The Portuguese Insular Navigation Company's steamship Peninsular outward-bound for New York

Built for Lund’s Blue Anchor Line by J.L.Thompson at Sunderland and launched as the Murrumbidgee in 1887, this vessel was renamed Peninsular following her purchase by the Portuguese Insular Navigation Company in 1893. Employed on the company’s main Lisbon to New York service via the Azores, she made over 60 round trips which, after 1902, also featured a brief call at New Bedford, Massachusetts, to land any steerage passengers. Enjoying a rather colourful career which included breaking her propeller shaft in mid-Atlantic in February 1901 and colliding with (and sinking) the French steamer Conseil in the Tagus at Lisbon exactly a year later, she was withdrawn from the New York route in 1908 and thereafter sailed only to the Azores. Sold to new Portuguese owners in 1910 and again in 1918, she was finally scrapped in 1923.

We are grateful to Michael Naxton for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.