Bjorn Edholm was an electrician aboard below are his notes on the incident written on letterhead from the Queen's Hotel in Singapore:
"06.30 Shaved and bathed and checked the temperature (+28 degrees) on the pier and looked out on the deck. All quiet and calm.
07.10 went into my cabin, put on the radio and began to read a book.
07.25 was thrown out of the chair onto the floor then back up again and again. All black, had no lights on and through the port holes was no light.
I left my cabin and opened the door to the deck, but closed it again. Everything was just smoke, fire (no flames, but red light) and water. An engineer came and opened the door and when through when it had calmed down somewhat, two engineers also went through before before I went out. Climbed to C-deck (I dared not try the bottom of the poop-deck). I found a Lifebelt and took the ladder down to B deck. The ship was listing about 45 degrees by now. The time was approximately 1-2 minutes after the explosion. I waited up on the railing for a short while to see if we were still sinking. The movement seemed to have subsided as she was rocking more before.
From where I stood I could see the back tyres were in the water and they seemed to float. I could see nothing of the tank deck. The Portside bridge wing was in the water and a lifeboat was at the port wing, including a mate in the boat. It was burning heavily on the starboard side.
When it looked as if we were not going to sink so suddenly I began to climb again with the help of the railing down to the height of the door of the machine room and jumped from there into the water astern of the port bridge wing and swam up to the lifeboat and was helped into it. It was almost full with water and oil. It was almost impossible to get a foothold on the slippery oil. We pulled up all that were on the port side of the boat and used a life raft that had unfurled itself to help rescue those in the water.
We tried to row away from the Seven Skies so we would not be drawn down with her when she sank. It was almost impossible to grasp the oars and put any force behind the stroke because everyone and everything was covered with black oil. We managed to get free from the hull in time, it sank 15 minutes after the explosion.
We picked up four other crew in the water and around 08.45 we were rescued by a Japanese fishing boat / trawler named Myojo Maru, where we could refresh ourselves, wash most of the oil off and were given coffee and sandwiches, while they continued looking for more missing."
Stoker Harry Lundgren said:
"Most of us were asleep when the explosion occurred. We had to throw ourselves into the sea. We could not think of what happened we just grabbed a life-vest and ran out on deck. We had time to launch a lifeboat before the ship sank but most of the crew were jumping into the sea among the floating wreckage and sticky oil."
For crew man Olle Jonsson it was a particularly bizarre experience:
"I had just risen and I only had a towel wrapped around my hips when the ship shook with the blast. Someone threw a life-vest for me and the next moment I was in the water, naked!
When I stuck my head up out of the water it felt as if someone had painted my face with oil. The towel was gone. The guys on the Japanese fishing boat were a little bit surprised when they pulled out a naked man covered in oil."
The ship sank rapidly, but within 20 minutes the 32 surviving crew members had been picked up by the Japanese fishing vessel MYOJYO MARU which was nearby at the time and transferred to the British cargo vessel ARCTIC OCEAN which transported them to Singapore. The severely injured engineer was flown to Singapore by British Air Force Helicopter.
