XVII

SPECTRAL SHIPS

We have not yet lost that sense of terror before the vast power and wrath of the waters that wrought strange gods and monsters from the fancy of our ancestors. It is this fright and helplessness in us that gives disappearances at sea their special quality. In spite of all progress, all inventiveness, all the power of man’s engines, every putting forth to sea is still an adventure. The same fate that overcomes the little catboat caught in a squall may overtake the greatest liner—the Titanic to note a trite example.

As a matter of fact, never a year passes without the loss of some ship somewhere in the wild expanse of the world’s waters. Boats go down, leaving usually at least some indirect evidence of their fate. Now and again, as in the case of the Archduke Johann Salvator’sSanta Margaritaand Roger Tichborne’s schoonerBella, not a survivor lives to tell the tale nor is any bit of wreckage found to give indication. Here we have the genuine marine mystery. The marvel lies in the number of such completely vanished ships. A most casual survey of the records turns up this generous list, from the American naval records alone:

The brigReprisal, 1777; theGeneral Gates, 1777; theSaratoga, 1781; theInsurgent, 1800; thePickering, 1800; theHamilton, 1813; theWasp III, 1814; theEpervier, 1815; theLynx, 1821; theWildcat, 1829; theHornet, 1829; theSylph IIand theSeagull, both in 1839; theGrampus, in 1843; theJefferson, 1850; theAlbany, with two hundred and ten men, in 1854; andLevant II, with exactly the same number aboard, in 1860. In 1910 the tugNinasteamed out of Norfolk and was never again heard from, and in 1921 the seagoing tugConestogaput out from Mare Island, Cal., bound for Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, with four officers and fifty-two men aboard, and was never again reported. These are not mere marine disasters[13]but complete mysteries. No one knows precisely what happened to any of these ships and their people.

[13]For a handy list of these see The World Almanac, 1927 Edition, pages 691-95.

No account of sea riddles would be complete without mention of the American brigantineMarie Celeste, of New York, Captain Briggs, which was found floating abandoned and in perfect order in the vicinity of Gibraltar on the morning of December 5th, 1872. She had sailed from New York late in October with a cargo of alcohol, bound for Genoa. On the morning mentioned the British barkDei Gratia, Captain Boyce, found theMarie Celestein Lat. 38.20 N., Long. 17.15 W. with sails set but acting queerly, yawing and falling up into the wind. Captain Boyce ran up the urgent hoist but got no answer from the brigantine. The day being almost windless and the sea beautifully calm, Captain Boyce put off in a boat with his mate, Mr. Adams, and two sailors, reached theMarie Celesteand managed to board her. There was not a soul to be seen, not the least sign of violence or struggle, no indication of any preparations for abandonment, not a boat gone from the davits.

Captain Boyce and his mate, naturally amazed, made a careful inspection of the ship and wrote full reports of what they had found. In the cabin a breakfast had been laid for four persons and only partly eaten. One of these four was a child, whose half empty bowl of porridge stood on the table. A hard boiled egg, peeled and cut in two but not bitten into, lay near one of the other places. There were biscuits and other food on the table.

Investigation showed that the cargo had not shifted and was completely intact. None of the food, water or other supplies had been carried off, the captain’s funds, of considerable amount, were safe and his gold watch hung in his bunk, as did the watches of two of the seamen. There was no evidence whatever of any struggle, and a report published by irresponsible papers, to the effect that a bloody sword had been found was officially denied. Neither was there any leak or any defect, except that there were two square cuts at the bow on the outside. They had been made with an axe or similar tool and might have been there for some time.

TheDei Gratiatowed her prize into Gibraltar and notified the American consul, who again examined the brigantine with all care and reported to Washington. It was found that theMarie Celestehad set sail with a crew of ten men, the mate, the captain, his wife and their eight-year-old daughter. She was a vessel of six hundred tons.

Inquiries made by the American consuls in all the region near the finding place of the abandoned vessel resulted in nothing and a general quest throughout the world brought no better results. The British shipHighlanderreported that she had passed theMarie Celesteand spoken her just south of the Azores, on December 4th, the day before she was picked up, and that the brigantine had answered “All well.” This is obviously a mistake, for the most easterly of the Azores lies about five hundred miles from the place where the ship was found or about twice as far as she was likely to have sailed in twenty-four hours.

There are conflicting statements as to the actual state of affairs on theMarie Celestewhen found. One report says the ship’s clock was still ticking. On the other hand the log, which was found, had not been brought up beyond ten days prior to the discovery. One statement says that the ship’s papers and some instruments were gone, another that everything was intact. All indications are, however, that the crew had not been long away. A bottle of cough medicine stood upright and uncorked on the table next to the child’s plate. Any bit of rough weather or continued yawing and twisting before the wind with a loose rudder would have upset it. Again, on a sewing machine, which stood near the table in the cabin, lay a thimble, that must have rolled off to the floor if there had been any specially active dipping or lurching of the brigantine.

Many theories have been propounded to explain the disappearance of the crew, not the least fantastic of which is the giant cuttlefish yarn. Those who spin this tale affect to believe that there are squidlike monsters in the deeper waters of midocean, large enough and bold enough to reach aboard a six hundred ton ship and snatch off fourteen persons one after the other. Personally, I like much better the idea that Sinbad’s roc had come back to life and carried the crew off to the Valley of Diamonds on his back.

As in other mysteries, men have turned up from time to time who asserted that they knew the fate of the crew of theMarie Celeste, that they were the one and only survivor, that murder and foul crime had been committed on the brigantine and more in the same strain.

In 1913, theStrand Magazine(London) printed a tale which has about it some elements of credibility. The article was written by A. Howard Linford, head master of Peterborough Lodge, one of the considerable British preparatory schools. Mr. Linford specifically disowned responsibility for what he narrated, saying that he had no first hand knowledge. His story was, he said, based on some papers left him in three boxes by an old servant, Abel Fosdyk.

This Fosdyk appears in the Linford narrative as one of the ten members of the crew—the steward in fact. He recounts that the carpenter had built a little platform in the bows, where the child of the captain might play in safety. The thing was referred to as baby’s quarterdeck, and upon this structure the child played daily in the sun, while its mother sat beside it, reading or sewing. The good woman had been ill the first part of the trip and was now greatly worried because of the nervous health of her husband, who had suffered a breakdown.

One morning, according to the supposed Fosdyk papers, the captain determined to swim about the ship in his clothes, possibly as the result of a challenge from the mate. Mrs. Briggs tried to dissuade her husband but he was obdurate and she prompted the mate to swim with him. They plunged in and the whole crew, with the commander’s wife and child, crowded on the little platform to watch the swimmers. Suddenly there was a collapse and the platform, with all on it fell into the sea. Just then the breeze freshened and the brigantine, with sail set, rapidly ran away from the swimmers and the hopeless strugglers in the water. Fosdyk alone managed to cling to the platform and was washed to the African shore, where he was restored to health by some friendly blacks. He reached Algiers and in 1874 Marseilles. Later on he got to London and was employed by Mr. Linford’s father.

Here is a tale that is on its face within the realm of possibility. We may believe it if we like, without risking the suspicious glances of our better balanced brothers, but——

Would an experienced mariner, even in a nervous state, have gone swimming hundreds of miles from land, leaving his vessel with sail set and expecting, even in a calm, to keep pace with her? Would the helmsman have left his post under such circumstances to stand on the baby’s quarterdeck and gape? Would the captain and mate have got up without finishing their breakfast to engage in such folly? Finally, why did this Abel Fosdyk not immediately report the story on his return to Algiers or at least at Marseilles, when there was a great hue and cry still in the air and sure information would have been rewarded? Or why did he not tell the story in the succeeding years, when the newspapers again and again revived the mystery and sought to solve it? Why did he leave papers to be published by another after his death?

My answer is that the mystery of theMarie Celesteis no nearer solution since the so-called Fosdyk papers were published. Moreover, I cannot find that worthy’s name on the list of the mystery ship’s crew.

A more credible explanation has recently been put forth by a writer in the New YorkTimes, who says that the whole case rested upon a conspiracy. The captain and crew of theMarie Celestehad agreed with the personnel of another ship, that the brigantine be deserted in the region where she was found, her men to put off in a longboat which had previously been supplied by the conspirators in order that none of theMarie Celeste’sboats should be missing. The other vessel was to come along presently, pick up the derelict and collect the prize money, while the owners were to profit by the insurance. The deserting crew was to get its share of the proceeds and then disappear.

There are objections to this explanation also. Would a set of sailors and a captain, the latter with his wife and little girl, venture upon the sea in an open boat some hundreds of miles from land? Would the captain have taken his wife and child on the voyage with him if such a trick had been planned? And why was no member of the crew ever discovered in the course of the feverish search or through the persistent curiosity that followed? On the other hand, such tricks have been worked by mariners, and men who set out to commit crimes often attempt and accomplish the perilous and seemingly impossible. The doubts are by no means dispelled by this theory but here is at least a rational version of the affair.

The World War added two mysteries of the sea to the long roster that stand out with a special and tormenting character. The war had hardly opened when the British navy set out to destroy a small number of German cruisers that lay at various stations in the Atlantic and Pacific. There was von Spee’s squadron which sent Admiral Cradock and his ships to the bottom at the battle of Coronel and was subsequently destroyed by a force of British off the Falkland Islands. There was theEmden, that made the Pacific and Indian oceans a torment for Allied shipping for month after month, until she was overtaken, beaten and beached. Finally, there was theKarlsruhe.

This modern light cruiser, completed only the year before the war began, did exactly what she was designed for—commerce raiding. With her light armament of twelve 4.1 inch guns and her great speed (25.5 knots official, 27.6 according to the British reckoning) she was a scout vessel and destroyer of merchantmen. Since there was no considerable German fleet at sea to scout for, she became, within a few hot weeks, the terror of Allied shipping in the Atlantic. One vessel after another fell to her hunting pouch, while crews taken off the captured or sunken merchantmen began to arrive at American, West Indian and South American ports.

These refugees told, one and all, the same story. There would be a smudge of smoke on the horizon and within minutes the long slender German cruiser would come churning up out of the distance with the speed of an express train, firing a shot across the bows and signalling for the surrender of the trader. The prize crew came aboard, always acting with the most punctilious politeness and treating crew and passengers with apologetic kindness. If the vessel was old and slow, her coal was taken, the useful parts of her cargo transferred, her crew and passengers removed to safety and the craft sent to the bottom with bombs or by opening the sea cocks. If, on the other hand, the captured ship was modern and swift, she was manned from the cruiser, loaded with coal and other needed supplies, crowded with the captives and made to form an escort. At one time the cruiser is said to have had six such vessels in her train, at another four. When there got to be too many passengers and other captives, the least worthy of the vessels was detached and ordered to steam to a given port, being allowed just enough coal to get there.

As early as October 4, 1914, two months after the opening of hostilities, it was announced that theKarlsruhehad captured thirteen British merchantmen in the Atlantic, including four hundred prisoners. She did much better than that before she was through and the chances are she had then already put about twenty ships out of business, for this was a conservative announcement from the British Admiralty, which let it be known soon afterwards that all of seventy British war vessels were hunting theKarlsruheand her sister raider, theEmden.

Shipping in the Atlantic was in a perilous way and excitement was high among newspaper readers ashore, who watched the game of hide and seek with all the interest of spectators at some magnificent sporting event. Nor was the sympathy all against the German, for the odds were too heavy. The wildest rumors were floating in by every craft that reached port from the Southern Atlantic, by radio and by cable. On October 27, a Ward Line boat came into New York with the report that she had observed a night battle off the Virginia Capes between the German raider and British men-of-war. On November 3 came the report that theKarlsruhehad captured a big Lamport and Holt liner off the coast of Brazil as late as October 26. On November 10 an officer of a British freighter captured by the raider reached Edinburgh and told the story that theKarlsruhewas using Bocas Reef, off the north Brazilian coast, as a base.

Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the forays of the modern corsair ceased. The first belief was, of course, that the pursuing British had found her and sent her to Davy Jones. But as the weeks went by without any announcement to that effect, doubts crept in. Soon the British government, without making a formal declaration, revealed the untruth of this report by keeping its searching vessels at sea. It was the theory that theKarlsruhehad run up the Amazon or the Orinoco for repairs and rest. The expectation was that she would soon be at her old tricks again.

The battle and sinking story persisted in the British press, the wish being evidently father to the thought. On January, 12, 1915, for instance, the MontrealGazettepublished an unverified (and afterwards disproved) report from a correspondent at Grenada, British West Indies, giving a detailed description of a four hour battle in which the raider was destroyed. This story was allegedly verified by the washing ashore of wreckage and the finding of sailors’ corpses. All moonshine.

On January 21, an American steamer captain announced having sighted theKarlsruheoff Porto Rico. On other dates in January and February she was also falsely reported off La Guayra, the Canary Islands, Port au Prince and other places. On March 17, the BrooklynEaglepublished a tale to the effect that the hulk of the raider lay off the Grenadines, a little string of islets that stretch north from Grenada in the Windwards. This report said there had been no battle. The cruiser had been self-wrecked or broken up in a storm. Again wreckage was said to have been found, but here once more was falsehood.

On March 18, theStifts-Tidendeof Copenhagen reported that theKarlsruhehad been blown up by an internal explosion one evening as the officers and men were having tea. One half of the wreck sank immediately, the report went on to say, while the other floated for some time, enabling between 150 and 200 of the crew to be rescued by one of the accompanying auxiliaries. The survivors, it was added, had been sworn to secrecy before reaching port—why this, no one can guess.

The following day, theNational Tidendepublished corroboration from a German merchant captain then in Denmark, to the effect that the “crew of the Karlsruhe had been brought home early in December, 1914, by the German liner, Rio Negro, one of the Karlsruhe’s escort ships.”

Somewhat later, a Brooklyn man, wintering at Nassau, in the Bahamas, reported finding the raider’s motor pinnace on the shore of Abaco Island, north of Nassau.

To this there is little to add. Admiral von Tirpitz, then the head of the German navy, says in his memoirs just this and no more:

“The commander of theKarlsruhe, Captain Köhler, never dreamt of taking advantage of the permission to make his way homeward; working with the auxiliary vessels in the Atlantic, surrounded by the English cruisers, but relying on his superior speed, he sought ever further successes, until he was destroyed with his ship by an explosion, the probable cause of which was some unstable explosive brought aboard.”

It is obvious from this that theKarlsruhewas given the option of returning home, having gained enough glory and sunk enough ships to satisfy a dozen admirals. But the main fact to be gleaned from Tirpit’s statement is that an internal explosion was the thing officially accepted by the head of the German admiralty as the cause of her disappearance. And this is the most likely of all the theories that have been or can be proposed. But, that said, we are still a long way from any satisfaction of our deeper curiosity. Where and when did the explosion take place? Under what circumstances? Did any escape and return to Germany to tell the tale?

To these queries there are no positive answers. If theKarlsruhewas, as so often stated, accompanied by one or more auxiliaries or coaling ships, it seems incredible that all the crew can have been lost and quite beyond imagination that there was not even a distant witnessing of the accident. Yet this seems to have been the case. In spite of the report that a large part of the famous raider’s crew got safely home after the supposed explosion, I have searched and scouted through the German press and the German book lists for an account of the affair—all in vain. Not only that, but I am assured by reliable correspondents of the American press in Germany that nothing credible or authoritative has appeared. We have von Mücke’s book “The Emden,” published in the United States as early as 1917, and previously in Germany. We have the exploits of theMoewe, and we have the lesser adventures of the popular von Luckner and his craft. But of the famousKarlsruhewe have nothing at all, save rumors and gossip.

The conclusion must be that the ship did break up somewhere in the deepest ocean, as the result of an explosion, while she was altogether unattended. She must have gone down with all her men, for not even the reports of finding bits of her wreckage have ever been verified. The mystery of her end is still much discussed among seafaring men and William McFee, in one of his tales, suggests that she lay hid up one of the South American rivers and came to grief there.

Even more fantastic than this, however, is the story of the great United States collierCyclops. This vessel, of nineteen thousand tons displacement, five hundred and eighteen feet long, of sixty-five foot beam and twenty-seven foot draught, with a cargo capacity of twelve thousand five hundred tons, was built by the Cramps in Philadelphia in 1910. She was designed to coal the first-line fighting ships of our fleet while at sea and under way, by means of traveling cables from her arm-like booms. She had frequently accompanied our battleships abroad, had transported the marines to Cuba and the refugees from Vera Cruz to Galveston in April 1914. On a trip to Kiel in 1911, she was wonderingly examined by the German naval critics and builders, who declared her to be a marvel of design and structure.

Wide World.~~U. S. S. CYCLOPS~~

Wide World.

~~U. S. S. CYCLOPS~~

On March 4, 1918, theCyclopssailed from Barbados for an unnamed Atlantic port (Norfolk, as it proved), with a crew of 221 and 57 passengers, including Alfred L. Moreau Gottschalk, United States Consul General at Rio de Janeiro. She was due to arrive on March 13. When that date had come and nothing had been heard from her, it was announced that one of her two engines had been injured and she was proceeding slowly with the other engine compounded. But on April 14 the news came out in the press that the great ship was a month overdue and totally unaccounted for.

For a whole month the story had been veiled under the censorship while the Navy Department had been making every conceivable effort to find the ship or some evidence of her fate. There had been no news through her radio equipment since her departure from Barbados. There had been no heavy weather in that vicinity. She had been steaming in the well-traveled lane of ships passing between North and South America, yet not a vessel had spoken her, heard her radio call or seen her at any distance. Destroyers had been searching the whole Gulf, Caribbean, North and South Atlantic regions for three frantic weeks. They had not found so much as a life preserver belonging to the missing ship.

The public mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that a German submarine had done this dirty piece of business, if an attack on an enemy naval vessel in time of war may be so listed. Alas, there were no German submarines so far from their home bases at that time or any proximate period. None had been reported by other vessels and the German admiralty has long since confirmed the understood fact that there was none abroad. A floating mine was next suspected, but the lower West Indies are a long distance from any mine field then in existence and a ship of the size of theCyclops, even if mined, probably would have had time to use her radio, lower some boats and put some of her people afloat. At the very least, she must have left some flotsam to reach the beaches of the archipelago with its tragic meanings.

The mystery was soon complicated. On May 6 a British steamer from Brazil brought news that two weeks after the due date of theCyclopsbut still two weeks before her disappearance was announced, an advertisement had been published in a Portuguese newspaper at Rio announcing requiem mass for the repose of the soul of A. L. M. Gottschalk “lost when theCyclopswas sunk at sea.” Efforts were made by the secret agents of the American and Brazilian governments to discover the identity of the persons responsible for the advertisement, but nothing of worth was ever discovered. The notice was signed with the names of several prominent Brazilians, all of whom denied that they had the least knowledge of the matter. The rector of the church denied that any arrangement had been made for the mass and said he had not known Gottschalk. Some chose to believe that the advertisement had been inserted by German secret agents for the purpose of notifying the large number of Germans in Brazil that the Fatherland was still active in American waters.

A rumor having no substance whatever was to the effect that the crew of the ship had revolted, overcome the officers and converted the ship into a German raider. A companion tale said the ship had sailed for Germany to deliver her cargo of manganese to the enemy, by whom this valuable metal was sorely needed. The only foundation for this rumor was the fact that theCyclopswas indeed carrying a load of manganese ore to the United States.

It was not until August 30, 1918, that Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels announced that the ship was officially recorded as lost. At that time he notified the relatives of the officers, crew and passengers. More than three months later, on December 9th, Mr. Daniels supplemented this official notice with the statement, given to the newspaper correspondents, that “no reasonable explanation” of theCyclopscase could be given. And here the official news ends. At this writing, inquiry at the official source in Washington brings the answer that nothing has since been learned to alter the then issued statement.

TheCyclopscase naturally excited and disturbed the public mind, with the result of an unusual crop of fancies, lies, false alarms and hoaxes. On May 8, 1923, for instance, Miss Dorothy Walker of Pittsburgh reported that she had found a bottle at Atlantic City containing the message “Cyclopswrecked at Sea.—H.” This note was written on a piece of note paper torn from a memorandum book and was yellowed with age. The bottle was tightly corked and closed with sealing wax—a substance which shipwrecked sailors do not have in their pockets at the moment of peril.

Other such messages were found from time to time. One floated ashore at Velasco, Tex., also in a bottle. It read:

“U. S. S.Cyclops, torpedoed April 7, 1918, Lat. 46.25, Long. 35.11. All on board when German submarine fired on us. Lifeboats going to pieces. No one to be left to tell the tale.”

The position indicated is midway between Hatteras and the Azores, where theCyclopshad no business and probably never was. It was found after the war, as already suggested, that no German submarine had been in any so distant region at the time. We may accordingly look upon this bottle as another flagon of disordered fancy, another press from the old “spurlos versenkt” madness.

Finally, in their search for something that might explain this dark and baffling affair, the hunters came upon a suggestive fact. The commander of theCyclopswas Lieutenant-Commander George W. Worley. It now came to light—and it struck many persons like a revelation—that this man was really G. W. Wichtman, that he was born a German; ergo, that he was the man responsible for this disaster to our navy. It proved true that Wichtman-Worley was a German by birth, but he had been brought to the United States as a child and had spent twenty-six years in the American navy. No one in official position suspected him, but the professional Hunstrafersinsisted that this was the typical act of a German, no matter how long separated from his native land, how little acquainted with it or how long and faithfully attached to the service of his adopted country. It is only fair to the memory of a blameless officer to say that Lieutenant-Commander Worley could not have done such a complete job had he wished to and that his record is officially without the least blemish.

We are left then, to look for more satisfactory explanations of the fate of the big collier. One possibility is that the manganese developed dangerous gases in the hold and caused a terrific explosion, which blew the ship out of the water without warning, killed almost all on board and so wrecked the boats that none could reach land. The only trouble with this is that a nineteen thousand ton ship, when destroyed by an explosion, is certain to leave a great mass of surface wreckage, which will drift ashore sooner or later or be observed by passing vessels in any travelled lane. It happens that vessels sent out by the Navy Department visited every ness and cove and bay along the coast from Brazil to Hatteras, every island in the West Indies and every quarter of the circling seas without ever finding so much as a splinter belonging to the collier. Fishermen and boatmen in all the great region were questioned, encouraged with promises of reward and sent seeking, but they, too, found never a spar or scrap of all that great ship.

This also seems to dispose of the possibility of a disaster at the hands of a German raider or submarine. Besides, to emphasize the matter once more, the German records show that there is no possibility of anything of this sort. The suspicion has been officially and categorically denied and there is no reason for concealment now.

There remains one further possibility, which probably conceals the truth. TheCyclops, like her sister ships, theNeptuneandJupiter, was topheavy. She carried, like them, six big steel derricks on a superstructure fifty feet from her main deck. This great weight aloft made it dangerous for the ship to roll. Indeed she could not roll, like other heavy vessels, very far without capsizing. We have but to suppose that with her one crippled engine she ran into heavy weather or perhaps a tidal wave, that she heeled over suddenly, her cargo shifted and her heavy top turned her upside down, all in a few seconds. In that event there would have been no time for using the wireless, no chance to launch any boats. Also, with everything battened and tied down, ship-shape for a naval vessel travelling in time of war, especially if the weather was a little heavy, there is the strong possibility that nothing could have been loose to float free. In this manner the whole big ship with all her parts and all who rode upon her may have been dumped into the sea and carried to the depths. One of the floating mines dropped off our Southern Coast in the previous year by the U 121 may have done the fatal rocking, it is true.

There is no better explanation, and I have reason to know that an upset of this sort is the theory held by naval builders and naval officials generally. But certainly there is none and a satisfying answer is not likely to come from the graveyard of the deep.

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