HMS Trincomalee in Hartlepool is the oldest ship afloat in the United Kingdom. Trincomalee itself is under water, inundated by the tsunami. No-one knows whether it is hundreds or thousands who are dead, but the homeless figure runs to 96,000.

Trincomalee is the major town in north-east Sri Lanka. It is about two-thirds the size of Hartlepool, but is capital of a wider region.

Trincomalee has the fifth largest natural harbour in the world and overlooks the Bay of Bengal. This position made it extremely important to explorers vying for trade in the Indian Ocean in centuries gone by; this position made it extremely vulnerable when the tsunami rolled across the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day.

So important was Trincomalee that although the Danes discovered it in 1617, the Portuguese took it from them in 1624 and then the Dutch captured it in 1639. They gave it back to the local king of Kandy who demolished the fortifications. The Dutch immediately built them back up.

In 1672, the French navy appeared on the horizon, and the Dutch fled. They quietly returned in 1674 and re-assumed control.

A century of peace. In 1782 the British captured Trincomalee, but within months had lost it to the French who, in 1783, gave it back to the Dutch.

In 1795, the British beseiged Trincomalee for three weeks and the Dutch surrendered. Britain ruled Ceylon.

Then the Napoleonic Wars broke out. The British ran out of timber to build ships. So, in 1816, master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia began building a frigate in Bombay out of malabar teak for the British navy. The frigate was named Trincomalee after Britain's newest and most important possession in that part of the world.

The frigate was launched on October 12, 1817, and reached Britain in 1819, by which time Napoleon had been defeated. She was immediately surplus to requirements and put into storage. Indeed, in all her long life, she only saw active service between 1847-57, when she patrolled the American coasts.

After that, she became a training ship based for 15 years in Hartlepool. In 1877, she moved to Southampton and fell out of service.

But her Bombay malabar teak ensured she didn't rot, and in 1987 she was returned to Hartlepool and restored. She now, of course, is moored at the heart of the historic quay.

In Trincomalee itself, an Indian navy hospital ship has just moored in the harbour. Trincomalee's hospital is beachside, but is still operating as only 2ft of water washed through it. However, the hospital in the nearby town of Kinniya was completely destroyed.

Galle, in south Sri Lanka, was the area hit hardest by the tsunami, but Trincomalee fared only a little better. However, Galle is a holiday spot whereas Trincomalee is in the heart of Tamil Tiger territory. Getting information from and aid to the Tamil areas has proved very hard.

In all, the tsunami killed more than 30,000 people in Sri Lanka. In the last two decades, the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese government has killed about 60,000 - mostly in northern districts like Trincomalee.

There has been a ceasefire since 2002, but observers in late 2004 believed that a return to war was imminent. Then the tsunami struck.

Now the people of Trincomalee are dependent for aid and survival upon the government their Tamil Tigers have spent the last 20 years trying to destroy. The tsunami killed Tamil and Sinhalese alike: might they now unite in its wake?