Japanese battleship Ise
On 12 April 1922, while at Yokohama, "Ise" hosted a delegation which included the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), who was accompanied by his second cousin, the future Lord Mountbatten of Burma. Captain Kanna Norikazu relieved Nagasawa on 1 December. The ship aided survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake in September 1923. From the early 1920s through the late 1930s, "Ise" mostly cruised off the coast of China. Little detailed information is available about her activities during the 1920s, although she helped sink the obsolete destroyer during gunnery training on 10 August 1926. The ship was overhauled in 1928–1929, during which her forward superstructure was enlarged and her aviation facilities improved.
SS Elbe (1881)
The night of 30 January 1895 was stormy. In the North Sea, conditions were freezing and there were huge seas. SS "Elbe" had left Bremerhaven for New York earlier in the day with 354 passengers aboard. Also at sea on this rough night was the steamship "Crathie", sailing from Aberdeen in Scotland, heading for Rotterdam. As conditions grew worse, the "Elbe" discharged warning rockets to alert other ships to her presence. The "Crathie" either did not see the warning rockets or chose to ignore them. She did not alter her course, with such disastrous consequences, that she struck the liner on her port side with such force that whole compartments of the "Elbe" were immediately flooded. The collision happened at 5.30 am and most of the passengers were still asleep.The "Elbe" began to sink immediately and the captain, von Goessel, gave the order to abandon ship. Amid great scenes of panic the crew managed to lower two of the "Elbe"'s lifeboats. One of the lifeboats capsized as too many passengers tried in vain to squeeze into the boat. Twenty people scrambled into the second lifeboat, of whom 15 were members of the crew. The others were four male second-class passengers and a young lady’s maid by the name of Anna Boecker, who had been lucky enough to be pulled from the raging sea after the first boat had capsized. Meanwhile, on the other side of the "Elbe", Captain von Goessel had ordered all the women and children to assemble there but no other lifeboats were launched because the ropes on the derricks were all frozen up, and so they perished along with the captain. Within 20 minutes of the collision, the "Elbe" had sunk and the only survivors were the 20 people in the one surviving lifeboat. These people now had to endure mountainous seas and below-zero temperatures and they were 50 miles from land. Things looked bleak; the "Elbe"'s distress rockets had not been seen by any passing vessels and so no one knew of their predicament. After five hours in the raging storm, their luck changed. A fishing smack from Lowestoft called the "Wildflower" found them. In desperate conditions the crew of the "Wildflower" struggled to pull the 20 survivors from the lifeboat, which had begun to break up. The skipper, William Wright, said later that the survivors would not have lasted another hour in those conditions, and believed that the only reason they had stayed alive for five hours was the expertise of the "Elbe"'s crewmen aboard the lifeboat.