SS Tilawa

The SS Tilawa was a passenger cargo ship that was sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Indian Ocean in late November 1942, with the loss of 280 lives. The ship carried a cargo of silver bullion that was recovered in 2017.

The Tilawa was a 10,000-ton steam passenger liner of the British India Steam Navigation Company, built in 1924 by Hawthorn Leslie & Co. Ltd. at Hebburn-on-Tyne.

In late November 1942, the Tilawa sailed from Ballard Pier in Bombay (now Mumbai), bound for Durban followed by Mombasa and Maputo. The ship carried nearly 1,000 people—more than 700 passengers and more than 200 crew—and 600 tons of cargo, including 2,364 bars of silver bullion intended to be struck as South African and Egyptian coinage at the South African mint. The cargo was valued at £34 million ($43 million) in 2020. On November 23, the Tilawa was torpedoed by the submarine I-29 of the Imperial Japanese Navy, near the Seychelles Islands. An hour after the first torpedo struck, the submarine fired again. The second torpedo sank the ship. 280 people went down with it. Survivors spent two days adrift in the Indian Ocean without sufficient food and water. In the early hours of November 25, HMS Birmingham, which had been alerted to the sinking, arrived and managed to rescue 674 people. Birmingham reached Bombay with the survivors on 27 November.

The Tilawa came to be known as the "Indian Titanic", a reference to the 1912 sinking of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean with a large loss of life. In 2022, a memorial event took place in Bombay to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Tilawa's loss.

In December 2017, Argentum Exploration, a marine salvage company founded by racing driver Ross Hyett and owned by investor Paul Marshall, located the wreck of the Tilawa at a depth of approximately 2.5 kilometres (8,200 ft; 1,400 fathoms; 1.6 mi) and secretly recovered the silver. The company declared it to the Receiver of Wreck in the United Kingdom, but South Africa, which had meanwhile signed a contract with a different salvor in ignorance of the successful recovery, asserted legal ownership in 2018 and further denied the obligation to pay a recovery fee because the cargo had been a state possession and being transported for a sovereign, not a commercial purpose. An initial ruling for Argentum by the High Court of Justice was unsuccessfully appealed by South Africa. In May 2024, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom reversed the ruling, upholding the South African position.

External links

• Tilawa 1942
• The S.S. Tilawa