'Mount Zion') was a passenger and cargo steamship that was built in Denmark in 1907 as St. Jan for Det Østasiatiske Kompagni.
In 1940 in the Second World War a U-boat sank Har Zion by torpedo in the North Atlantic, killing 36 of her 37 crew.
In 1907 Burmeister & Wain in Copenhagen, Denmark built three sister ships for Det Østasiatiske Kompagni (ØK, "The East Asiatic Company").
[4] In 1912 the Koninklijke Nederlandse Stoomboot-Maatschappij (KNSM, the "Royal Dutch Steamboat Company") took over The Koninklijke West-Indische Maildienst (KWIM, the "Royal West Indian Mail Service"), which served the Dutch colonies of Surinam and Curaçao.
On 28 July, Cacos rebels in Haiti lynched President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, and the USA responded by landing 330 US Marines at Port-au-Prince.
[12] As part of the Allied blockade of the Central Powers in the First World War, the Royal Navy used to stop and search ships passing in and out of neutral states such as the Netherlands that neighboured Germany.
In October 1916 the Royal Navy searched Nickerie and the ocean liner Zeelandia, and seized all the mail they were carrying.
[13] On 20 March 1918 President Woodrow Wilson issued Proclamation 1436, authorising the seizure under angary of Dutch ships in US ports.
For the next two months she traded in the Eastern Mediterranean, calling at Limassol in Cyprus, Haifa in Palestine, and Port Said in Egypt, before heading for Wales.
In home waters Har Zion detached for an anchorage in the Thames Estuary off Southend-on-Sea, where she arrived on 9 March.
PML's representative was sceptical of employing a woman, but impressed by her qualifications, and by her previous service for Blue Funnel Line and the British India Steam Navigation Company, so he offered her the job with immediate effect.
[20] Drummond said that Har Zion's officers and men were of numerous nationalities: Arab, British, Czech, Egyptian, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Spanish, and the ship's dog was Polish.
[21] Drummond found disciplinary problems with the engine room crew, which in due course she brought under control.
[22] On 22 March Har Zion left The Downs anchorage off the east coast of Kent, and the next day she arrived in Antwerp,[19] where a Greek Third Engineer joined the crew.
[26] In Liverpool Har Zion loaded a cargo of 1,000 cases of spirits and 120 tons of fertilizer, bound for Savannah, Georgia.
[28] The next day a Polish destroyer, ORP Błyskawica, rescued a seaman, Osman Adem, who was Har Zion's sole survivor.
It is on a part of Europe's North Atlantic continental margin called the Donegal Fan, just southeast of the Hebrides Terrace Seamount.