Wartime mystery solved as divers find wreck of ship torpedoed by German U-boat

For more than 80 years, the final resting place of S.S. Cornwallis and her crew was unknown.

The steamboat was heading from Barbados to New Brunswick in December 1944 when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat, which had just dropped off two Nazi spies in Maine.

Only five of the ship’s 48 crew members survived. They were among the more than 1,600 merchant mariners who were responsible for moving much-needed supplies, killed during the Second World War.

Now, an American team of volunteer divers has revealed its discovery — offering family members of the men some closure.

“It was almost as if our grandfather had spoken, ‘Hey, don’t forget about me,’” said Donald Stewart, the grandson of David. H. Stewart, who was lost with the steamship.

Robert Stewart was just 15 years old when he learned in a telegram that his father, David H. Stewart, was among the dead.

“Devastating, to say the least,” he said about the news.

“My mother had a tremendously good singing voice, but I don’t think I ever heard her sing that much after that.”

Nova Scotia native James Roy, 34, was also on board the ship.

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“My dad used to speak of him a lot. My dad wasn’t very emotional about it, but he spoke of him. He’d say, ‘Oh, I wish you had met Jimmy, my brother,’” said his nephew, Glenn Roy.

Roy said his father never forgot his older brother. Over the years, Roy became interested in studying genealogy and learning about his family’s history.

Among his collection of treasured items is the telegram sent to his grandmother informing her James had died, as well as documentation of the pension she later received.

For more than eight decades, no one knew the exact location of Cornwallis’ watery grave until 2019, when a group of divers made it their mission to find the wreck in the Atlantic Ocean.

“The big thing is that someone has taken an interest in finding this location and putting a place on a map,” said Danny Allan, of the Nomad Exploration Team.

It wasn’t an easy task. The team spent years researching the ship and conducted a painstaking grid search over five days in the Gulf of Maine.

This past July, just when they were about to move to a new location, they spotted something on the sonar about 16 kilometres from a small island off the coast of Maine, submerged 122 metres below the surface.

“It was very evident from that you could see the superstructure of the wreck — the structure over where the engines were,” recalled Allan.

“And we were able to put divers on the numbers that we had found and we are able to verify with 100 per cent certainty that this was indeed the Cornwallis.”

He said identifying the ship meant checking blueprints from the original builders in British Columbia, and finding identifying characteristics.

“In a perfect world, you would find the ship’s bell that says, S.S. Cornwallis. In this case, I don’t think the bell is on the ship because it was torpedoed and the front end is broken off, so I’d be shocked if the bell was still there,” said Allan.

“This one is easy simply because it’s a 400-foot wreck with a 50-foot beam. There’s not many ships of that size.”

For the families of the crew members, that certainty helps bring a sense of closure.

“At least somebody was thinking about him,” said Roy about his uncle.

“He didn’t leave anything, you know what I mean. It was only this stuff that I have — a little bit of memories, a few pieces of paper. No family, no kids or anything. So I keep it going.”

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