In 1893 Santander received a ship full of dynamite. Shortly after he had 600 dead and a city razed

His Newcastle (United Kingdom) manufacturers designed him as an ideal ship for cabotage service, but the Cabo Machichaco It has gone down in history for something very different: starring in one of the greatest tragedies of the recent history of Spain, a brutal catastrophe that at the end of the 19th century shook (literally) the city of Santander and left a wake of dead and chaos. In the blink of an eye, he fell hundreds of lives, wounded thousands of peopledamaged dozens buildings and unleashed a deadly metallic rain. And yes, the latter is also literal.

There is who holds in fact that it remains the greatest civil catastrophe in the contemporary history of Spain, with a balance of dead, injured and destruction greater than that of the famous Rodeos plane crash occurred in Tenerife almost eight and a half decades later and that ended the life of 583 people.

When everything is complicated

Cabo Machichaco disaster occurred at the Santander docks November 3, 1893but (as often occurs with misfortunes) to understand their causes you have to go back long and look at other latitudes. First to the Schlesinger Shipyard, Davis & Co of Newcastle, which is where they shaped around 1882 as a vapor with iron helmet of 78.8 meters of length for 10.2 manga. Then to Bilbao, the place where years later, in 1893, he provided cabotage service under the orders of the Sevillian Naviera Ybarra.

There, in Bilbao, the crew of Cape Machichaco was found in November 1893 with an unforeseen event that was fully affecting maritime traffic and ended up altering his trip to Santander: A spring of anger. In dessert that small detail would be relevant because the sanitary measures to stop it marked the exit of the ship, forced him to undergo a quarantine upon arriving in Cantabria, where he had to anchor next to the Lazareto de Pedrosa, and (most importantly) marked his load.

As Luis Jar Torre recalls in An article About the disaster published in the General Magazine of Marina, The steam was primed with 1,616 tons of loadbetween which bags of flour, wine, paper, tobacco, wood and oil were included, but also materials related to the powerful Biscay siderurgy, including almost 400 bars and floods of iron, tin, pipes, metal cubes and rails. The Cape cocktail completed it 20 glass helmets of sulfuric acid and explosives.

Many explosives.

To be more precise, Jar Torre speaks of 1,720 dynamite boxes with a gross weight of 51,5400 kilos. “And although the explosive would not go from 43 t it was an amount four times higher to the normal for having lac Navy officer. A small part of that dynamite, about 20 boxes, had Santander destination, but most had to continue towards Seville and Cartagena.

They never completed their journey.

If the circumstances facilitated that Cabo Machichaco transported more explosives than normal, the laxity of local authorities just facilitated misfortune. Although the Regulation of the Puerto de Santander It forced ships with this type of merchandise to download in remote or anchored docks, with the help of Gabarras, the truth is that the early hours of November 3, 1893, the corporal docked in the center of the Cantabrian capital, at the dock No. 1 of Maliaño.

About seven in the morning the ship had already docked, more or less an hour later the operators began to download goods and around noon the works were already well advanced. Except for some punctual problem with some coils, the day He advanced without problemsbut around two o’clock in the afternoon things twisted in a bad way. The reason? The operators realized that the smoke from Bodega Nº2, located just in the bow.

It is not known exactly what the fire unleashed. In his day he signed up for a poorly turned off butt, but in 1900 the authorities had not yet reached any firm conclusion and with the passing of the decades other options equally feasible have been considered, such as the breakage of one of the 20 helmets that contained sulfuric acid.

What we do know with certainty is that the efforts of the crew to quell the flames They served little. The fire advanced. The smoke became increasingly visible. And everything that could be expected passed: the authorities came, firefighters came, sailors came to lend a hand and a swarm of neighbors and curious attracted by that flame ship in the llast in Santander came.

And all this while the fire advanced in a ship crowded with chemical substances, metals and tons of explosives. The chronicles say that among the public stacked on the dock, the rumor that the corporal stored dynamite came to circulate, which led some to move away from the area. But for a short time. Towards mid -afternoon, while the authorities were looking for a way to prevent the ship from going to pique, the operations from land followed about 3,000 curious.

Because? Because it is difficult to resist a good show. And because after all, it was true or not that the ship contained explosives, the authorities were still gathered in the area without that it seemed to import much. They trusted that dynamite would be safe as long as there was no detonator. In fact it was not the first ship that burned with a similar load without a deflagration. It had happened years before to another ship very similar to Cape Machichaco, Cabo San Antonio, who also suffered a fire in the sea.

That was a mistake.

A recklessness.

Minutes before five in the afternoon, shortly after they started working in the rivets on the side of the ship, a part of the Cape cargo burst. Big. “It was a kind of shrapnel cannon shot to heaven, with the submerged part of the ship making a cylinder head, its tube sides, mouth and grooves and their projectile load,” Describe Jar Torre. It did not explode the entire dynamite of the wineries, but it was enough to cause a catastrophe.

The violence of deflagration, its expansive wave and The shrapnel that was shot He fulminated the officers, the authorities, public and crew from the vessels in the area. The outbreak moved tons of water and mud, caused a violent tremor, damaged buildings and propelled a rain of fragments that extended within a radius of 700 meters, although some flew several kilometers.

The balance is terrifying.

Jar tower remember that 300 people died on the spot, although that balance ended up raising 575 over the days. They were added between 1,500 and 2,000 injured and the large damage caused by deflagration. It is estimated that it destroyed about 60 buildings and another 86 suffered ravages. In a city of just 50,000 inhabitants that had just lost a stroke apart from its firefighters, guards, police and civil authorities, the “projectiles” in flames scattered during the explosion caused fires in several homes in the center.

A disaster

And if the figures are not shocking in themselves, There are the testimonies. It is said that the deflagration was so violent, so shortly brutal, that in the enclosure of the Cathedral of Santander, located more than 200 m where the ship was located, about 60 beams of 300 kilos fell. As a fall of heaven. Literally. And it was not the only place in the region in which fragments of the defenestrated Cabo Machichaco rained and its cargo of explosives and steel material.

A zuclete was fired and ended landing eight kilometers away, in Peñacastillo, where killed a person. The explosion also catapulted the cane of the civil governor, which appeared on a beach thousands of meters from there. And a guard said he found a macabre surprise when examining the roof of a wood warehouse located two kilometers: a couple of legs.

The deflagration of November 3, 1893 was violent, wild, but curiously it was not the only one starring Cabo Machichaco. Despite the strength of the explosion, the ship’s stern sank in the bay with hundreds of dynamite boxes in the cellar, which over the months became a reason for concern for the authorities. To solve it they decided to resort to divers and cranes, but things did not go as expected either.

On March 21, almost five months after the first explosion, part of the ship’s dynamite burst while a diver worked in the cellar. The incident He added 15 bodies to the tragic death of Cape Machichaco. And since there are not two without three, weeks later (on the 30th) the ship returned to star in a new explosion, although controlled and with the help of the Condor cannon.

It was the last act of the tragedy of Cabo Machichaco, the involuntary and unexpected protagonist of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Spain.

Images | Wikipedia 1 and Santander City Council

In Xataka | The worst shark attack in history: the terrifying story of the survivors of USS Indianapolis in 1945