ARC Caldas was one of two s built for the Colombian Navy during the 1930s. Originally ordered for the Portuguese Navy, the two ships were purchased by Colombia while still under construction. She was discarded in 1960 and subsequently scrapped.

Design and description The Antioquia-class ships were designed by the British shipbuilder Yarrow and were based on , a prototype destroyer built for the Royal Navy in 1926 by Yarrow.Roberts, p. 397 They were long overall and between perpendiculars, with a beam of and a draught of . The ship displaced at standard load and at full load.Whitley, p. 32

The Antioquias were powered by two Parsons-Curtis geared steam turbines, each driving one propeller shaft using steam provided by three Yarrow boilers. The turbines, rated at , were intended to give a maximum speed of . The destroyers carried enough fuel oil to give them a range of at .

Armament was similar to contemporary Royal Navy destroyers, with a gun armament of four 4.7 in (120 mm) Vickers-Armstrong Mk G guns, and three 2-pounder () Mk VIII anti-aircraft guns. Two quadruple banks of 21-inch (533mm) torpedo tubes were carried, while two depth charge throwers and 12 depth charges constituted the ships' anti-submarine armament. Up to 20 mines could be carried. The ships' complement consisted of 147 officers and men.

1955 incident On 28 February 1955, eight crew members of the Caldas went overboard due to an alleged storm on a voyage to Cartagena. One of the sailors, Luis Alejandro Velasco, managed to survive on a life raft for ten days without food or water and was found by locals on a beach near San Juan de Uraba. The other sailors had drowned shortly after they went overboard, making him the sole survivor of the incident. Velasco was subsequently treated as a national hero by the government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.

Velasco later revealed to author Gabriel García Márquez that there had been no storm and that the Caldas was instead overloaded with contraband in Mobile where it had laid for repairs, causing the ship to list dangerously. Márquez initially published these findings in a series of articles for the El Espectador newspaper in 1955 and later again in his book The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor in 1970. The publication of the 1955 articles caused great controversy since they contradicted the official narrative about the incident adopted by the Colombian government.Márquez, pp. 12 – 18.

Citations

Sources

Márquez, Gabriel García (1970). The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.