by Scott Sadil
Running out across the channel between Albany Island and Adolphus Island, off Cape York, the extreme northern reach of all of Australia, you come upon an odd navigational marker, a single spire standing by itself in the blue, wind-ruffled sea.
Ships of all sizes use the channel as they pass between the Gulf of Carpentaria, west of Cape York, and the Coral Sea, extending from the coastline of Queensland, beyond the Great Barrier Reef, and out into remote islands at the edge of the South Pacific. And the ships, you notice, if you happen to see one, tankers or freighters or cruise ships the size of a block of Manhattan skyscrapers, give wide berth to the Quetta, site of one of the worst disasters in Queensland’s rich maritime history.
Yet if your own vessel happens to be carrying a group of sportfishers, there’s a good chance you’ll make directly for the Quetta, where the chance to drop bait or lures or jigs of one kind or another down into these dangerous waters makes anglers all but giddy with the thought of tying into a big one, known locally, amongst Aussies at least, as a stonker.
But your odds of actually landing a big fish on the Quetta, as opposed to simply hooking one, are long indeed.
She was a Royal Mail Ship, steel, powered by steam, 380 feet long, 40 feet in her beam. Built in Scotland and launched in 1881, she had made eleven successful passages from London to Brisbane and back to London again during nearly a decade of travel and hard work, sailing half the world’s high seas.
During her twelfth passage home, however, heading once again from Brisbane to London, in calm seas under clear skies, she found an uncharted rock or peak of coral reef, depending on your sources, in the middle of the Adolphus Channel.
The rock (or reef) tore a hole from the stem of the Quetta to her engine room amidships.
Six of her water-tight compartments opened to the sea. They flooded immediately. Boilers exploded. Portholes burst. She went down in minutes, taking the lives of 134 passengers, nearly half of all who were aboard, some of them notable Queenslanders bound for business, education, and, no doubt, pleasures, back at the heart of the British empire.
