She was designed to carry passengers and cargo between London and Port Adelaide, South Australia, and was the fastest ship to sail on that route.

James Laing built Torrens for £27,257[1] at his Deptford shipyard in Sunderland,[2] largely to the specifications of Captain Henry Robert Angel (1829 – June 1923).

[6] It is likely that she was named after Colonel Robert Torrens, a principal exponent of the economic benefits of nineteenth-century colonial trade.

[citation needed] Torrens carried a number of notable passengers, including the Congregationalist minister Rev.

On the evening of 11 January 1899 she struck an iceberg some 22 nautical miles (40 km) southwest of the Crozet Islands and limped into Adelaide dismasted, with her bow stoved in.

[6] In 1973, two ANARE expeditioners discovered a headless figurehead of a woman at Sellick Bay, on the mid-west coast of Macquarie Island.

[12] It was on one of his two outward voyages to Australia that he showed one WH Jacques the draft manuscript of his first novel, Almayer's Folly.

In March 1893, on the return Port Adelaide-to-Cape Town leg, Conrad struck up a friendship with Edward Lancelot Sanderson and the future Nobel literary laureate John Galsworthy.

Galsworthy had sailed to Australia[13][14] with the intention of meeting Robert Louis Stevenson, but by chance met Conrad instead.

It resembled so much an exhibition of intelligent grace and unerring skill that it could fascinate even the least seamanlike of our passengers.

[6] After retiring from active sea life, Henry Robert Angel set up a smelting works in Stratford, London.

He died in Las Palmas after injuring himself in a fall aboard the steamship Highland Piper, which was taking him to his favourite holiday spot.

Although clearly a strong captain and capable seaman, he was intemperate in habits, and was suspended for two years after he ran Beltana aground on Kangaroo Island in 1871, failed to report the damage, and falsified the log.