by Eve Redstone

Created on: October 05, 2008   Last Updated: December 01, 2010

Mousehole is a tiny Cornish fishing village tucked onto the southern coast of Cornwall in England. The sea-lanes in the area are busy with shipping approaching and leaving the busiest sea-lane in the world, the English Channel. Storms blow in off the Atlantic and the Cornish people have a long and tempestuous relationship with the sea. The coast has a rich maritime history full of shipwrecks, smuggling and tales of daring rescue and terrible disaster.

Most of this history is in the distant past, but there are still small tragedies every year, and in some years there are larger tragedies. December 19th 1981 saw one of the modern tragedies, a tale of heroism that reached around the world, but a tragedy that still scars the tiny community of Mousehole today. The Cornish are a fiercely independent people, and a true Cornishman is Cornish before they are British, and they belong to the sea before they belong to the land.

The lifeboats of the area are manned on a volunteer basis by men who often work the oceans for a living and know their local waters to a greater distance than they know the land.

The disaster started when the freighter the Union Star travelling on its maiden voyage from the Netherlands to Ireland hit trouble just off the Wolf Rock lighthouse. The engines cut out and the captain was unable to restart them. A tug (The Noord Holland) offered assistance but this was refused because if a tow was accepted then salvage fees would be payable. The seas worsened and the ship was swept further towards the rocks of the Cornish coast. By this time the tug was very close but Captain Henry Moreton refused to accept help, soon the tug retreated as the seas became too dangerous for the tug to continue.

Captain Moreton put out a distress call to the Falmouth coast guard and a helicopter was dispatched from RNAS Culdrose. With the winds now approaching one hundred miles an hour and seas of over fifty feet the helicopter was unable to approach the Union Star to rescue any one on board. The call was put out to Mousehole and the Penlee lifeboat, the Solomon Browne, was launched under the command of Trevelyan Richards. Tragic experience dictated that no more than one man from any family went out on a call as perilous as this, and of the twelve men who turned out for the call only eight were aboard when the boat was launched.

The Solomon Browne reached the Union Star and in massive seas, so massive that the lifeboat actually landed on the deck of the freighter twice, four

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