On Jan. 9, 1972, the British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth burst into flames and sank in Victoria Harbour. Although the fires were determined to be the work of arsonists, no one has ever been charged with the crime.
The RMS Queen Elizabeth, a 83,000-ton ocean liner, was the largest ship in the world when it launched in 1938. It was retired 30 years later and subsequently purchased by Chinese shipping tycoon C.Y. Tung, who brought the ship to Hong Kong to be converted to a floating school called “Seawise University.”
On the morning of Sunday, Jan. 9, 1972, while the Queen Elizabeth was anchored in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, a series of fires suddenly broke out aboard the ship, forcing hundreds of visiting shipyard workers and their families to evacuate the ship.
John A. Hudson, an Englishman who had sailed his own boat into Hong Kong Harbor, describes watching the fire: “What caught our attention from a distance across the water was smoke coming from the ship's portholes; not just one or two portholes but from almost all of them from stem to stern on one side. … What had started as puffs of smoke from portholes turned into a raging inferno in the upper superstructure generating huge volumes of smoke. This, over only a three hour period.
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