After the Russification in Finland increased, the resistance activist
Konni Zilliacus in 1905 organized the smuggling of weapons to the Finnish and the Russian resistance movements. With Japanese financing,
John Grafton was bought. In London the ship was loaded with 15,560 Swiss
Vetterli M/1869-71 rifles, 2.5 million rounds of ammunition for them (both bought in France), 2,500 Webley Mk IV and WG revolvers and 3 tons of explosive gelatin; additionally the cargo seems to have included 200 small automatic pistols and 300
Mauser C96 pistols bought in Hamburg. According to the original plan, the weapons were to be transported via the Netherlands and
Copenhagen to a meeting place in the
Gulf of Finland, from where the journey would continue to
Saint Petersburg. On arrival, a part of the cargo would be offloaded and given to Russian revolutionaries. After running into a few problems the route was changed, and the ship set course towards the
Gulf of Bothnia and the town of
Kemi, where part of the cargo was offloaded. The journey continued to
Jakobstad which, like Kemi, was a centre of the Finnish resistance. The ship was piloted into the rocky archipelago north of Jakobstad and the offloading of the weapons was conducted without any serious problems. When the ship continued her journey south, she ran aground. The crew started to salvage what remained of the weapons. It quickly became clear that the whole cargo could not be salvaged. The captain, J.W. Nylander, made the decision to blow up the ship to avoid it ending up in the hands of the Russian authorities. On the afternoon of 8 September 1905 the ship was blown up with three powerful charges. The sound of the explosion was heard some 50 kilometers away. Despite the harsh censorship during the Russification, widespread speculation about the event occurred in both Finnish and foreign newspapers. Even though the plans for
John Grafton did not pan out, the event is considered one of the first concrete actions for an independent Finland. In 1930 a monument was unveiled at
Orrskär in
Larsmo to commemorate the event. To this day parts of the cargo and ship lie at the bottom of the gulf. The weapons that had been offloaded started to spread out into the villages (where they amongst other things were used for moose hunting) and were later part of the armory of the
White Guard when it founded in 1917. The already obsolete weapons (the Vetterli M 1869 was a black powder rifle) were never used in any military manner. The Russian authorities salvaged parts of the cargo and sank them further out where the depth was greater. ==See also==