On Christmas Eve 1901 a chilly easterly storm was brewing, with extreme waves outside Sandhamn in Stockholm’s outer archipelago. In the late afternoon darkness, pilots on the island had observed the light from a steamer that they suspected was in need of help. Interrupting their Christmas celebrations, they manned the pilot cutter and steered towards the light from the steamer’s lanterns. The steamer signalled for help, and the pilot cutter responded. But just before the men arrived at the steamer, the lights vanished.
The pilots assumed that the ship had turned out to sea again in the darkness to await the dawn light of Christmas morning. They searched for the ship for a while in the miserable weather without finding any traces. When they returned to Sandhamn, the pilot cutter was covered in an armour of thick ice and its sails had frozen solid so that they could not be lowered.
When daylight came on Christmas morning, the pilot lookout men knew that a disaster had occurred. At the side of the fairway towards Sandhamn, at the same height as Revengegrundet, several masts were seen jutting out of the water. The steamer they had sighted the day before had not turned out to sea again but instead ran aground, filled up with water and quickly sank. The pilot cutter immediately returned to the scene, but there were no signs of life from the crew.
When a salvage steamer arrived from the Neptune Company, divers were sent down for an initial inspection. The hull, which stood at a depth of 26 metres, had large holes in the bottom and a ripped off keel. The smokestack had fallen to the seafloor, and the superstructure, wheelhouse, skylight, railings and more had been pushed over onto the deck. The divers identified the vessel as the Sundsvall steamship Polstjärnan (“the North Star”).
A few days earlier, she had departed Burntisland, just north of Edinburgh, for the journey to Stockholm fully loaded with coal. The crew consisted of 22 people, including two women. All perished.
Alma Andersson, the galley manager on board, had sent off a message in a bottle after the ship ran aground. When the bottle was found, a picture of the course of events became clearer. In the rough weather, Polstjärnan had suffered a rudder failure a bit off the coast. Heavy seas had washed the captain and mate overboard.
Before the ship sank, the galley manager had put on six life vests. But this did not help, and her body was found during the spring outside Runmarö.
