The Bayard was a three masted, 67 metre long, 1,028 ton, sailing ship

Sailing ship

The term sailing ship is now used to refer to any large wind-powered vessel. In technical terms, a ship was a sailing vessel with a specific rig of at least three masts, square rigged on all of them, making the sailing adjective redundant. In popular usage "ship" became associated with all large...

 built by T. Vernon and Son, Liverpool for the Hall Line in 1864. In 1868 she was transferred to Sun Shipping Company and in 1881 sold to Foley and Company.
On 20 August 1883 she arrived in Suva

Suva

Suva features a tropical rainforest climate under the Koppen climate classification. The city sees a copious amount of precipitation during the course of the year. Suva averages 3,000 mm of precipitation annually with its driest month, July averaging 125 mm of rain per year. In fact,...

, Fiji

Fiji

Fiji , officially the Republic of Fiji , is an island nation in Melanesia in the South Pacific Ocean about northeast of New Zealand's North Island...

 carrying 494 Indian indenture

Indenture

An indenture is a legal contract reflecting a debt or purchase obligation, specifically referring to two types of practices: in historical usage, an indentured servant status, and in modern usage, an instrument used for commercial debt or real estate transaction.-Historical usage:An indenture is a...

d labourers from Calcutta. She had previously carried indentured labourers to the West Indies.

In 6 May 1885, Bayard hit an iceberg

Iceberg

An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice...

, 55 miles (88.5 km) South of Cape Race

Cape Race

Cape Race is a point of land located at the southeastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland, Canada. Its name is thought to come from the original Portuguese name for this cape, "Raso", or "bare"...

 while on a voyage from Marseilles to St. Pierre. The ship lost her stern, bowsprit, jib boom, foremast, topgallantmast and yard, but reached her destination on 23 May, leaking badly.

She was later used as a coaling ship for the whaling station in South Georgia. Bayard lost her mooring at the coaling pier on the northern side of the island during a severe gale on 6 June 1911 and ran aground on the rocks on the southern side of the island, where she rests there today, as a breeding site for blue-eyed shags.

See also

• Indian indenture system
  Indian indenture system
  The Indian indenture system was an ongoing system of indenture by which thousands of Indians were transported to various colonies of European powers to provide labour for the plantations...
  
  
• Indian indenture ships to Fiji
  Indian indenture ships to Fiji
  Between 1879 and 1916, a total of 42 ships made 87 voyages, carrying Indian indentured labourers to Fiji. Initially the ships brought labourers from Calcutta, but from 1903 all ships except two also brought labourers from Madras. A total of 60,965 passengers left India but only 60,553 arrived in...
  
  
• Indians in Fiji
  Indians in Fiji
  Indo-Fijians are Fijians whose ancestors came from India and various parts of South Asia, South-East Asia and Asia itself. They number 313,798 out of a total of 827,900 people living in Fiji...