Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea
Page 9
There are some researchers of anomalous phenomena who are particularly interested in the mysteries associated with omens, portents, and premonitions. They wonder whether the blood red waratah flowers brought the ominous threat of blood and death to the ill-fated Waratah liner. Omens or not, she was sometimes described as “the ship without a soul,” and her history was never a happy one. Blue Anchor had done well commercially with the Waratah’s sister ship, Geelong, which was why the Waratah had been built to almost identical specifications. Like the Titanic, the Waratah was well equipped with allegedly watertight compartments — eight of them — and was believed to be unsinkable. Omen enthusiasts might be interested in that proud claim. The ancient Greek sin against their pantheon was hubris — the foolish pride of trying to equal, or surpass, the gods. It was almost as if some jealous and sinister oceanic deity resented the claim and set out to disprove it!
The Waratah was capable of thirteen knots (yet another omen?).
Her captain, an able and experienced veteran named Joshua E. Ilbery, with thirty years of maritime skill behind him, was not happy with the Waratah’s performance on her maiden voyage. Ilbery was said to have been unhappy with her stability when she sailed from England to Australia on November 5, 1908. There were 689 emigrants tightly packed into the third-class dormitories down in her various holds, plus 67 first-class passengers in far more spacious and comfortable conditions on the upper decks. The ship made calls at Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney without any trouble, and most of her passengers were set down in Australia. Because of his misgivings about the Waratah’s overall balance and stability, Captain Ilbery was said to have personally supervised the loading and stowing of the cargo — nearly seven thousand tons of it including corn, frozen meat, and hides. It is also recorded that the Waratah was checked in dry dock and pronounced perfectly seaworthy and fit to sail.
She set out on April 27, 1909, Durban being her first port of call. It’s at this juncture that the most intriguing part of the Waratah’s tragedy took place. One passenger was an engineer named Claude Sawyer, a veteran of many lengthy sea voyages. He felt distinctly uneasy about the Waratah’s stability. Reports tend to vary slightly, but Sawyer clearly had some sort of premonition in the form of a dream, or dreams. In a few accounts, he is supposed to have said that he had seen a weird, semi-human figure at the porthole of his cabin, waving a bloodstained rag at him. In other versions, the sinister figure who came to warn him was dressed like Hendrik van der Decken, the Flying Dutchman — who had, in legend, come to grief in that same area of ocean near the Cape of Good Hope. So disturbed was Sawyer by these weird dreams, or hallucinations, that he disembarked at Durban and booked a passage home on a different vessel. He actually told the booking manager of the Union Castle Line that he had had a horrendous dream the previous night in which he saw the Waratah struggling through huge waves. In Sawyer’s dream, one vast wave went over her bow and pressed her down into the sea. Then he saw the vessel roll over towards starboard. After that, she went straight down, disappearing completely. So much for the eight vaunted watertight compartments and the myth of the Waratah’s unsinkability.
Documentary evidence of Sawyer’s grave doubts about the Waratah’s sea-worthiness existed in the form of a telegram he sent to his wife in London: “Thought ‘Waratah’ top heavy, landed Durban.”
On the evening of July 26, 1909, the Waratah left Durban en route to London. The next morning she overtook the Clan MacIntyre, a much slower, smaller vessel. They exchanged signals:
Clan MacIntyre:
What ship?
Waratah:
Waratah for London.
Clan MacIntyre:
Clan MacIntyre for London. What weather did you have from Australia?
Waratah:
Strong south-westerly to southerly winds across.
Clan MacIntyre:
Thanks. Goodbye. Pleasant passage.
Waratah:
Thanks. Same to you. Goodbye.
The Waratah steamed on her way, leaving the little Clan MacIntyre far behind. The crew of the smaller vessel watched the Waratah fade over the horizon. That was the last certain sighting of her. At approximately nine-thirty on the evening of July 27, 1909, the Union Castle liner Guelph was heading for Durban in the opposite direction from the Waratah when she exchanged light signals with a large, unidentified vessel. Because of poor visibility, the Guelph was able to read only the last three letters of the bigger vessel’s name: those highly significant letters were T A H. The mystery deepened. If it was the Waratah the Guelph had encountered, she would have covered only seventy or eighty sea miles since exchanging greetings with the Clan MacIntyre about fifteen hours previously. For a ship capable of thirteen knots, even if bad weather had brought her down to ten knots, the Waratah should have covered at least twice that distance. Had she developed engine trouble, making her vulnerable to storms and heavy seas, if she could not make normal headway against them?
Another major peril of the area was the Agulhas Current and the hazardous oceanic phenomenon associated with it: the Agulhas Retroflection. Large low-pressure systems come from Antarctica accompanied by driving rain and fierce winds — and they come very fast. Moist, warm air from the African coast collides with chilled Antarctic air and results in heavy cloud cover, making conditions at sea even more perilous. A combination of the Agulhas Current and the Agulhas Retroflection are capable of producing gigantic rogue waves — some well over thirty metres high — that can threaten to engulf ships the size of super-tankers.
The fast, warm Agulhas Current runs south and west from the Indian Ocean and then collides with the icy-cold Benguela Current near the Cape of Good Hope. Second only to the Gulf Stream in speed, the Agulhas splits up and surges in one direction through the narrow channel between Mozambique and Madagascar. Winds with speeds of nearly two hundred kilometres per hour are not unknown in the area. When they blow from the west or southwest — opposing the Agulhas Current — they produce gargantuan waves (as described above) beyond the survival capacity of almost all ships.
As well as the definite sighting by the Clan MacIntyre and the probable sighting by the Guelph, the Waratah may also have been spotted by the Harlow. Her captain reported seeing smoke on the horizon where the Waratah might have been. He also reported what he thought were her masthead lights, then flashes like distress flares — or an explosion.
Ominously, some time after the Waratah went missing, there were reports from the Insizwa and the Tottenham that they had seen bodies in the water over five hundred kilometres southwest of Durban.
There were prolonged searches for the Waratah, as some expert mariners believed that she had not sunk but was disabled and drifting.
Two British Royal Navy ships — HMS Pandora and HMS Forte — based at Port Natal, Durban, joined in the search, but without any success. HMS Hermes also took part, but with no better luck than the two earlier search vessels. The very determined Australians persisted with the theory that the Waratah might still be afloat. There were enough provisions on board to keep the passengers and crew alive for eighteen months or more, and there had been a strange case in 1899 when the Waikato had been disabled and drifted for nearly four months until she reached the remote Island of St. Paul’s in the Indian Ocean. Accordingly, the Australian government sent out the Sabine to search for the Waratah. The Sabine hunted hopefully for three months and covered over twenty thousand kilometres. She failed to find any trace of the Waratah. Still not prepared to abandon their loved ones and friends, the relatives of the Waratah’s passengers and crew chartered the Wakefield in 1910 and conducted another painstaking three-month search. Once again, no trace of the missing Waratah was found.
As recently as 1989, Emlyn Brown chartered the Meiring Naude and used what was then the latest and most sophisticated submersible camera equipment to search wreckage that might have been the Waratah. Powerful currents swept the cameras away from his objective. Fearless and determined, Brown and his team have not yet giv
en up their underwater search, but the wreck of the Waratah has still not been discovered.
One of the strangest rumours and legends associated with the mystery is that a group of white-skinned children had turned up in a badly damaged lifeboat at a remote area of the South African Transkei coast in 1909. According to this rumour, they were nursed and cared for by the friendly and hospitable local people, and eventually assimilated into their community.
Perhaps one of the saddest and most poignant mysteries of vanished ships is the loss of the Erna, a fine Canadian vessel from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her loss was so heavily overshadowed by the tragedy of the Titanic, which happened at the same time in 1912, that only the bereaved families and friends in St. John’s really knew about it. Unlike the mighty Titanic, the Erna went down without a trace and left no survivors to tell the traumatic tale of her dying moments. But was there something singularly sinister and significant about the early months of 1912? Were there abnormal ocean conditions? Not only the Erna and Titanic went down that year: at least six other sturdy and seaworthy Canadian ships from Conception Bay and St. John’s also vanished into the Atlantic. These included Arkansas, Aureola, Beatrice, Dorothy Louise, Grace, and Reliance.
The three-thousand-ton Erna was predominantly a sealing ship, the property of her skipper, Captain Thomas Linklater. Born in Scotland, Linklater had worked with Gulf Line steamers, and had been happily settled in St. John’s, Newfoundland, for more than ten years.
Erna left Scotland, heading for St. John’s, on February 26, 1912. The captain’s wife and nine-year-old son were aboard, along with three other passengers — including one who had been a survivor of the Aureola. Also aboard were Captain Jacob Winsor of Wesleyville and thirty crewmen. Linklater was planning to disembark at St. John’s with his family, and Captain Winsor and the crew would continue on from there to the sealing grounds to undertake work there. In all, thirty-seven souls were lost with the Erna when she vanished somewhere in the North Atlantic on her way from Scotland to St. John’s. Freak weather? Collision with an iceberg — just like the Titanic? Or was some stranger, more terrible force at work in the hazardous North Atlantic in 1912?
There were said to be strange psychic happenings aboard the SS Borodino back in the 1950s when she was on a regular run between Denmark and Hull. A seaman named Percy MacDonald had suffered a grim accident in the engine room and had lost both legs there. A young steward was so traumatized by what he reported as an apparition with no legs that floated outside his cabin door that he left the ship at Hull.
The four-masted Pamir, built in 1905 at the Blom and Voss shipyards in Hamburg, was one of the loveliest and most impressive tall ships ever launched: with four masts and over four thousand square metres of canvas, she was nearly three hundred feet long. In the 1950s she served as a training ship. She encountered Hurricane Carrie on September 20, 1957, just a few hundred miles from the Azores. Her final radio distress call reported a forty-five-degree list and all sails lost. The U.S. freighter Saxon responded by steaming at top speed towards the Pamir’s last reported position. They found five survivors in a lifeboat and saved one more the following day. Eighty of her complement had gone down with her, many of them teenaged sea cadets. Many strange reports were made over the years of sighting the Pamir again as a ghost ship. The crew of the Esmereld, battling a gale herself in the English Channel, claimed that they saw the spectral Pamir with her dead crew lining the rail. Famous yachtsman Reed Byers reported sighting the phantom Pamir near the Virgin Islands, and other reports of the ghostly vessel were made by observers on the Gorch Foch and the Christian Radich. Yet another report of the spectral Pamir came from U.S. Coast Guards on board the Eagle.
One of the weirdest marine encounters of all time took place in 1774. A whaler named the Herald saw an ice-encrusted hulk drifting not far from the coast of Greenland. Just as was to be the case with the Mary Celeste almost a century later, the captain of the Herald did his duty and sent a search party out to the derelict. She turned out to be the Octavius, which had once been bound for China. She had left England in 1761 — thirteen years before the Herald found her. The Octavius’s log showed that she had been trapped in the ice near Alaska. How had she made her way through the infamous Northwest Passage and somehow emerged near Greenland — on the eastern side of Canada? There were forty-eight dead seamen, fully dressed as though for duty, frozen solid in the fo’c’sle. The captain sat in his cabin, hands on the desk in front of him. Like his men, the dead skipper was frozen solid.
The tragic tableau in the adjoining cabin brought the search party close to tears. The frozen body of an attractive young mother rested almost casually with her head propped up on one elbow. Her husband was a little way from her, beside a pile of wood shavings that he had been vainly trying to light. Wrapped carefully in the warm clothing his devoted parents had placed around him was the frozen body of their young son.
There was something in those sad victims reminiscent of the corpses found after the volcano destroyed Pompeii.
There is also a tragic mystery surrounding the final disappearance of Henry Hudson, the pioneering navigator who gave his name to Hudson Bay. The Muscovy Company, which he had helped to found, sent him to look for the Northwest Passage in 1607 and again in 1608. Both trips were unsuccessful: Hudson was stopped by the ice floes. In 1609, the Dutch East India Company hired him to try again. He set off in the eighty-ton Half Moon with a crew of twenty Dutch and English mariners. After yet another unsuccessful trip, the Half Moon reached England again in November. With a different group of wealthy London sponsors anxious to find a shorter, cheaper route to what they called the Spice Islands, Hudson was sent off again in a new vessel named the Discovery. Trapped for long months in the ice in James Bay, the crew quarrelled and then mutinied. Hudson with his son and a handful of men who were still loyal to him were set adrift in a small, open boat. They were never seen again.
The account of another mysterious missing vessel, the Marlborough, is sometimes questioned and may need further verification. As far as can be ascertained, however, she was built by Robert Duncan of Glasgow and launched in 1876. Her main function was to carry passengers from the U.K. to New Zealand and cargoes of frozen lamb on the way back. She was a fine vessel of over eleven hundred tons. Having made many successful voyages under Captain Anderson, she was in the hands of another expert skipper, Captain Herd, when she vanished without trace on a voyage from Lyttleton, New Zealand, to the U.K. early in 1890.
There were reports that a ship passing one of the islands near Cape Horn in 1891 recorded seeing what looked like a group of marooned mariners on the island signalling for help. The report went on to say that the weather was appalling and there was no possibility of reaching the stranded survivors. Had they come from the missing Marlborough? Another possible clue to the mystery was reported in 1913, when a Seattle pilot named Burley alleged that he had seen the wreck of the Marlborough — or possibly another vessel with the same name — in a lonely cove. He vividly described her dereliction and said that he had observed twenty or so skeletons near her, surrounded by heaps of empty seashells, as though the starving mariners had survived on shellfish for as long as they could.
Another report states that the remains of the Marlborough were found by the British steamer Johnson off the coast of Chile. Her paint was peeling, her sails had rotted, and a boarding party from the Johnson discovered the skeletons of nineteen men and one woman. Could the Marlborough really have drifted for twenty-three years after leaving Lyttleton?
A very similar mystery surrounds the tragic loss of the Dunedin. Having made nearly twenty successful and uneventful trips between New Zealand and the U.K., the Dunedin vanished without a trace in the vicinity of Cape Horn only a matter of days after the ill-fated Marlborough disappeared. The Dunedin had a crew of over thirty and she was loaded with wool and frozen meat when she sailed on her last journey from Oamaru in New Zealand. (Incidentally, the town is famous today as the home of a magnificent blue peng
uin colony.)
Another strange marine spectre, one that haunted the Port Pirie, was unusually benign. In 1948 one of her crew was killed when a boiler ran dry and exploded. A while later, one of her engineers was checking things and was concerned because of a sinister knocking sound in the feed pump supplying the boiler. The gauge showed that the boiler was full — yet the sinister knocking continued. As a last resort, the engineer checked the gauge and found that it was wildly faulty — the boiler was almost empty and about to explode. The regular crew were convinced that it was the spirit of the dead man looking after them. Those who had been there with him when the fatal accident took place said that he had sworn that if it was within his powers in the Next World, no shipmate would ever die on board the Port Pirie as he had suffered when the boiler exploded.
The alleged ghost that troubled and jinxed the Great Eastern, however, was far from benign. Brunel designed the ship, and some idea of her size relative to other vessels in 1857 can be gleaned from the difficulty that was experienced when an attempt to launch her (sideways!) was made on November 7 that year. The nineteen-thousand-ton vessel travelled about a metre and stuck fast. It wasn’t until January 30, 1858, that they finally got her floated. The trouble that dogged her had begun! For over a year, she simply floated there, without any move being made to her complete her: this cost a fortune. One reason for building her so big was the problem of refuelling normal-sized steamers on the Australia run. The Great Eastern could carry enough fuel to get her to Calcutta in one stage. Her enormous size was also an attempt to beat the problem of rolling and the seasickness that accompanied it. It was argued (not unreasonably) that if a vessel was longer than the length of the largest wave known to seafarers, she would not roll. It was all right as a theory — it just didn’t work in practice. The Great Eastern was a more powerful emetic than anything used by the Roman Emperors at their orgies!