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ended up as the Alkimos .
    Any sailor will tell you some ships are jinxed, destined to an inglorious history of mishap and tragedy from the day they are launched. The George M. Shriver was such a ship. Built in the Kayser Shipyards in Baltimore in 1943, the 7300-tonne oil-powered freighter was one of the thousands, hastily assembled in American shipyards and called Liberty Ships, which ran the gauntlet of German U-boats in the Atlantic and carried much-needed supplies to worn-torn Britain.
    The Kayser Shipyard prided itself on the speed with which it assembled hulls; ten days was the average. The George M. Shriver took six weeks . Its prefabricated sections didn’t fit, equipment broke down and there were numerous accidents among the workers, who struggled to complete their task and rid their slipway of what was already being called a jinxed ship.
    The George M. Shriver ’s World War Two service record was largely undistinguished and it was in dry-dock more often than at sea. In 1943 the ship was sold to a Norwegian company and given a new name, Viggo Hansteen , but if it was hoped the change of name would bring a change of luck, that hope was never realised. In the years after the war when it passed into private hands, the ship was involved in all sorts of mishaps and needed constant repairs. In 1961, for example, it collided with another vessel in Bristol harbour and was out of servicefor eleven months while its bow and its superstructure were rebuilt. After that the Norwegian owners decided they had had enough of the costly ship and sold it to a Greek company who renamed it Alkimos , the name it carries to this day.
    In March 1963 while en route from Jakarta to Bunbury in Western Australia the Alkimos struck a reef off lonely Beagle Island about 120 kilometres south of Geraldton. Local crayfishermen circled the stricken ship and reported its predicament to the maritime authorities in Perth but, inexplicably, the commander of the Alkimos , Captain Kassotakis, did not request assistance for three days. A tug was eventually sent to try to refloat the freighter but the captain decided the winches on Alkimos were more powerful. For two days the winches ground, the ship writhed and shuddered and moved not a centimetre. A salvage expert who was flown up from Perth flooded the stern of the vessel, raising the bow, and the Alkimos finally refloated.
    Half-filled with seawater and in danger of sinking at any moment, the disabled ship was towed into Fremantle harbour but, if the captain thought his troubles were over, he was wrong. Repairs began immediately but, in May, a mysterious fire almost gutted the ship. The chief officer was fined 100 pounds for misleading an official inquiry into the grounding, writs for amounts totalling 25,000 pounds were served on the captain for failing to pay for earlier repairs and the ship was impounded. The owners paid up but cancelled plans to repair the battered and charred ship in Australia and engaged a local tug operator to tow it to Hong Kong.
    The tug Pacific Reserve set out on 30 May with the Alkimos secured on a 600-metre towline. The sea was calm at first, but on the second day out an unforecast westerly gale whipped up mountainous seas. Fifty-seven kilometres north of Fremantleand twenty-four kilometres off the coast the towline snapped. The crew of the Pacific Reserve tried desperately to secure another line but the sea was too rough. The Alkimos began to drift helplessly towards the coast. For the second time in three months the ill-fated freighter ploughed into treacherous reefs and the boiling surf impaled it on Eglinton Rocks.
    Several attempts to salvage the vessel were made but all ended in failure and the Alkimos ’s jinx touched every one of them. Tugs were damaged, lines snapped, equipment failed, accidents and illness plagued the salvage crews and the crippled ship stayed wedged in rock and sand. Salvage attempts were abandoned when the winter storm season arrived,