An 18 year old deck boy with venereal disease was dropped off at Ellis Island Hospital. He didn’t know it but it was a stroke of good luck. Another lucky fellow was my cousin, Joosep Seeblum, he had signed off the ship as 2nd Officer/Mate and was going home to his wife and apartment in Queens, NYC.
A week later, on June 24th, the 3,000 ton S.S. Tiiu left New York. Eleven of the previous crew had signed off, ten men had signed on, making a total crew of 20. Tiiu made a stop in Halifax before heading across the Atlantic to Liverpool and London. During the crossing, Capt. Nelberg learned via the ship’s wireless radio that his 29-year-old wife had died June 29th of pulmonary pneumonia. Benhard Nelberg was suddenly a widower at sea. His 6-year-old son was in Tallinn dealing with his mother’s death as best he could without parental consolation.
On July 9th, about 100 miles southwest of Ireland, ‘Tiiu’ was torpedoed by a German U-boat U-34 at 12:32 p.m. The crew calmly began to lower lifeboats as if nothing was out of the ordinary. What they didn’t know was that a torpedo struck the engine room – the Captain assumed they had hit a mine. The first lifeboat was lowered easily, but the second one was difficult to maneuver. It landed upside down in the water. It took enormous effort to turn it upright in the high waves with a strong wind blowing. Capt. Nelberg was furious with himself that in the crisis he forgot to grab a life belt. Adrift in lifeboats, the crew watched Tiiu’s Estonian flag flutter and sink within six minutes. During the next three days, the men were distraught and fatigued, muscles ached with tension. Capt. Bernhard Nelberg’s thoughts must have wandered to his younger brother Richard Nelberg (Merkur Captain) who was on the ‘Colon’ ship in 1931 when it hit a mine between Osmussaar and Pakri lighthouse, causing the death (injury and drowning) of his accomplished brother at age 27.
On July 11th, one of Tiiu’s lifeboats with nine men was rescued by a British fishing trawler about 90 miles west of southern Wales, arriving at Milford Haven two days later. The second boat of 11 survivors landed at Glasgow on 18 July. The WWII German Commander Wilhelm Rollmann of U-34 torpedoed and sank 12 European ships, including Estonian S.S. Vapper, in the month of July 1940, mostly sunk in the southwest waters of Ireland.
On August 29, 1941, another of Robert Nelberg’s ships, the S.S. Lucerne, was sunk in the Gulf of Finland by a German plane. Worse than that, brother Capt. Robert Nelberg died in Siberia in 1941.
After the Atlantic survival, Capt. Bernhard Nelberg worked in Woking, near London. There’s an immigration record of his son, Ago, arriving in Canada April 1954. He listed his occupation as ‘sailor,’ and last address in Woking, Surrey, same town as his father. Bernhard enjoyed his years as a director/investor of Nelkou Steamship Company Ltd., immigrated to Canada in 1960, and began a new career as a pig farmer in Ontario. He died in Toronto in 1977. His son, Ago, died 12 years later in Toronto; both are buried at York Cemetery, Toronto, Ontario.
