Hazard (probably)

This Hazard was a steam tug built in 1873 by Richard Stobbs at Coble Dene, North Shields. A local wreck list names A. Bain of North Shields as owner in 1892. Tugs worked close to ports and shipping routes, towing, meeting or helping other vessels, but the checked sources do not say whether Hazard had a tow, where she had started, where she was heading or what exact task she was doing on 2 December. She should not be confused with the merchant sailing vessel of the same name lost at Hailstone Rock in 1815, 77 years earlier and much farther north.

Hazard developed a leak and sank off Alnmouth Bay on 2 December 1892. That gives a direct physical cause: water entered faster than the tug could be kept afloat. The public account does not say what opened the leak, how quickly flooding spread, what the weather was, whether pumps failed or whether the master tried to beach her. The official seabed record calls its identification 'Hazard (probably)', so even the link between this documented sinking and the exact saved point remains open. The loss event is recorded more securely than the identity of the obstruction below.

No checked public source gives the size of Hazard's crew or says that a person died, was injured or was rescued. The local list records the leak and sinking but, unlike several neighbouring losses on the same page, adds no crew outcome. That silence may mean an uneventful escape was not considered worth reporting, but it is not proof that all survived. It would be equally wrong to infer deaths from the fact that the tug sank. A crew agreement, casualty return or contemporary newspaper report is still needed before this page can give a number or name.

The national record places a steam-tug wreck point in Alnmouth Bay but labels the identification as probable. It gives a precise grid reference yet no surveyed length, width, depth, machinery, boiler, hull material, orientation or condition. Precision of the pin does not remove uncertainty over the name. The feature lies in Maritime England off Northumberland, although the saved collection placed it under Scottish Borders because that was the nearest available local-area border for the offshore point. No visitor should expect a complete tug or treat the folder name as the country of loss.

Hazard represents the small working steam craft that kept the Tyne's busy shipping moving in the late nineteenth century. Her North Shields builder, owner and 19-year working life tie the Alnmouth loss to the shipbuilding and towing trade of Tyneside. A leak was an ordinary danger rather than a famous disaster, but the loss shows how quickly a useful harbour vessel could disappear when working along an exposed coast. Locally, the probable wreck belongs to Alnmouth Bay's dense record of losses. Its value lies in that working history and in the honest possibility of identification, not an invented death toll.