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Warship 2

We can report that WASHINGTON LIBRARY  has kindly agreed to provide a DISPLAY cabinet in its Heritage Area, for the Sarabande plaque. Tom Copeman and Ernie Guy from WHS visited the Library to add photographs and relevant background information to the display (see photograph).

Following the publication of our previous article on HMS Sarabande on the Washington History Society website, we were pleased to receive the following response from a gentleman living in Tillsonburg, Ontario, Canada:

“ I came across your website about the Sarabande, and I have some information to share with you about the ship and its eventual fate. During the war it was based in Freetown, Liberia and participated in convoys from there. After the war it was sold to a Norwegian company, and in the Spring of 1949 was purchased by a group of Latvian political refugees in Sweden who were desperate to get as far away from the Russian Communists as possible. The ship was refurbished in Goteborg, Sweden, and in July 1949 set sail for Canada with 254 Latvians, Estonians, and Poles, plus a few other nationalities on board. At that time I was 9 years old and my step-father was a boatswain on the Sarabande in exchange for a free passage for him, my mother, my younger brother and I. After a difficult crossing of the North Atlantic we arrived in Halifax, Canada at the beginning of August, and were promptly interned by the Canadians for 10 weeks, before being allowed to enter the country. In pursuing this further, drop me a line.  few years ago we had a reunion of the people who came over on the ship, and some of us have done some research on the eventual fate of the Sarabande. She was sold in 1949 to pay the fines of the chief organiser and the Captain- $400 each for bringing illegal immigrants into Canada, and eventually ended up on the Great Lakes and in the Caribbean until sometime in the 1980s.

We are in currently in correspondence with the writer, and hope to discover more facts about the ship.

The Washington residents who collected for the Sarabande in 1942 would have been surprised and gratified to learn that their adopted warship had such a long and interesting career.