The worst oil disaster to affect the UK and particularly Cornish shores was when on 18 March 1967 the Liberian-registered British Petroleum chartered supertanker the Torrey Canyon hit Pollard's Rock on Seven Stones Reef between Land's Ends and the Isles of Scilly. The tanker began to break up discharging its cargo of nearly forty million gallons of Kuwaiti crude oil. Harold Wilson's government took decisions to set fire to the oil slicks and use dispersants.