Troop Ship
In November 1899, the Dunottar Castle was requisitioned as a troop ship during the Second Boer War. She carried General Redvers Buller and 1,500 troops to Cape Town for Boer War duties and on the following voyage carried Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. During the war, she made frequent trips between England and the Cape Colony and carried some of the most famous Boer War warriors of the time, including two famous scouts, Major Frederick Russell Burnham and Col. Robert Baden-Powell, as well as a young war correspondent for the Morning Post by the name of Winston Churchill.
In 1904, the Dunottar Castle was laid up at Netley in Southampton Water, but by 1907 she was being chartered to the Panama Railroad Co. for their New York to Colon (Panama Canal) service. In 1908 she was chartered to Sir Henry Lunn Ltd for cruises to Norway and the Mediterranean, and in 1911 she took guests to the Delhi Durbar of King George V.
Union Castle became part of the Royal Mail Group in 1912, and the Dunottar Castle was sold to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in 1913 as the Caribbean. In 1914, the HMS Caribbean was requisitioned for World War I, initially as a troopship to bring soldiers from Canada to Europe and later as an Armed Merchant Cruiser. But after it was found that she was unsuitable to carry gun mountings, she was converted into a dockyard workers accommodation ship on May 1915.
Read more about this topic: RMS Dunottar Castle
Famous quotes containing the words troop and/or ship:
“Is a man too strong and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;Mnature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and the feldspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)