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Description: | Signed by the artist, lower left, and reproduced under the title given above in his co-authored 'More Sea Fights of the Great War' (1919) f. p. 60. The book (pp.59-60) gives a circumstantial account, without any hard facts, of her encountering and sinking a U-boat but there is no independent evidence for this, so how the story reached publication and illustration by Wyllie is a puzzle. He is unlikely to have invented it and it may be based on misinformation. The ship's name is also a problem: 'Merope' (pronounced with the same stress as 'therapy') was one of the daughters of Atlas in Greek mythology: many naval ship names drew this tradition ('Calliope' is another example), but standard modern printed reference sources call her 'Merops'. This sounds more like a naval nickname and may, in fact, be an entrenched, repeated mistake that Wyllie and his co-authors are less likely to have made at the time. The ship itself was a steel barquentine built in 1892 as the Danish-flagged 'Maracaibo'. She was taken into Q-ship service on 2 February 1917 operating under the names 'Bellmore', 'Ilma', 'Maracaibo', 'Merope / Merops', 'Q28', 'Steady' and 'Toofa', until returned to mercantile service on 11 February 1919 and renamed 'Bellmore'.
Box Title: Wyllie: Kitson IX (a) (b) merchant sail & steam - passenger - coal whipping. | Publisher: | "http://collections.rmg.co.uk/" | Rights holder: | "Royal Museums Greenwich" | Subjects: | drawings Merope 1808 [HMS] Merope | Source: | Royal Museums Greenwich | Identifier: | http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections... | Go to resource |
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