How a 1929 shipwreck saw South Shields sailors be mistaken for Amelia Earhart

In 1929 a ship called SS Norwich City departed from England for Australia. On board were sailors from South Shields, specifically 10 Arab sailors who had settled in the area working alongside a 25-strong British crew.

They had lived together in a boarding house at 132 Commercial Street along with their families. There was a large influx of seamen from Yemen and its neighbouring countries to South Shields between the end of the 19th Century and up to the First World War.

But their jobs on board would have been menial and conditions poor: working in the engine room and shovelling coal where it was brutally hot. They lived hard lives with little respect from the ship’s officers.

After arriving in Australia they then left for Vancouver in Canada, by way of Hawaii. But as the ship approached the equator it encountered a big storm, getting lost and eventually running aground on Gardner Island (now known as Nikumaroro Island.)

The crew decided to abandon ship, but this led to eight of the sailors becoming lost- most of whom were Arab.

According to reports from the survivors, screams were heard from one of the Yemeni seamen- it was thought he had been attacked by a shark.

Three or four days later, the sailors who managed to get ashore were found and rescued and the island was once again uninhabited.

Gardner Island remained uninhabited until 1938 when the British colonised the island to grow coconuts.

Labourers were sent over to work and lived there by themselves. But in 1940 the British decided to station an Officer there, an Irishman called Gerald Gallagher.

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After Gallagher had been there for a while he was informed by his interpreter that a human skull was found by the labourers in the months previous. They had buried it out of respect for the dead but the discovery piqued Gallagher’s interest and so he asked to be brought to the grave.

After seeing the skull, Gallagher gave the orders for the whole surrounding area to be cleared and searched, leading him to the discovery of a further 13 bones.

The revelation saw Gallagher send a telegram to the British headquarters in Fiji, outlining what they had found and also mentioning a women’s “heavy” sandal was discovered.

The telegram said there was evidence of a campfire and that whoever had been stranded there had been eating turtles to try and stay alive.

All of the evidence led Gallagher to believe it could have been Amelia Earhart- the American woman who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic.

In 1937, Earhart had gone missing whilst attempting to become the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe and is believed to have disappeared in the area surrounding Gardner Island.

This would have been an opportune discovery for Gallagher. You see, Earhart’s husband had put out a reward- $2,500 (what would be $25,000 today.)

So, Gallagher shipped all of the bones off to Fiji.

But by the time the bones got there it was 1941- the year of Pearl Harbour which threw the Pacific into chaos. The Japanese were jumping from island to island, killing British soldiers and citizens. In the process the bones were lost- no one knows what happened to them.

Kenton Spading, author of Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, suspects they were buried in Fiji somewhere.

“They might be in an unmarked grave, I’m hoping to discover them. But in the meantime all I have is the measurements of the bones.”

Before they were lost, a doctor in Fiji measured the bones and the report found its way to Spading.

One of his colleagues Dr Richard Jantz- who specialises in human skeletons- managed to get ahold of the doctor’s report. Dr Jantz also went a step further.

Jantz used photographs to approximate the length of Amelia Earhart’s bones and compared her height to the bone measurements of the castaway.

“Her measurements approximately matched the bones of the castaway,” said Spading. “The castaway could have been Amelia Earhart.”

But parallel to Jantz working on this theory, Spading was working on a theory of his own- that the bones belonged to one of the Arab sailors from South Shields.

“You’ve got to jump through a lot of hoops to get Amelia Earhart on that island. What about these sailors that were lost that we know were there, right?

“They’re really good candidates for the bones.”

Now, Spading has been working on this theory for decades. In 1998, he travelled over from his home in Minnesota to the British Archives at Kew and Hanslope Park. He located seaman’s cards for some of the lost South Shields sailors, notes written by Gallagher and the doctor’s report on the bones shipped from Gardner Island to Fiji.

“Seaman’s cards were like a drivers licence- they had their photograph, their height, eye colour, hair colour. And so I thought if I can get all of the seaman’s cards of the Arab and British sailors I can get their heights and if they match I’ve got a candidate.”

After reviewing the data Spading found heights for three Arab candidates for the bones: Ayed Nair, Said Metanna and Saleh Ragee all of whom had resided in South Shields before embarking on their final voyage. From the measurements found on his card, Saleh Ragee is the most likely candidate.

Two of the British sailors are also candidates: Thomas E. Scott and Francis Sumner. Spading is still searching for the heights of Redman Yousef, Amed Hassan, Ali Hassan and James W. Horne.

And so, the story is far from over.

Spading is travelling to South Shields in August to find out more about the sailors’ lives and hopefully trace some of their family members.

If he can access any more photos of the sailors, Spading will be able to determine their bone length and get closer to the truth.

“It’d be interesting to know if there are any family members of the South Shields-based sailors still living in the area,” said Spading. “I think they’d be interested to know their loved ones haven’t been forgotten.”

If you know anything about any of the men mentioned, or about the SS Norwich’s final voyage, contact Kenton Spading at [email protected]