The Loss of the Vivid: the Biography of a Shipwreck

At about ten o’clock on the morning of Tuesday 8 July 1913, a lifeboat put ashore at Scalasaig, the tiny port of Colonsay, and a bedraggled party were welcomed into the Colonsay Hotel for shelter and refreshment. The rescuees, it transpired, were neither fishermen nor seamen but teachers, who had spent an uncomfortable six hours in their open boat rounding the south and east of Oronsay after their ship had struck a rock in the small hours of that morning. They knew nothing of the subsequent fate of this ship or of her crew, but they had been charged by the Captain to deliver a telegram for transmission to Glasgow. A few anxious hours must have passed before another vessel, HMS Research, arrived to claim the lifeboat and to assure the party that their shipmates were safe — but that their ship, the steam yacht Vivid, was not.