Sunk by a U-boat, it might have been forgotten, were it not for a cargo that looks set to become the largest haul of precious metal to be retrieved from the depths of the Atlantic.
It was a decision that would bring tragedy: a German U-boat attacked it on 16 February 1941, and 84 men died when the ship went down.
Fisher, the Germans and Sir George fail to get to the U-boat before it submerges, and surrender.
She picked up officers and crew from a Dutch cargo ship before the U-boat sank it.
Aircraft like the Wellington could carry ten 250 lb DCs, one of which could sink a U-boat if it hit within 13 feet.
WH: It can be argued that the team at Bletchley Park saved on the order of 20 million lives, because they managed to stop the U-boats, and it really quickened the end of the war.
Despite Admiral Sims's frequent warnings of the severity of British losses to the U-boat campaign, it was not until both men had seen things with their own eyes that they truly understood the direness of the situation.
The Ascension Island guns saw action only once, on 9 December 1941, when they fired on the German U-boat, as it approached Georgetown on the surface, to shell the cable station or sink any ships at anchor.
The USS Joyce spotted the German U-boat on its sonar and gravely damaged it with counter fire, forcing it to surface, the AP details.
U-Boat Worx says it has been contracted to manufacture a private submersible for a Caribbean beachfront estate with its own underwater drive-in marina.
The Lusitania, similarly, was torpedoed by an old-fashioned, pre-radar submarine – a "one-eyed vessel", as one German U-boat commander described it, in which the decision whether to fire or not was based on one pair of and their distant view through a foggy telescope.
