On October 1st, 1939 the Admiralty had passed a message to all British merchant ships at sea warning them that a German raider might be operating off the east coast of South America. This was the result of the British Steamer Clement, of the Booth Line, having been sunk 75 miles south-east of Pernambuco, Brazil, on September 3 The next day American press reports announced that one of the Clement’s lifeboats had been picked up by a Brazilian coasting steamer, and that another had come ashore at Maceio, south of Pernambuco. The captain and chief engineer, it was stated, had been taken on board the raider, which, as we know now, was the pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee.

Having thus advertised herself the Graf Spee steamed east, and during October sank four more British ships on the trade route to the Cape. Their officers and crews were made prisoners, the bulk of them being transferred to the notorious Altmark, with which the Graf Spee was working. The last of that batch of sinking’s, the Trevanion, was on October 22nd, not far from St. Helena.

The Booth Line ran passenger services from the United Kingdom right up to Manaus - 1,000 miles up the Amazon. Founded in the 1860s, they took over the Red Cross Line in 1901 and the Iquitos Steam Ship Company in 1911. In 1946 the Booth Line was sold to the Vestey Group of companies and in 1975 all the group's ships were pooled under Blue Star Ship Management Ltd and the Booth Line ceased to exist as a separate entity.