Timeline: Shipping Disasters

1912

The Titanic, a British ocean liner, sank in the Atlantic with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
1914

Steamship the Empress of Ireland sank after a collision in St Lawrence River, Quebec, Canada, killing 1,024.

1945

Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship carrying German refugees, was destroyed by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic, killing an estimated 9,000 people.

1948

The Kiangya, a Chinese steamship, sank after hitting a mine during the Chinese civil war, killing as many as 3,920.

1954

Toya Maru, a Japanese freightliner, sank in a typhoon, killing 1,172.

1987

The Dona Paz ferry sank after colliding with the tanker Vector in the Sibuyan Sea in the Philippines. The accident cost 4,375 lives on the ferry and 11 on the tanker.

In the same year, a British ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise, capsized in the English Channel, killing 193 people.

1991

The Salem Express ferry sank after hitting coral outside the Red Sea port of Safaga, killing 464 people.

1993

The Neptune, a ferry, sank west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing several hundred.

1994

The ferry Estonia sank off the Finnish island of Utoe, en route from Tallinn to Stockholm, killing 852.

2000

The Indonesian ferry Cahaya Bahari sank off the coast of Sulawesi, killing around 550 people.

2001

An overcrowded fishing boat carrying asylum seekers to Australia from Lampung, in Sumatra, sank in international waters between Indonesia and Australia, killing 353 people.

2002

The Joola, a Senegalese ferry designed to carry 550 people, capsized off the Gambian coast, killing 1,863 people. In the same year, the MV Salahuddin-2, a Bangladeshi ferry, sank in the Meghna River, south of Dhaka, killing more than 450.

2003

The MV Nasreen, a Bangladeshi ferry, sank in the monsoon-swollen Meghna river, south-east of Dhaka, killing up to 400 people.

2006

The Salam Boccaccio 98, an Egyptian ferry, sank in the Red Sea carrying more than 1,300 people. There were at least 100 survivors.