The sinking of SS Tubantia

 

SS Tubantia was a luxury liner built for the Dutch in 1913. She was designed for speed and luxury, particularly for service between the Netherlands and South America.

Tubantia was state-of-the-art in that electricity was used for all on-board facilities, even down to personal cigar lighters in every stateroom. Being brightly lit was regarded as a safety feature, in that being easily seen as a civilian ship belonging to a neutral country during wartime would be an additional safety feature.

However, this did not prove to be the case on 16th March 1916, when SS Tubantia was at anchor 58 miles from the Dutch coast and was hit by a torpedo fired by UB-13, a German U-boat. Fortunately, three nearby ships immediately came to her rescue and there were no casualties.

One reason why nobody died as a result of the sinking was that the ship had very few passengers at the time. Despite all the claims of being a safe ship, not many people were willing to take the risk of a voyage at a time when U-boat wolf packs were known to be patrolling in the region.

At first, the German government denied responsibility for the sinking, coming up with the strange claim that Tubantia must have encountered a stray torpedo that had been fired weeks before. However, few people believed this story and eventually Germany did pay reparations to the Netherlands.

The story might have ended there, were it not for the fact that many people started to take particular interest in what might have been on board the ship when it sank. A number of multinational dive teams made repeated dives to the wreck in the years that followed, clearly in the belief that it would be worth their while to do so.

However, all that was found in the way of cargo was a hold full of Dutch cheese. Rumours began that the cheese was hiding a consignment of gold bullion, but there was never any confirmation that this was the case. Needless to say, the cheese was soon well past its sell-by date and not worth the bother of rescuing it.

© John Welford

The name of Pakistan

 

Pakistan was created in 1948 as a Muslim nation carved out of former British India. But where did the name come from? It was coined by a Muslim Indian nationalist named Choudhary Rahmat Ali, in a 1933 pamphlet entitled “Now or Never”.

Ali, who was based in the UK as an academic working at Cambridge University, simply took the names of the five provinces of India that were to be incorporated as the new country. The initial letters of four of them, plus the end of the fifth, could be read as the new name. These were:

Punjab
North West Frontier (Afghan province)
Kashmir
Sindh
Baluchistan

Put together, this made Pakstan, so adding a “i” made sense in terms of producing something more pronounceable. The idea caught on and before long everyone was referring to the putative new country as Pakistan, although its creation was still 15 years into the future.

Ali later claimed that a slightly different derivation was what he had in mind, namely:

Punjab
Afghania (North-West Frontier province)
Kashmir
Iran
Sindh
Tukharistan
Afghanistan
Baluchistan

Ali spent most of his life in England but travelled to Pakistan in 1948, hoping to settle in the country he had named. However, he soon made it clear that he had envisaged a much larger Muslim nation – presumably including Iran and Afghanistan – than Pakistan turned out to be. He also threatened to set up a new Liberation Movement that would have challenged the status quo. Not surprisingly, he was subsequently refused a Pakistani passport and returned to England. He died in 1951, back in Cambridge, but Pakistan continued to bear the name he had conjured up.

© John Welford