ROBERT MOUAT; AMERICAN, 20TH CENTURY

Built for the Baltimore Steam Packet Company in 1928 and named for its late president, the President Warfield, served in Old Bay Line Service between Norfolk and Baltimore. Her Principle dimensions were: LOA - 320 ft., Beam - 56.5 ft., Draft - 18.5 ft. and had a GRT of 1,814. After serving as a barracks ship in England she saw service in England and France. Bought in 1946 by a front for the Palestine resistance organization, Haganah, she was renamed Exodus in 1947 and illegally tried to smuggle 4,515 immigrants to Palestine. As soon as she left the territorial waters of France, British destroyers accompanied it and on May 4, 1947, near the coast of Palestine, the British rammed the ship and boarded it. The ship was towed to Haifa, where the immigrants were eventually returned to Germany. Exodus lay within view of Tel Aviv for some time before being towed to a maritime graveyard near Haifa in the fall of 1948. On August 26,1952, the Exodus caught fire and burned to the waterline despite efforts to save her. The ship's remains eventually were towed to the Bay of Shemen, where they rest to this day.