mixed Scandinavian crew, mostly Norwegian with three Swedish citizens among them. The route took her south out of the Bristol Channel, past Lundy, across the open western approaches of the English Channel, and around the southwest tip of England before turning east for the French coast. That last leg, the run past the Runnel Stone and Land's End, was the killing ground.

The submarine that intercepted her was U-95, of the German 4th U-boat Flotilla, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Athalwin Prinz. He attacked without warning, the standard practice in the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign that Germany had resumed in February 1917 and that was a major factor in the United States entering the war that April. One torpedo was enough. Vigrid heeled, settled, and went down. Five of the crew were lost: two Norwegians and three Swedes, neutral citizens of neutral countries, killed in a war that their governments had refused to join. Captain Jensen and thirteen other men got into the boats and rowed for the Cornish coast. They landed at Penzance and made their way home. Their families learned that they were alive several days later, which by 1917 standards counted as good news.

Sixteen days after sinking Vigrid, on 16 January 1918, U-95 was lost with all thirty-six of her crew near Hardelot on the Pas-de-Calais coast. The cause has never been established. She may have struck a mine, she may have suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, or she may have been depth-charged by an escort whose log entry was lost in the chaos of the final year of the war. In her six wartime patrols she had sunk fourteen ships and damaged three more. Athalwin Prinz lies somewhere off northern France. The Norwegian sailors he killed lie in the western approaches. The coal that Vigrid was carrying probably did not reach Rouen. The war kept going for another ten months. By the end of it, Norway had lost more sailors than the United Kingdom would lose at the Battle of Jutland.