Torpedo strike near Zhoushan.
1942 / East China Sea / Present memory
The Lisbon Maru Chronicle
1,816 prisoners. 828 lost. 384 rescued. A long ocean story of war, silence, and digital reawakening.
The Hook
The names arrive before the ship.
A death roll and a field of faces turn the loss back into individual lives. The poem beside them gives the page its first voice: a light carried through water, war, and time.
1,816prisoners 828lost 384rescued
Featured Story / Re-emergence
The wreck returned to the present.
Director Fang Li located the wreck, interviewed Dennis Morley at 101, and brought descendants back into the same story. The catastrophe becomes visible again through film, testimony, and family inquiry.
Chapter I
Before the voyage, there was the camp.
After the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, more than 1,800 Commonwealth soldiers were held in Sham Shui Po before being loaded onto the Lisbon Maru.
27 September 1942
The manifest is a ship before it is a document.
The cargo plan and manifest show the ship as an arrangement of compartments. Behind the diagram were three dark holds crowded with prisoners forced aboard on 27 September 1942.
Hold I Hold II Hold III / Morley testimony
USS Grouper / Gato-class submarine
A technical fact becomes a moral blind spot.
The submarine fired on an unmarked Japanese freighter, unaware that 1,816 British POWs were locked inside the holds. The machinery is precise; the knowledge around it is not.
- Length
- 311 ft
- Speed
- 20 knots surfaced
- Torpedo tubes
- 6 bow / 4 stern
- Commissioned
- 12 Feb 1942
Route & Wreck Location
From Hong Kong toward Japan.
The route begins at Hong Kong, where the POWs boarded on 27 September 1942, and ends near Zhoushan, where the ship was struck and sank on 1-2 October.
Hatches sealed, no food, no water, no ventilation.
The ship sinks; prisoners break out into gunfire and open sea.
Chapter II / Hold No. 3
In Hold No. 3, the sea became darkness.
Dennis Morley's testimony anchors the emotional center: stench, dehydration, panic, and the final singing of Auld Lang Syne as the ship began to go down.
A deliberate act of listening
Zhoushan rescue
Forty-six boats, 384 lives.
The fishermen of Qingbang and Miaozihu moved toward survivors under danger. Miao Kaiyun's night crossing and cave rescue give this chapter local agency and geographic precision.
Post-war silence
What families inherited was an interval.
Families faced empty graves, partial answers, and survivor silence. One descendant's request to fill the gap between capture and death gives the silence a precise shape.
capture transfer missing interval death family inquiry Gwulo page
Chapter III / Digital Archive
Fragments began to answer one another.
Thomas Henry Steed / Gwulo Andrew Salmon / diary Miao Kaiyun / media Dennis Morley / testimony Zhejiang Archives / rescuers
People Directory / The Heart of the Site
People Directory
The chronicle ends by returning to people: survivors, rescuers, diarists, families, and the public records that keep their names reachable.
Dennis Morley
Last British survivor (Hold No.3)
Survived the sinking, endured forced labour in Japan. Died in 2021, aged 101. His testimony gave the archive its darkest sound: absolute darkness, suffocation, and Auld Lang Syne.
Open source recordSources / About
The site ends where responsible memory begins.
Based on survivor testimonies, Tony Banham's research, Zhejiang Provincial Archives, Gwulo.com, and The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru (2024).
