The granddaughters of two sailors who survived a shipwreck off Cornwall over 109 years ago have met in Malta for the first time to share the details of the story of survival they were brought up hearing.

“The meeting was very emotional on many different levels,” said Ute Lassen Poechman whose German grandfather, August Lassen, survived the wreck of the Hera.

He clung on to the ship’s mast for hours along with another four men who included Maltese Joseph Cauchi, the grandfather of Rita Agius.

Only those five men emerged alive. Nineteen crew members died in the freezing waters.

It was Ute, 69, who sparked the search for Rita, 53, after learning about her while on holiday in Malta. Last week, Ute contacted Times of Malta for help to find the granddaughter of the only Maltese survivor.

The two families were reunited after Rita’s daughter, Michaela spotted the Times of Malta article and reached out.

“The Agius family is a very warm and friendly family. We had an instant rapport. It was very successful. We will see if we can meet again in the future,” said Ute.

Rita added: “I was looking forward to meeting Ute. Malta was the place to reunite us. I want to tell the story my grandfather was so proud of – the story he repeated over and over to people.”

The five survivors of the Hera shipwreck, including August Lassen (far right) and Joseph Cauchi (second from left)

The Hera story

On February 1, 1914, the German cargo ship Hera was 90 days into a voyage from Chile, carrying a cargo of nitrates, when it hit thick fog, striking a reef that runs out from Nare Head, in Cornwall.

Nineteen crew members died in the freezing waters. Only five men emerged alive and these included Lassen and Cauchi, both 19.

Ute’s grandfather got married and had two children, one of whom was Ute’s father. Ute was born in Glücksburg, a small town near the German-Danish border, and the family lived there until they emigrated to Canada when she was a child.

“My grandfather died in 1951 – two years before I was born. Any of the stories I have were related by my family. I remember my father talking about how the captain pushed my grandfather up on the mast and gave him a whistle and told him to blow it so that anyone there would swim towards the sound,” she recalls.

The whistle that saved lives is still on display in the Schiffarhrtsmuseum, in Flensburg, Germany.

Meanwhile, in Malta, a young Rita was hearing a similar story about a sinking ship and a whistle that saved her brave grandfather – who got married and had two daughters, one of who was Rita’s mother, Emmanuela.

“I was nine years old when he died in 1979. I remember him outside his house recounting his story. As I child I was impressed by the details. He did not know how to swim and the life ring he found was torn and he struggled to hold on,” Rita recalls.

The whistle that saved the lives of five men shipwrecked off Cornwall in 1914.

Her grandfather prayed to be rescue.

“He said he did not want to drown, especially because he did not want to leave his mother wondering what happened to him. But most impressive was how he saw his friends die in the freezing cold. Those who climbed higher up the mast would get weak with the cold. He saw them loosen their grip and say ‘Bye Joe’ and then fall into the water. This allowed him to climb further up to safety. When the rescue boat arrived, they did not see him at first. He heard them and blew the whistle,” she said.

Telling their story

Both Ute and Rita inherited the newspaper clippings of the wreck, which they still treasure. Years ago, Ute shared copies of them with the website submerged.co.uk, which tells the stories of wrecks in UK seas.

Back in Malta, in the early 2000s, Rita was watching a documentary about shipwrecks which sparked her memory and she ran an internet search about the Hera. She came across submerged.co.uk and sent in her grandfather’s story: a translation of an interview her grandfather had given to Maltese newspaper It-Torċa in 1964 when he was 70 years old.

Years passed.

And Ute, who now lives in Hanover, Canada, came to Malta on vacation with her partner earlier this month. She came across the tourist ship Hera and decided to revisit submerged.co.uk after many years. That was when she spotted Rita’s posts and made the connection with Malta.

She could not believe this was happening while she was in Malta.

Rita now has a dream that would bridge the generations.

“My dream is to one day visit the grave where the men who died are buried and hear my daughter, who is a soprano, sing there during a memorial,” she says.