Maritime record MWX2210 - Alexandrovna

The ALEXANDROVNA was built in 1874 by G M Steeves , Liverpool (who was also the owner). Master: J Purdy Crew: 18 Crew Lost: 18

She `...was driven ashore near Tilly Whim, between Winspit and Anvil Point lighthouse during a hurricane from the SSW...was first seen approaching the coast at 4pm. The Swanage lifeboat crew was mustered, but it was realised there was no hope whatever of rounding Durlston Head in the prevailing conditions. Accordingly they remained stood [sic] by to launch, if by chance a ships boat or wreckage with survivors was swept into Durlston Bay. Meanwhile, the rocket apparatus was manhandled along the cliff path to the scene, but there was no response to shouts or signals, and it seemed the wreck had been abandoned. The lifeboat crew stood down at dark, and re-mustered promptly at dawn. They then launched in marginally better weather conditions to investigate the mystery. They could see no sign of life on the wreck...the ship is believed to have had a crew of 18, all lost...to have struck and broken in pieces in 10 minutes. Wreckage came ashore as far as the Needles.

(1)(3) Source (3) gives the nationality of the vessel as USA, and the place of loss as 0.5 mile west of Anvil Point; however, Tilly Whim is east of Anvil Point.

ALEXANDROVNA, stranded in SSW 10 at Swanage.(4)
A brass ring was recovered from this wreck, position 50 35.43N 001 58.00W. (Droit A/2280).(5)

Finds include iron cannon balls which (8) suggests may mean that the site discovered is not the ALEXANDROVNA but an earlier wreck.

There is no discrepancy in the positions given. Anvil Point lighthouse is only a few hundred metres west of Tilly Whim.

Not many months after this description of a great storm at Tilly Whim had been penned, there actually occurred a catastrophe of the terrible nature imagined in the text; and happening as it did by day instead of by night, the event is not left to conjecture. The weather of Saturday, April 29, 1882, will long be present to the recollection of my readers living in the south of England. In the morning a fresh breeze and a falling barometer presaged a gale; but not even experienced seamen were led to expect such a hurricane as began suddenly to blow in the afternoon. To mention but two evidences of this, an emigrant ship with more than three hundred souls on board started earlier in the day from Plymouth (an act which would have been but courting destruction had her captain any means of forecasting the storm which soon burst upon him); and the great ironclad frigate Warrior was caught in the open Channel and shipped sea after sea, so that even her lofty decks are said to have been four times flooded with water. Both these vessels escaped fortunately unharmed; but many others were missing when the gale had subsided; and one of them was the Alexandrovna of Liverpool, a fine Scotch-built sailing ship of no less than 1250 tons.
Towards four o'clock that Saturday afternoon a large vessel was descried, approaching the shore in an apparently disabled state, by two persons who chanced to be spending their half-holiday on the cliff near Tilly Whim, watching the fury of the gale. It seemed as if she had been lying to, for her topsails were in ribbands, and she had but one staysail set. No crew could be seen, not even a man at the wheel, the atmosphere being too thick; and no endeavour to keep the vessel off the land was perceivable. The wind was then blowing almost directly on shore. In a very few minutes the fated ship was among the broken billows, which covered the sea with foam for hundreds of yards from the rocks. The two spectators at first made the best of their way in the teeth of the fierce wind towards the spot where she appeared likely to strike; but when she was clearly doomed, one ran back to Swanage, a distance of nearly two miles, to warn the coastguard there. Meanwhile the men at the St. Aldhelm's Head station, who had from a distance seen the peril in which the ship was involved, were hurrying down with their life-saving appliances. The vessel almost immediately struck with fearful force upon the perpendicular cliff, about half a mile to the westward of Tilly Whim. In ten minutes or less, before anyone could reach the spot, she was a mass of fragments, which had already begun to float away with the tide towards Swanage! Nothing was seen of the crew that day, nor could the coastguard effect anything when they arrived with the rocket apparatus; but a few feet of one of the topmasts, having still attached to it the yellow-painted truck, through which the signal halliards are rove, was found lying on the green slope above the cliff, showing that in the tremendous shock the mast must have been almost flung out of the vessel. Next day a life-buoy, having upon it the name Alexandrovna, was picked up ; and large pieces of wreckage were landed at Swanage and other parts of the coast. When the name of the unfortunate vessel was thus made known, it was ascertained that her crew consisted of more than twenty hands, every man of whom perished. Many of their bodies were afterwards found, either jammed in among the rocks, or floating in the waters of the channel, most of them bearing marks of frightful injuries-inflicted, it is to be hoped, after death. Those found near Swanage were buried in the parish churchyard.
The phenomenal violence of this gale may be judged from the fact that seasalt is recorded to have been blown by it more than a hundred miles inland; and that it completely stripped all the trees in exposed situations on the coast of their young green leaves, which the spring had just brought out. The elms at Swanage were not covered with leaf again till past midsummer. Robinson, C.E. 1882. A Royal Warren or Picturesque Rambles in the Isle of Purbeck


Position 50 35.43N 1 58.00W taken from (3)

Parliamentary papers Vol 63, p130 (Monograph). SWX4648.

<1> Larn, Richard, 1992, United Kingdom shipwreck index, Extracted 23 November 1992 (Index). SWX5030.

<2> Farr, Grahame, 1971, Wreck and rescue on the Dorset coast, n/a (Monograph). SWX1056.

<3> Larn, R, and Larn, B, 1995, Shipwreck index of the British Isles, volume 1 : Isles of Scilly, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset Section 6, Dorset (AJ) Vol 1 (Monograph). SWX4541.

<5> 2001, Maritime and Coastguard Agency: Receiver of Wreck Amnesty (Index). SWX4542.

<6> Le Pard, G, 1995-2003, Dorset Coast Forum Maritime Archaeological Database, 007 (Digital archive). SWX8707.

<7> Robinson, C E, 1882, Picturesque Rambles in the Isle of Purbeck (Monograph). SDO9701.

<8> Hinchcliffe, J and V, 1999, Dive Dorset: a diver guide (3rd Edition) (Monograph). SWX1.

<9> Cumming, E, The Dorset shipwreck and maritime incident directory, 6 (Monograph). SDO16406.

<10> National Record of the Historic Environment, 1143801 (Digital archive). SDO14739.

Record last edited

Apr 3 2024 1:35PM