After the ship had slid under the waves, all that was salvaged was a section of the ship’s rudder and the antique spoked ship’s wheel, complete with the copper central dome that covered the pulley mechanism.

(In 1967, the wheel ended up in the hands of a Humansdorp family who had it valued in 1995 by the Greenwich Maritime Museum in England. They estimated that the collector's value at the time was in the region of £50,000 (about R300,000 then).

Not long after the ship sank, a “captain’s chair” washed out on the beach near Oyster Bay. The chair, made of Burmese Teak, has “SS Lyngenfjord” engraved on the backrest, with the metal number 22 underneath. On the front of the backrest is the emblem of the Grace Line – the original owners of the freighter.

The chair remained in the hands of members of the family who found it nearly seven decades ago, but in May 2006 it was obtained by the owners of the ship’s landlocked namesake in St Francis Bay, where it occupies pride of place in the entrance hall.

The ill-fated ship was built in 1913 for the Grace Line and named Colusa. In 1914 it was renamed the Santa Cecelia and in 1931 it was sold to a Greek shipping line and renamed the Nideros. It was bought by the Norwegian American Line in 1933 and renamed the SS Lyngenfjord.