Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea

by Lionel

  UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF THE SEA

  UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF THE SEA

  by

  Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

  Copyright © Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editorial Director: Anthony Hawke

  Copy-Editor: Jennifer Bergeron

  Design: Bruna Brunelli, Brunelli Designs

  Printer: Friesens

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Fanthorpe, R. Lionel

  Unsolved mysteries of the sea / Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 1-55002-498-1

  1. Ocean — Popular works. 2. Seas — Popular works. 3. Underwater exploration — Popular works.

  I. Fanthorpe, Patricia II. Title.

  GC21.F35 2004 551.46 C2004-900458-1

  1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on recycled paper.

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  This book is dedicated to our friend Chris Roberts, an outstanding master craftsman, watchmaker, and jeweller, with many thanks for his kind help in allowing us to photograph his superb collection of artistic model ships.

  Model of the Cutty Sark.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  by Canon Stanley Mogford, MA

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE:

  The Flying Dutchman and Other Phantom Ships

  CHAPTER TWO:

  Mysterious Merpeople

  CHAPTER THREE:

  Who Were the Water Gods?

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  Monsters of the Deep

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  Mysterious Disappearances and Appearances

  CHAPTER SIX:

  The Philadelphia Experiment

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  The Disappearance of the Crew of the Mary Celeste

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  Some Strange and Dangerous Denizens of the Deep

  CHAPTER NINE:

  Perilous Waters

  CHAPTER TEN:

  Lost Lands: Slipped and Sunken Continents

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  Mysteries of the Circumnavigators

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  The Baychimo and Similar Mysteries

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

  Pirates, Slavers, Buccaneers, Privateers, Wreckers, and Smugglers

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  Mysterious Maps and Ancient Sea Kings

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  Legendary Voyages: Odysseus, Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

  Sea Mysteries of the Hawaiian Islands

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FOREWORD

  by Canon Stanley Mogford, MA

  It has been said, “There are no stones in a street without a voice and no house without echoes.” Such may or may not be true. If true at all, imaginative people long to capture some of those voices and those echoes. It’s human to probe, not altogether out of sheer inquisitiveness, but from a need to get to a truth. How much poorer and less advanced this world of ours would be had we not been blessed with men and women who probed: Edison, Marconi, Jenner, Pasteur — and so many others. Their determination to know about something, not always without cost to themselves, transformed life for millions of us.

  The authors of this book are well known for their probing and penetrating researches. Over the years they have presented us with much that is baffling and invited us to consider their interpretations and conclusions.

  Lionel has done much of this interpretative work in the full glare of prime-time television with millions of viewers. His programs, including Fortean T.V. and Talking Stones, have extended over several series. In the first, he introduced us to the paranormal, with many differing aspects of psychic phenomena, and led us into the company of ghosts and hobgoblins and much that goes “bump in the night.” In Talking Stones he concentrated, in the main, on inscriptions on gravestones, and resurrected for us those men and women long buried there. It became clear some people deserve never to be forgotten.

  Lionel and Patricia together have pursued the same theme of search-and-interpret in a series of books. In one, they introduced us to a number of fascinating people with out-of-the-ordinary lives. In the normal way of things, few would know of Bérenger Saunière, of Rennes-le-Château. He was simply a parish priest, one of many such French priests, poor like all the others before and since, but one who moved somehow from poverty to immense wealth with no one ever knowing, apparently, where his vast fortune originated. Some of his associates were found murdered, but whether they were connected with his rise to riches no one ever knew, or lived to tell the tale. Nor was the secret of Spring-Heeled Jack — Victorian England’s version of Jumping Jack Flash — and his out-of-this-world athleticism ever fully understood. If his ability to vault hedges and even houses as reported was anywhere near true, he was an athlete of Olympian proportions.

  In a later book, the authors moved from the vagaries and mysteries of people to equally strange places, neighbourhoods, and houses with their abnormal happenings and atmospheres. Some of the places selected for us were well known: Glastonbury, Stonehenge, and Easter Island. From such locations, they led us to houses, like Llancaiach Fawr and Borley Rectory, and invited us to share their strange atmospheres and ghostly presences. They even took us to certain hills, so strange and awesome that the force of gravity seems to lose its grip there and cars left in neutral with handbrake released move upwards and not down. This book of theirs leaves no readers in doubt: people can be strange — but so can places!

  To complete this trilogy of sorts, Lionel and Patricia contemplated unusual and peculiar objects, including puzzling prehistoric maps, a cursed diamond, Orffyreus’s perpetual motion machine, and a weird clay monster. Their analyses of these and many other mysterious items led them — and their readers — on a journey through history and the contemporary world. Things, as much as people and places, have tales to tell.

  Most of us love a good murder book. We with our unexciting, unruffled lives are content to share at arm’s length the lives of others more fraught than our own. In their most recent book in this series, Lionel and Patricia reminded us of
some celebrated murders: a few of them long in the past, such as Tutankhamun, Thomas Becket, and Julius Caesar. Some others were bizarre and horrible in their day and are likely never to be forgotten, such as the Jack the Ripper murders. Others were from our own day and generation but with something of the uncertain and unsolved about them. The book leaves us wondering about many things. Who was Jack the Ripper? Was young Tutankhamun killed? If so, by whom and why? Was Hanratty guilty? Did the State hang an innocent Timothy Evans? The authors give us not only facts and background, but also their own conclusions, with which their readers may or may not agree.

  In this book, the authors have taken on perhaps their greatest challenge yet. They have dared us to look with them at some of the great mysteries of the sea. Such mysteries are not hard to find, but they are difficult to grasp. The seas have many secrets in their great depths. In their deepest, unfathomed waters there are undoubtedly creatures never yet seen by anyone. Leviathans of the deep are certainly not merely figments of Jules Verne’s imagination. The powers of the sea can be terrifying. Almost imperceptibly, over the centuries, its tides have eaten into our coastlines, engulfing fields and houses. If there is any credence to be given to Plato’s description of the island of Atlantis, with its large population and highly developed civilization, the seas have engulfed it forever as they have other islands, before and since. Only the sea can tell us where Atlantis lies now.

  Humans have mood swings, as do the seas, but when the seas have them we do well to be frightened. The sea can change from a sweet, calm millpond to a raging torrent in which nothing afloat can survive. Countless wrecks lie deep beneath its waters, victims of the savage mood swings of the oceans. The seas have their secrets as we have ours. They have their phantom ships, their strange creatures, their lost vessels and crews, their sunken islands, their mermen and mermaids. These things are not, it seems, solely the imaginings of fanciful writers.

  Lionel and Patricia have set them all out for us. They make few judgements. They leave that to their readers. Their research has been a fascination to them and a labour of love. It has involved much work and many journeys. Where it is still possible, they have looked with their own eyes — and what they saw and what they felt they have shared with us. Perhaps some mysteries, be they on sea or land, are destined never to be solved. At least, with the help of our authors, we know where these mysteries are. This book, and their others like it, with all the hard work involved, has left us much in their debt. It deserves and will receive our respect and admiration.

  Stanley Mogford, MA

  Cardiff, Wales, UK, 2004

  (The authors, as ever, are deeply grateful to Canon Stanley Mogford, one of the greatest and most deservedly respected scholars in Wales, for his kindness in writing this foreword. It is always an honour and a privilege for any author to have his support.)

  INTRODUCTION

  The sea is a mysterious place. Enigmas lurk in its depths, riddles map its coasts, and weird anomalies appear in its behaviour. Credible witnesses report over the years that they have seen ghost ships and phantom craft of every description. Is it possible that these phantoms are connected to the equally strange accounts of inexplicable marine tragedies? Ships — including some very large ones — simply vanish without trace. On other occasions it is the people who vanish inexplicably, while their ships remain seaworthy and afloat with no one on board and no clues as to what might have happened to the missing passengers and crew.

  The sturdy and seaworthy Nova Scotian brig Amazon was renamed Mary Celeste before she sailed into history without her passengers and crew in 1872. The mysterious Philadelphia Experiment possibly involved Long Island, New York, and the legendary Montauk Experimental Base said to have been located there.

  Mermaids and mermen — or things that might be mercreatures — are often seen in the distance: in some reports, they’re actually captured. Tales of ancient sea gods and demigods such as Poseidon, the Tritons, Oannes, Quinotaurs, the Sirens, and Dagon may be only mythology and legend — or they could be half-submerged, distorted memories of forgotten sea empires and their powerful rulers.

  If, according to the old proverb, a cat may look at a king, then it seems only fair that a king may look at a sea monster. Among many impeccable witnesses to these bizarre phenomena was the future king George V during his days in the British navy. Alexander the Great is also alleged to have seen one many centuries earlier: perhaps sea monsters enjoy embarrassing kings and emperors. Dourly unswayed by pressure from those who tried to refute or ridicule his report in 1848, fearless Captain M’Quhae stuck to his guns about the sea serpent he had observed.

  Did spiteful, insane jealousy lead to the loss of the Lady Lovibond on the awesome Goodwin Sands on Friday, February 13, 1748? Why have so many good ships and brave sailors died on the Goodwins? There are other dangerous and inexplicable areas, like the Bermuda Triangle and the Japanese Triangle, where more planes and ships go down and more people vanish than pure random chance can rationally explain.

  The seas and oceans are also the hazardous habitat of sea wasps, sharks, the dreaded Portuguese man-of-war, the blue-ringed octopus, and huge, hungry, saltwater crocodiles.

  There are persistent mysteries surrounding reports of lost islands and even lost continents. Did Atlantis really exist ten thousand years before Solon, the great Athenian statesman, first heard about it from an old Egyptian priest at Sais? Is there historical and geological truth in the Oera Linda Book, which tells of the lost island of Atland, known to Frisian sailors as Aldland, meaning “the old land.” Supposedly, in ancient times, it occupied a place in the North Sea. Are the Azores the tips of mountains that once loomed above a lost land in the Atlantic? Is the beautiful Hawaiian archipelago in the Pacific the last vestige of the great continent of Lemuria? Were Atlantis and Lemuria both cradles of ancient and mysterious civilizations? The Lost Land of Lyonesse is said to lie off the coast of Cornwall in the U.K., and there are reports of church bells being sounded from long-drowned steeples beneath the North Sea where the old port of Dunwich in Suffolk, England, once stood.

  Those who made pioneering circumnavigations of the globe came back trailing clouds of mystery as well as their deserved glory. Admiral Anson, whose family resided at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire in Britain, became fabulously wealthy — and, in the eyes of some researchers, his vast treasures have never been satisfactorily explained. There are tenuous connections between the mysteries of intriguing Shugborough Hall and those surrounding Rennes-le-Château in southwestern France, where Bérenger Saunière, the enigmatic nineteenth-century priest, also became suddenly and unaccountably rich.

  An archetypal hero, boldly adventurous Francis Drake also circumnavigated the world, and one of the greatest mysteries associated with his adventures was his so-called “missing time.” There was a period in Drake’s full and audacious career when historians find it difficult to work out where he was or what he might have been doing. It’s even possible that he and a handful of loyal men were involved in creating the mysterious Money Pit on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Could it have concealed mysterious treasure from far across the sea, which Drake stashed away in the labyrinth below Oak Island?

  The other equally intriguing sea mystery associated with Sir Francis Drake is the legend of his drum — sounded when England is in great danger to summon the invincible sea hero back from the world beyond the grave. There are those with rare psychic gifts who claim to have heard it.

  Statue of Sir Francis Drake at Plymouth Ho.

  The oceans have their villains, pirates like Edward Teach (known as Blackbeard) and the highly successful Bartholomew Roberts, as well as their heroes, like Anson and Drake. Wreckers, smugglers, buccaneers, and slavers have all contributed to the grimmer unsolved mysteries of the sea.

  There are also tragic unsolved human mysteries of the sea, like the unknown fate of Sir John Franklin and the brave explorers who accompanied him in his fatal search for the Northwest Passage in 1845 — and the three graves th
ey left behind on Beechey Island. Were there other explorers who set out thousands of years before Franklin? Hapgood’s theory of the ancient sea kings is well worth careful study, as are the contentious Piri Reis and Buache maps. In the realm of legendary voyages, the adventures of the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece and the colourful travels of Sinbad the Sailor have much more to them than legend alone. Didn’t Thor Heyerdahl’s courageous expeditions prove conclusively that even with very simple and unsophisticated ships and rafts, human courage and ingenuity could take fearless men across vast oceans?

  These many unsolved mysteries of the sea have certainly fascinated and intrigued us. We hope our readers will share our enthusiasm.

  Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe

  Cardiff, Wales, UK, 2004

  Galley.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Flying Dutchman and Other Phantom Ships

  Many of us will already know the broad outline of the legend of the Flying Dutchman through Wagner’s superb opera Der fliegende Holländer, 1843, and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798. One version of the story has a hero (or anti-hero) named Captain Falkenberg doomed to sail the North Sea forever playing an interminable dice game with Satan. In Coleridge’s version, Death and Life-in-Death arrive on a weird ghost ship and play dice for the Ancient Mariner:

  Was this the ship of Coleridge’s strange vision?

  And those her ribs through which the Sun

  Did peer, as through a grate?

  And is that Woman all her crew?

  Is that a Death? and are there two?

  Is Death that Woman’s mate?

  Her lips were red, her looks were free,

  Her locks were yellow as gold:

  Her skin was as white as leprosy,

  The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

  Who thicks man’s blood with cold.