I cannot tell you much about the ship, but I can tell you some of the materials on board. There was an astronomical observatory in South Africa (Boyden Station) owned by Harvard. This observatory had been taking photographs of stars (glass plate negatives) since 1928. In 1944, the Boyden Observatory shipped off some 1,500 plates to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and of course, they never arrived. I am Curator of the existing collection of photographic plates, so I am quite sure of this information and mention it as proof that there was some harmless cargo aboard. We still use all of these plates in current science to study changes in the sky.
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