At 18.02 hours on 17 May 1942 the unescorted Skottland (Master Lauritz Jensen) was torpedoed on the port side by U-588 about 20 miles west-southwest of Cape Sable, Nova Scotia. A torpedo struck aft between #3 and #4 hatch and a second is assumed to have hit amidships near the fire room. The explosions stopped the engines and the ship lost all power. Most of the crew were on deck as they had just completed a gunnery drill and abandoned ship in the starboard lifeboat because the port boat had been destroyed and the motorboat capsized. They launched the boat with great difficulty because of the heavy list to port and some of the men later transferred onto two rafts that floated free after the ship sank by the stern in about 30 minutes. The men in the boat rowed around to search for a missing stoker, but did not find him and assumed that he had been killed by the explosions. The survivors were picked up by the Canadian lobster boat O.K. Servise 4 (Master S.E. Himmelman) after being spotted by a Canadian aircraft and taken to Boston, where they arrived the following morning. Nine men had been injured and four of them were taken to a hospital upon arrival.