SS Yarmouth Castle, built as Evangeline, was an American steamship whose loss in a disastrous fire in 1965 prompted new laws regarding safety at sea.

After a short period in service, the ship was laid up, and then sold in 1954 and put under Liberian registry, operating from Boston to Nova Scotia, then to the Caribbean.

The ship had a glassed-in promenade deck, two social halls, a library, a dancing saloon and a verandah cafe.

[3] Six boilers provided steam to two Parsons turbines developing 7,500 shaft horsepower for a speed of 18 kn (21 mph; 33 km/h).

[5] The transport operated during the first half of 1942 out of New Orleans to Curaçao, Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

After repair and conversion in Galveston, Texas, during September and October 1942, Evangeline began operations out of New York in November to Oran, Casablanca, Algiers, Bizerte and other North African ports, supporting operations after the landings in North Africa on November 8, 1942.

The transport made one trip to the United Kingdom after return to New York in August 1943, and in January 1944 departed for service in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) for operations.

[10] The ship returned on December 25, 1944, to Honolulu, and in January 1945 to San Francisco, where the Navy took over jurisdiction briefly until April.

[5][9] After being refitted and refinished at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation's shipyards at a cost of US$1.5 million, she returned to passenger service in May 1947.

Yarmouth Castle departed Miami for Nassau on November 12, 1965, with 376 passengers and 176 crew members aboard, a total of 552 people.

At some point between midnight and 1:00 a.m. crew and passengers began noticing smoke and heat and started searching for a fire.

Some passengers tried to escape through cabin windows but found them difficult or impossible to open due to improper maintenance.

[11] While some lifeboats burned and others could not be launched due to mechanical problems, half of the ship's boats made it safely away.

Bahama Star radioed the U.S. Coast Guard at 2:20 a.m. Finnpulp was the first ship on the scene, aiding the first lifeboat, which carried the Yarmouth Castle's captain.

[11] All survivors had been pulled aboard Finnpulp and Bahama Star by 4:00 a.m. Yarmouth Castle capsized onto her port side just before 6:00 a.m., and sank at 6:03 a.m.

Eighty-seven people went down with the ship, and three of the rescued passengers later died at hospitals, bringing the final death toll to 90.

The Yarmouth Castle fire was the worst disaster in North American waters since the SS Noronic burned and sank in Toronto Harbour with the loss of up to 139 lives in 1949.

The construction of the ship, which contained excessive flammable material, allowed the fire to quickly spread out of control.

The high death toll was attributed to the fact that the general alarm and PA system were not immediately used to alert passengers and crew.

The report blames the captain and officers on the scene for not taking "firm and positive" action to organize firefighting and evacuation of passengers.

The report determined that Yarmouth Castle sank because the doors between the watertight compartments had not been sealed, allowing water to flow freely from the firefighting and sprinkler systems.

The Yarmouth Castle disaster prompted updates to the Safety of Life at Sea law, or SOLAS.

[13] Yarmouth Castle's largely wooden superstructure was found to be the main cause of the fire's rapid spread.

The ballad was not Lightfoot's only shipwreck-themed song; in 1976, he released his album Summertime Dream, which included the song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," based on the sinking of the American-flagged Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald in an early November gale in 1975.