Saturday 19 May 2012

The migrants who didn’t make it to Buenos Aires





When the Italian transatlantic steamer the Sirio foundered off the coast of Spain on a hot afternoon in August 1906, 300 passengers, most of them Italian and Spanish migrants on their way to a new life in Argentina, lost their lives in tragic circumstances.

The disaster has a lot in common with the recent Costa Concordia incident. Both ships ran aground caught sailing too close to the coast and both captains abandoned ship before their passengers had the chance to be rescued. But the Sirio was not a cruise. It was a ship which spent her life transporting migrants to the New World and a new life.