At dawn on 18 March 1967, the captain of the Torrey Canyon was asleep in his cabin while his ship, carrying 119,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude, steamed at full speed toward the Seven Stones reef between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. The first officer was busy adjusting course to thread between fishing boats. The steering, the master would later discover, was not in the mode he believed it was. By the time anyone realised, Pollard's Rock was already grinding through the hull, and an estimated 25 to 36 million gallons of oil were beginning the slow, black migration that would coat 120 miles of Cornish coast and another 50 miles of Brittany. The world's first major oil tanker disaster had just begun, and Britain had no idea what to do.
The Torrey Canyon had been built in the United States in 1959 with a modest 60,000-ton capacity, then enlarged in Japan to carry 120,000 tons of crude. She was registered in Liberia, owned by a Union Oil subsidiary, chartered to BP, and crewed by Italians under Captain Pastrengo Rugiati. On this voyage she had no scheduled route and therefore no full-scale charts of the Scillies. Pressure to make Milford Haven on the high tide of 18 March had pushed Rugiati to take the narrow inside passage rather than swing safely around the islands. When fishing boats appeared in his path, confusion over the steering selector lever, an obscure control intended for maintenance, robbed the bridge of crucial minutes. The grounding was not an accident in the sense of being unforeseeable. It was the predictable end of a chain of small institutional shortcuts.
Salvage attempts failed, and Captain Hans Barend Stal of the Dutch salvage team was killed during the effort. As the wreck began to break up, Prime Minister Harold Wilson convened a mini cabinet at RNAS Culdrose and made a decision unique in British history: bomb the ship. On 28 March, Blackburn Buccaneers of the Fleet Air Arm flew in from Lossiemouth and dropped forty-two thousand-pound bombs on the stationary wreck. Roughly a quarter missed. Hawker Hunters then poured aviation fuel onto the oil to make it burn, but exceptionally high tides kept extinguishing the flames. More Buccaneers came, more Hunters, more napalm. By the end, around 161 bombs and 16 missiles had been thrown at a ship that could not move. The image of jets bombing a derelict in British home waters became one of the defining absurdities of the 1960s.
What the bombs did not do, the cleanup did. Some 42 vessels sprayed over 10,000 tons of so-called detergents onto the slick. They were not really detergents at all but solvent-emulsifiers originally formulated for cleaning engine rooms, with no concern for marine toxicity. In Cornwall they were misused with extraordinary creativity: 45-gallon drums tipped over clifftops to reach inaccessible coves, helicopters hovering low and pouring a steady stream, bulldozers ploughing dispersant straight into the sand at Sennen Cove, where the buried oil could still be found a year later. About 15,000 seabirds died, along with vast numbers of marine organisms, before the 270-square-mile slick finally dispersed. Some oil was simply tipped into a quarry on the Chouet headland on Guernsey, where it still sits today.
When the bills came due, the legal system proved as unready as the response. The wrecked Torrey Canyon had a salvage value of one lifeboat worth fifty dollars, and Liberian law shielded the owners from direct liability. The British government finally cornered the company by arresting the sister ship Lake Palourde when she put into Singapore for provisions four months later. A young British lawyer named Anthony O'Connor, working for the Singaporean firm Drew and Napier, walked aboard and pinned a writ to the mast. The crew let him on because they thought he was a whisky salesman. The French government, alerted late, chased the ship with motor boats but could not catch her. The eventual settlement was the largest marine claim in history at the time.
Out of the wreckage came something durable. The 1969 International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage imposed strict liability on tanker owners without the need to prove negligence, and the 1973 MARPOL convention rewrote the rules of how the world's oceans were to be navigated and protected. Botanist David Bellamy became famous as a TV environmental consultant after publishing his report on the spill. Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song about the disaster. The Royal Navy added a new emergency override to its steering systems, designed to wrench the wheel out of automatic mode if anything ever went wrong again. The crews who operate it know it by name. They call it the Torrey Canyon switch.
The wreck site sits at approximately 50.04 degrees north, 6.13 degrees west, on the Seven Stones reef between the Cornish mainland and the Isles of Scilly. The reef is roughly 15 nautical miles west of Land's End and about 8 nautical miles northeast of St Mary's. From cruise altitude in clear conditions, the line of breaking water over the reef is the most visible marker. Nearby airfields include Land's End Airport (EGHC) and St Mary's Airport (EGHE) on the Scillies. Expect persistent Atlantic swell and frequent sea fog; the area sees some of the busiest tanker and freighter traffic in northwest Europe.