S.S. Caribou

The night of October 13, 1942, was dark and moonless over the Cabot Strait. The cold Atlantic air smelled of coal smoke as the SS Caribou thrummed its way through the black water. For seventeen years, the Newfoundland Railway passenger ferry had made this routine 96-mile journey from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. It was a lifeline, a familiar rhythm on the edge of a world at war. But on this night, that routine was about to be broken forever.

The Caribou was more than just a ship; it was an institution to the people of Newfoundland. On its final voyage, it carried a cross-section of a society mobilized for war. The manifest listed 46 crew members and 191 passengers. Among them were 118 military personnel heading to their posts, and 73 civilians, including many women and 11 children. The ship’s master, Captain Benjamin Taverner, commanded the ferry with a deep familiarity, and with his family beside him: his two sons, Stanley and Harold, served as his first and third officers. Aware of the danger that stalked these waters from a recent close call, Captain Taverner ordered a full lifeboat drill just before leaving port. He knew the enemy was out there.

The hunter in the dark was the German submarine U-69, commanded by 26-year-old Kapitänleutnant Ulrich Gräf. This was the Battle of the St. Lawrence, a period when German U-boats brought the war into Canada’s inland waters for the first time since 1812. The vast commitments on the ocean shipping routes had left this inland sea with very few warships or aircraft for its defense, turning it into a rich hunting ground. U-69 was no stranger to this theater. It had slipped into the Gulf on September 30 and, just five days before its fateful encounter with the Caribou, had sunk the freighter SS Carolus off the Gaspé Peninsula, a mere 275 kilometres from Quebec City. This sinking, so deep in Canadian waters, had already caused an uproar in Quebec and Ottawa. Gräf and his crew were experienced predators, and they were deep inside Allied territory.

At 3:21 a.m. on October 14, while searching for a grain convoy, Gräf spotted the Caribou. The ferry’s coal-fired boilers were belching heavy smoke, creating a dark plume that silhouetted the ship perfectly against the night sky. In the dim light, Gräf misidentified his targets. He believed the 2,222-ton ferry and its 670-ton escort were a much larger 6,500-ton freighter and a formidable “two-stack destroyer.” He fired a single torpedo.

The torpedo struck the Caribou‘s starboard side at approximately 3:40 a.m. The impact was catastrophic. The ship’s boilers exploded, throwing sleeping passengers from their bunks into instant pandemonium. The lights went out, and the vessel began to settle by the stern. In the chaos, life-saving equipment failed. The blast destroyed some lifeboats, while others could not be launched in the panic. Many people were forced to jump into the freezing Atlantic. The SS Caribou sank in just five minutes.

Aboard the Royal Canadian Navy minesweeper HMCS Grandmère, Lieutenant James Cuthbert saw the flash of the explosion and spotted the surfaced U-69. He immediately ordered his ship to turn and ram. Gräf saw the minesweeper bearing down and ordered a crash dive. As the Grandmère passed over the swirl of the submerging U-boat, Cuthbert dropped a pattern of six depth charges, followed by another three. He pursued the submarine for nearly two hours. This decision became a source of controversy, but Cuthbert was following strict British naval doctrine: press the attack on the submarine before attempting to rescue survivors. To stop would have made his own ship a sitting duck. It was an impossible choice, made worse by Cuthbert’s earlier, ignored warnings that his required position astern of the ferry was useless for detecting a U-boat lying in wait.

While the Grandmère hunted its quarry, the survivors of the Caribou fought for their lives. Gräf, in a calculated move, steered U-69 toward the sound of the sinking ship. He knew that the presence of men, women, and children in the water would prevent the Grandmère from dropping more depth charges in that area. It was a grim, effective tactic. At 6:30 a.m., with the first light of dawn breaking, Cuthbert abandoned the hunt to begin the grim task of rescue. Of the 237 souls who had been aboard the ferry, only 101 were pulled from the water alive.

The final death toll was 136 people: 57 military personnel, 49 civilians, and 31 crew members. The scale of the human tragedy was immense. Captain Taverner and both of his sons were lost to the sea. Of the 11 children who had been on board, only one survived. The news sent waves of shock and outrage across Newfoundland and Canada. An editorial in The Royalist newspaper captured the public sentiment, calling the sinking a “useless crime” that would only “steel our resolve.” For the small community of Port aux Basques, home to many of the crew, the loss was personal and devastating. The war had come ashore.

The hunter did not escape the war’s brutal calculus. On its very next patrol, on February 17, 1943, U-69 was located while participating with the wolfpack Haudegen in an attack on convoy ONS 165 east of Newfoundland. The British destroyer HMS Fame located it, and U-69 was sunk by depth charges. All 46 of its crew, including Ulrich Gräf, were killed. Their end was as swift and final as that of the ferry they had sunk four months earlier, a somber reflection on the final, tragic balance of war.

The sinking of the SS Caribou became the most significant sinking in Canadian-controlled waters during the Second World War. It stands as a stark symbol for the entire Battle of the St. Lawrence, an event that, for many Canadians and Newfoundlanders, transformed the war from a distant conflict into a clear and present danger on their own doorstep. The memory of that one torpedo in the dark still ripples through the coastal communities of Atlantic Canada. It is a story of how the vast, impersonal violence of a world war can be measured in the loss of a single ferry, its crew, and the families who waited on a shore they would never reach. It is a quiet, powerful reminder of the enduring cost of conflict, written on the cold waters of the North Atlantic.