Quiz #3
At the start of World War 1, in August 1914, the Cunard liner Carmania was requisitioned by the British government and converted at Liverpool to an armed merchant cruiser, mounting eight 4.7-inch guns. The same month, the Hamburg Sud Amerika liner Cap Trafalgar sailed from Montevideo and rendezvoused with a German gunboat in the South Atlantic. Her conversion to an armed merchant cruiser, mounting two 10.5 cm guns, included the removal of her third funnel to disguise the ship as a Union-Castle line vessel. (Some sources say she was disguised to look like the Carmania and vice versa!) These two ships met off Trinidad on 14 September 1914 and had a fierce hour-long fight, during which Carmania was hit 79 times, but Cap Trafalgar took on a list and went down by the bow. Most of her crew were rescued by the collier Eleonore Woermann. The Carmania survived the war and remained afloat until 1932.
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