Ourang Medan

Guest post by Alex 

Ourang Medan, November 13, 1939 (or earlier).

Today, for a change, a sea mystery from outside the Bermuda Triangle, in fact, from the other side of the globe. For six decades, the ghost ship Ourang Medan has been regarded among the greatest mysteries of the sea, right up there with the Mary Celeste and the Carroll A. Deering. Now, I may be able to present you the solution.

The yarn of the Ourang Medan is traditionally told thus:

In June 1947 or February 1948, two American vessels in the Strait of Malacca, the Silver Star and the City of Baltimore, picked up a distress call from a Dutch or Indonesian merchant ship by the name of Ourang Medan. (Indonesia was part of the Dutch Empire.) Ourang Medan is Indonesian or Malay and translates to Man from Medan, Medan being the largest city on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The message was scary enough: "All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead." The radio operator of the Ourang Medan asked for a doctor and gave her position. Then followed nothing but a nerve-racking stretch of indecipherable Morse code.

However, the Silver Star was able to raise the Ourang Medan one last time. Her radio operator took leave for the happy hunting grounds with a laconic, "I die."

Then there was only silence. Or, more probably, static.

The City of Baltimore was farther away than the Silver Star, so she continued on her course. But the Silver Star raced all through the night toward the position of the stricken vessel at full steam, her crew hoping to find some survivors when they got there.

In the morning, the Silver Star sighted the Ourang Medan. She was an ancient steamer, but except for a slight list and a missing lifeboat apparently undamaged. Yet the decks of the ghost ship were deserted.

The Silver Star sent over a boat to investigate. When the sailors boarded the ghost ship, they were greeted by a grisly sight: Her decks were strewn with corpses.

Their faces were contorted as if they had died in agony — or of horror. Their eyes were staring and their rigid and twisted bodies seemed to be pointing their arms at something, something in the sky.

The sun? Some airborne horror that killed like Medusa, by its mere sight? Like the mother (ship) of all UFOs?

The crew of the Silver Star could find no injuries on the corpses. Nor could they find any survivors. As he had promised, the radio operator was dead in the radio shack, collapsed over his transmitter. Even the ship's dog was dead.

Then and there, fire erupted from one of the cargo holds of the Ourang Medan. Fearing the worst, the officer in charge ordered his men back into their boat. As soon as they were a safe distance away from the ancient steamer, the towering inferno spreading from her hold exploded into a fireball.

Gutted by fire and explosions, the Ourang Medan eventually slipped beneath the waves. Her wreck, if it was ever searched for, has never been found.

So the story usually goes, give or take a lie or two.

Among believers, one rational explanation is that the Ourang Medan was smuggling poison gas and nitroglycerine, which in the leaky rustbucket got mixed with seawater. The resulting poison gas vapors killed the crew, and the nitroglycerine reacting with the seawater caused the subsequent explosion. Another, less spectacular, rational explanation is that carbon monoxide from the smoldering fire may have been the killer. And, of course, as I said, the true cuckoos believe that the corpses allegedly staring and pointing were staring and pointing in the direction of the UFO whose little green pilots murdered them.

Skeptics point out that the only element of the story that can be verified is the Silver Star. There are no records at Lloyd's or otherwise that a ship called Ourang Medan ever existed. Likewise, except for vague magazine articles giving no sources, there is no evidence that such an incident ever happened.

Of course, according to true believer logic, that means that the government erased all mention of the Ourang Medan because she was on a black ops mission smuggling chemical weapons. That is the same logic like the religionists' that their god hid dinosaur bones to test their faith.

To a true believer, absence of evidence proves evidence was destroyed by his theoretical conspirators, and evidence to the contrary proves evidence was planted by his theoretical conspirators. For to a true believer, reality is obliged to conform to his pet theory.

On top of the lack of evidence, the story is bodaciously unlikely in itself. Why would the crew of the Silver Star be courageous enough to board a ship where for all they knew they would catch an instantly lethal plague, but cow… uh, cautious enough to not even try to fight the fire and claim salvage? Even an ancient rustbucket has some scrap value.

Maybe they were good Samaritans eager to die saving others, but uninterested in saving property and in profit? Maybe, as Winer suggests, they had no steam pressure to operate the fire pumps? Or maybe it was necessary for the story to work?

After all, if the Ourang Medan had not been boarded, no one would have discovered the corpses pointing at the… uh… UFO. But if she had not gone down with all evidence, there would have been a scientific investigation.

So… While the behavior of the Silver Star crew is rather illogical, it is absolutely necessary for that sorry story to work as fiction — which it almost certainly is. Want more evidence for that?

Up to now, the earliest known reference to the Ourang Medan incident was in the May 1952 issue of the US Coast Guard's Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council. ("We Sail Together," Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council, May 9, 1952, pp. 107–110.) Yes, being featured in a government publication lent that tale undeserved credence. Yay, government.

Yet, through a simple search on eBay, I found a copy of the Vichy French magazine Sept-Jours (#45, September 7, 1941) that had the more or less complete story of the Ourang Medan in it (p. 9, "Après Vingt Mois — Le Mystère de l' 'Ourang-Medan' Est Éclairci," i.e., "After Twenty Months, the Mystery of the Ourang Medan Is Solved"). It predates the earliest commonly known version by eleven years.

This article, in turn, refers to an earlier article on the Ourang Medan in an earlier issue of the same magazine (#13, December 29, 1940). According to Sept-Jours, the Ourang Medan incident took place on November 13, 1939, predating the earliest traditional date for the incident by about eight years.

In the 1941 article, the ship that finds the Ourang Medan is not the Silver Star, but an unnamed American destroyer (or torpedo boat, torpilleur in the original; the French don't seem to make much of a distinction). That should come as no surprise, as the Silver Star was built only in 1942 (as the Santa Cecilia, 6,507 tons; 1946 to United States Maritime Commission, renamed Silver Star; 1947 reverted to Grace Line, renamed Santa Juana; scrapped 1971).

According to the article, Ourang Medan means "black man" in Malay. What's more, the story is set in mid-Pacific, not in Indonesia.

It claims the Ourang Medan was notorious in the South Sea for transporting convicts from Australia to penal islands. When she was too decrepit even for that, the Australian government sold her to a millionaire pirate, a suspected smuggler, drug dealer, and white slaver (that's at least what I think négociant de chair humaine means), who had eluded the police forces and navies of four or five countries.

One day, Sir Harry Charles Luke, the British governor of Fiji, heard that among a tribe on the main island of Viti Levu there lived a man who had arrived in a boat bearing the name Ourang Medan. The governor had that man dragged into the government offices in Suva and interrogated. The mysterious stranger told the story of the last voyage of the Ourang Medan.

Only the captain (cum owner, cum pirate) and the officers of the Ourang Medan were Europeans. The sailors were Malays or Polynesians, poor, poorly treated, and almost rightless.

In October, in Singapore, the Ourang Medan loaded 2,500 carefully sealed boxes. Then she headed for Sydney. But after several days at sea, the captain suddenly changed his mind and announced that they would go to Panama.

That meant a trip all the way across the Pacific, potentially dangerous, given the state of the ship. The men were frightened. But the captain stated that he had enough provisions on board and promised them a big bonus upon arrival.

On November 7, a sailor unscrewed the cover of a wind scoop. He collapsed, and the others thought he had fainted. But he was dead.

Shrugging it off as a heart attack, the captain had the corpse quite unceremoniously dumped overboard. Over the next couple days, more men died, and the rats jumped overboard, a sure sign the ship was doomed.

The sailors mutinied, demanding that the captain take them back to Singapore. That was when the radio operator sent the distress call. The survivors fled in two lifeboats, but only one boat with our sole survivor made it to Viti Levu.

The report was wired to Singapore, the authorities there investigated, and the truth was revealed. The Ourang Medan had been carrying nitroglycerine, potassium cyanide, and sulfuric acid, which had not been properly stowed. The containers broke, the chemicals reacted, and hydrogen cyanide poison gas filled the holds and the ventilation system. The explosion that destroyed the ship was caused by overheated nitroglycerin that spontaneously ignited when the ventilation fan stopped working.

That, lassies and lads, was the (presumably) original story of the Ourang Medan. It was on fucking eBay (I paid 3 euros plus shipping from France), and it was too hard to find for all those triangular researchers of the last six decades, Gaddis, Edwards, Winer, and the whole bunch of sensationalists.

Right, some of them died before there was any eBay, but they could have looked in a library. Yet that's the sort that makes fun of Kusche for doing all his research in the library instead of in the field.

But enough gloating at defenseless mystics. Where does that leave us?

First, now that we know that the Ourang Medan yarn predates the Silver Star, the last link to reality has been severed. The Silver Star was the only verifiable fact in the whole Ourang Medan yarn. With the mystery predating the Silver Star, it loses any possible claim to veracity.

True, the Sept-Jours article has Harry Luke as a link to a real person, but I think we can recognize a pattern of name-dropping here. Just like the later versions of the story used the real Silver Star to lend them credibility, the original story used Harry Luke. There are enough inconsistencies re the dates, locations, vessels, and personages in the various versions to be sure that they all are fiction with a fact or two thrown in for color.

Second, as a simple search on eBay netted me two earlier articles that no researcher seems to ever have found, there's no way we can be sure that the stories in Sept-Jours are the earliest incarnation. For all we know, that Ourang Medan nonsense may have been around in one form or another — minus radio distress call, poison gas, and UFOs, but still about a ghost ship full of corpses — as a silly season canard and a sailors' yarn since the beginning of the Age of Steam, and before that about a sailing ship Ourang Medan since the European discovery of Sumatra, and before that about a Roman galley called Man from Mdina (in Latin) since antiquity.

But couldn't the Sept-Jours tale be true, after all? Couldn't the Ourang Medan have been on a black ops mission for the Allies, who then covered up that embarrassing incident? Well, then the Allied governments must have gone to great lengths to have it buried, so thoroughly that it was forgotten after World War II and that no one before me ever found a trace of it.

Then the US government must have destroyed the whole crew of the destroyer that found the Ourang Medan, for so many men could not have kept a secret for decades. That would be a dastardly crime, but not impossible. The US government could simply have said the destroyer was destroyed by a U-boat.

Then the British government must have coopted or murdered everyone who knew the results of the investigations in Fiji and Singapore. If the knowledge was limited to government officials, that might be possible. Yet the article sounds like the results were public knowledge in Singapore. ("The truth was revealed.") If that's so, a cover-up would have been impossible.

But the cincher is, the story claims that the Ourang Medan was a notorious convict transport in Australia and Oceania, and that the Australian government once owned her. Of course, the Australian government could have destroyed all records on her. But it would be impossible to coopt or murder all the residents of coastal Australia and Oceania that must have known a "notorious" vessel.

As no such mass murder is known, there cannot have been any cover-up. As the Sept-Jours version is not widely known and there was no cover-up, the story is nonsense.

What's more, I found me a copy of the December 29, 1940, issue of Sept-Jours with the original account of the Ourang Medan yarn (p. 6, "Le Premier Récit d'un Grand Mystère de la Mer," i.e., "The First Account of a Great Sea Mystery"). (Now, can we trust the hoaxer that wrote it that this canard is indeed the origin of the Ourang Medan nonsense, because he says so, or did he recycle an even older sailors' yarn?) The article gives the classic version of the discovery of the Ourang Medan plus several additional details, most of which corroborate that the story is fiction.

The article features a blurry, grainy photo of a man in a naval uniform, allegedly the second officer of the Ourang Medan, lying on the floor, a pair of binoculars at his fingertips. It is probably posed. And why is there no photo of the ship herself? Because you cannot stage that in a newsroom.

The position is given as 200 miles southeast of the Solomon Islands. 

The article implies that the story was big news internationally and only not reported in France before because France was preoccupied with World War II. If that is true, why are there no records of the Ourang Medan incident being reported in the international press at that time?

The hoaxer claims that the distress call of the Ourang Medan was relayed as far away as Australia, Panama, Italy, France, and Germany. If that is true, why are there no records of that?

He (or she, by the way) also claims that the radio operators remembered the Ourang Medan as a ship that had recently transported convicts from Britain to Australia. If she was that well-known before the war, why did no one remember her when the story resurfaced after the war? If she picked up convicts in Britain, why are there no records of her there?

The Australian Broadcasting Company allegedly relayed the SOS as coming from the Sea of Micronesia. Yet both articles place the Ourang Medan in Melanesia (between the Solomon Islands and Fiji or off Fiji, respectively). A mistake by the Australian Broadcasting Company, or more sloppy writing courtesy of the hoaxer?

Unlike in the second article, the American torpedo boat or destroyer arrives only when the Ourang Medan is already on fire. She is discovered by an unnamed merchantman instead.

The American warship is identified as "torpilleur américain No. 716." That doesn't seem to make sense. The US Navy never had so many torpedo boats that one would be numbered 716. The destroyer DD-716, the USS Wiltsie, wasn't laid down before 1945. The USS Balduck was briefly classified as DE-716, but even she wasn't laid down before 1944. There was a submarine chaser USS SC-716, but the boats of her class were built between 1941 and 1944, again far too late to be afloat and cruising in 1939. Unless there's another Navy numbering scheme I'm unaware of, this ship appears to be pure fiction.

What's more, referring to a destroyer only by her number instead of by her name strikes me as rather un-American. It is, however, a typically German thing to do. The Germans never built many destroyers, and those they had often had no names, only numbers, and even those that had names were frequently referred to by their numbers only. This would appear to support my theory below that the hoaxer was a German.

The home port painted on the Ourang Medan's stern was "Sidney" [sic]. Another example of someone's stellar research.

The fire started in hold #2. That for a change is one claim that's not obvious nonsense.

When the first article was printed, the investigation into the incident had allegedly been going on for twelve months. If there was such a long investigation, why are there no records of that?

So we have nonsense, nonsense, and more nonsense. What, then, is the origin of the tale of the Ourang Medan? Nazi propaganda, that's what.

Just like the nazis' 1943 version of the Titanic movie. Both tales depict Western, capitalist, Allied society as breeding grounds for evil, capitalist pirates who sacrifice their crews on their coffin ships.

While obviously less costly to produce than a movie, the Ourang Medan article series goes even further propagandistically: The nameless captain (Nemo, huh?) of the Ourang Medan is a drug dealer and a white slaver. Thus, the story appeals to primeval fears among the stupid, the cowardly, and the weak, fears of drugs and rape, fears any authoritarian, fascist government exploits, fears only a strong, fascist government can supposedly protect you from.

The poor treatment of the native sailors? To put into perspective the poor treatment by the German occupiers.

The hydrogen cyanide gas? Maybe to distract from any rumors already spreading that the nazis were using it for mass murder?

Of course, aimed at the Western Allies, this propaganda would have been pointless. Anyone in the free world could have called or written to Australia, Singapore (not yet occupied by the Japanese), or Fiji, asked if anything about the Ourang Medan was known there, and upon being told no, concluded that the story was bogus.

But the people the propaganda was aimed at, the people of occupied and Vichy France, didn't have that luxury. They couldn't freely communicate with Allied countries and thus couldn't check the story.

It is of course not likely that this silly story was a major propaganda operation like Titanic. Hitler and Goebbels probably never heard of any Ourang Medan.

More likely, it was the homegrown product of Sept-Jours, in the spirit of collaboration. Just like Belgian cartoonist Hergé drew the anti-Semitic, anti-American Tintin comic book The Shooting Star to ingratiate himself with the nazi occupiers. Those collaborators told themselves, "This is just what is demanded now, and if we do it, hopefully the nazis will leave us alone."

Or was it homegrown? Or maybe rather heimgewachsen?

The Sept-Jours article matches almost blow by blow the account in the 1954 German pamphlet Dampfer "Ourang Medan" — Das Totenschiff in der Südsee (Steamer "Ourang Medan" — The Death Ship in the South Sea) by one Otto Mielke. This pamphlet was in fact the first issue of Anker Hefte (Anchor Pamphlets), a pulp magazine featuring fictionalized accounts of true sea adventures. Both versions are set in the South Sea instead of in Indonesia, both share some details like the rats abandoning the ship, and both have the poison gas solution related by a sole survivor, although the German version is set in 1947 and stars the Silver Star.

What's more, the Mielke account gives the position of the Ourang Medan as 20°S 179°W — which is consistent with the Sept-Jours version, but inconsistent with the Mielke account itself! This position is near Fiji, where Sept-Jours has the survivor land. Yet Mielke has his survivor make landfall at Taongi in the Marshall Islands, much farther north. If you look at a map, you'll see it's almost impossible to get from that position to the Marshall Islands without hitting Fiji first. So Mielke must have known the Sept-Jours version and rewritten it, but forgotten to change the position of the wreck when he changed the alleged landfall of the survivor.

View Larger Map

What Mielke did during the war is not certain, but apparently he was a war correspondent with the nazi navy, the Kriegsmarine. So maybe the tale of the Ourang Medan originated with Mielke? Maybe as a war correspondent he wrote propaganda to be fed to papers in occupied countries as international news?

Maybe Mielke happened to read the scuttlebutt version of his own propaganda tale in the Coast Guard magazine after the war? Maybe he decided to kick off his pulp magazine with a fictionalized version of a fictional sea adventure, because it was more sensational? After all, it had been legitimized by the Coast Guard. Maybe he rewrote his own old canard with a postwar setting and the real-life Silver Star?

As Churchill allegedly had it, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." And a silly bit of Vichy or nazi propaganda may resurface like a U-boat to become the greatest postwar sea mystery.

RIP, Ourang Medan. You belong to the realm of Tales of the Gold Monkey, not to reality. 

As the article was getting long, I turned my complete findings into a book. If you want to read the full story of the Ourang Medan, get yourself a copy of The Ourang Medan — Conjuring a Ghost Ship. 

Hewitt

Hewitt, January 20, 1921.

The steamer Hewitt sailed from Sabine, Texas, for Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, on January 20, 1921. She was carrying sulfur. After passing through the Straits of Florida, she was heard from for one last time from near Jupiter Inlet, Florida. (Group, p. 36.)

According to Spencer, her final reported position was about 250 miles north of Jupiter Inlet. (Spencer, p. 108.) Not exactly near, given the distances involved. Depending on whether they're nautical, 250 miles is somewhere off Jacksonville, at the northern end of Florida.

Berlitz claims the Hewitt was sailing from New York to Europe via the Bermuda Triangle. (Berlitz, Without a Trace, p. 24.) This again reflects more on the quality of Berlitz' "work" than on the course of the Hewitt.

The 5,399 GRT Hewitt was built in 1914 as the Pacific by Fore River for the Emery Steamship Company. She had a sister Atlantic, which was renamed Wilmore, torpedoed, and lost in 1917.

It has been suggested that the Hewitt was the mystery steamer that the crew of the Lookout Shoals Lightship observed on Saturday, January 29, allegedly tailing the schooner Carroll A. Deering just before the crew of the latter vanished. That mystery steamer ignored the lightship's signals and had a tarp draped over her side to obscure her name. The steamer may have picked up the schooner's crew after they abandoned her, or she may have hijacked her outright. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, pp. 68.) But as the Hewitt was northbound while the mystery steamer was southbound, that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. (Simpson, p. 111.)

The Hewitt was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased.

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

The Hewitt may have sunk in one of the two Atlantic storms from February 6 to 9 and from February 15. However, Group points out that then the question remains why nothing was heard from her in the meantime. (Group, p. 36.)

Apparently, Group failed to make the connection with another bit of his own research. On the next page, in the context of the Carroll A. Deering, he mentions a gale that raged at Cape Lookout for two days before it abated on January 29. (Group, p. 37.)

That's a time and place where the Hewitt was expected to be, for she was suspected of being the mystery steamer seen from the Lookout Shoals Lightship on January 29. Thus, it is possible that the Hewitt went down in this earlier storm without one having to assume she spent time in limbo somehow.

Spencer, to his credit, makes that connection, if reluctantly. (Spencer, p. 108.) So does Simpson. (Simpson, pp. 110.) And if she was last seen or heard from off Jacksonville, she was well on her way to Cape Lookout.

Then again, her sulfur cargo may have exploded. On February 1 at 2 AM, Coast Guardsmen at Absecon Light in Atlantic City, New Jersey, noticed "a vivid flash of light at sea, followed by an explosion." Powerboats found no wreckage or distress signals. At dawn, a seaplane joined the search, but didn't find anything, either. (Simpson, p. 17.)

As a postscript, during the Deering investigation, a crewmember of the Hewitt, one B.O. Rainey, cropped up. However, he claimed he left the ship before she sailed from Texas. 

The Oklahoma Triangle

Here's a Vile Vortex you never heard of: The Oklahoma Triangle is a mythical geographic area located in the South Central region of the United States. It is noted for an apparent high incidence of unexplained losses of houses, small boats on trailers, light trucks, and automobiles.

Many a homeowner in the Oklahoma Triangle has come home to find empty foundations where their house used to sit. Skeptics and debunkers point out that at the times of most all of those weird disappearances, a tornado (or several) was observed in the vicinity.

However, open-minded psychic investigators know that you can never be sure it was the tornadoes, just like you can never be sure there's no invisible, odorless miniature elephant hiding in your refrigerator. It would be unlikely for so many houses to be lifted by tornadoes, so it's much more rational to assume that the Martians got them.

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Let the sunshine in.

Svartskog

Svartskog, 1921. 

The Norwegian bark Svartskog vanished in or near the Bermuda Triangle in the first three months of 1921. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 79.) Gaddis misspells the name Svartskag. (Gaddis, Invisible Horizons, p. 140.) However, Svartskog is a village in Norway, so that would appear to be the correct spelling. 

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. Winds at times reached hurricane force. There were two particularly furious storms that lasted three days each, from February 6, 1921, and from February 15, 1921. 

A number of ships made port only after sustaining serious damage, so it is reasonable to expect other, less lucky ones to have sunken. (The mystics of course always turn this argument on its head and ask why not all ships survive a storm if some did. Surely, it must have been the Martians…) 

Winer describes how hurricane-force winds from the Arctic would coat superstructures with ice until ships became so top-heavy they were capsized by the towering waves, with lifeboats and rafts frozen to them so they could not be launched or float free and any survivors in the water freezing to death in mere minutes. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 79.) 

The Svartskog was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased. 

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

Steinsund

Steinsund, 1921.

The Norwegian bark Steinsund vanished in or near the Bermuda Triangle in the first three months of 1921. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 79.)

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. Winds at times reached hurricane force. There were two particularly furious storms that lasted three days each, from February 6, 1921, and from February 15, 1921.

A number of ships made port only after sustaining serious damage, so it is reasonable to expect other, less lucky ones to have sunken. (The mystics of course always turn this argument on its head and ask why not all ships survive a storm if some did. Surely, it must have been the Martians…)

Winer describes how hurricane-force winds from the Arctic would coat superstructures with ice until ships became so top-heavy they were capsized by the towering waves, with lifeboats and rafts frozen to them so they could not be launched or float free and any survivors in the water freezing to death in mere minutes. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 79.)

The Steinsund was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased.

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

Florino

Florino, 1921. 

The Norwegian bark Florino vanished in or near the Bermuda Triangle in the first three months of 1921. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 79.) Given the same ship type and nationality and the similar names, she may be the same ship as the one that entered the triangular rolls under the name Flonine or Fionine. 

What's more, Gaddis mentions a ship by the name of Entine Florina as a Bermuda Triangle victim of the 1920–21 flap of vanishings, which sounds similar enough to Florino to likely be one and the same. (Gaddis, Invisible Horizons, p. 140.) Others even split that name into two ships. Thus, we cannot ignore the possible worst case scenario, however unlikely, that we're dealing with five distinct triangular victims: Fionine, Flonine, Florino, Florina, and Entine. At the other end of the complexity spectrum, they may all be spelling variations of the same ship. 

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. Winds at times reached hurricane force. There were two particularly furious storms that lasted three days each, from February 6, 1921, and from February 15, 1921. 

A number of ships made port only after sustaining serious damage, so it is reasonable to expect other, less lucky ones to have sunken. (The mystics of course always turn this argument on its head and ask why not all ships survive a storm if some did. Surely, it must have been the Martians…) 

Winer describes how hurricane-force winds from the Arctic would coat superstructures with ice until ships became so top-heavy they were capsized by the towering waves, with lifeboats and rafts frozen to them so they could not be launched or float free and any survivors in the water freezing to death in mere minutes. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 79.) 

The Florino was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased. 

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

Flonine

Flonine, November 25, 1920.

The Norwegian bark Flonine sailed from Hampton Roads on November 25, 1920, and vanished in or near the Bermuda Triangle. (Spencer, p. 108.) She was bound for Copenhagen. According to The New York Times, the name is spelled Fionine, which sounds more like a name than Flonine. ("Divided as to Theory about Missing Ships," The New York Times, June 22, 1921.)

I mean, Flonine sounds more like some competition for Drano. The Flow Seven and Flow Eight formulas failed, but Flow Nine gets the drain cleaned. Fionine is probably some diminutive of Fiona. Or her name was really Flonine, and the reporter changed it as he thought the same as I.

Given the same ship type and nationality and the similar names, she may be the same ship as the one that entered the triangular rolls under the name Florino.

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. Winds at times reached hurricane force. There were two particularly furious storms that lasted three days each, from February 6, 1921, and from February 15, 1921.

A number of ships made port only after sustaining serious damage, so it is reasonable to expect other, less lucky ones to have sunken. (The mystics of course always turn this argument on its head and ask why not all ships survive a storm if some did. Surely, it must have been the Martians…)

Winer describes how hurricane-force winds from the Arctic would coat superstructures with ice until ships became so top-heavy they were capsized by the towering waves, with lifeboats and rafts frozen to them so they could not be launched or float free and any survivors in the water freezing to death in mere minutes. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 79.)

The Flonine was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased.

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

Yute

Yute, November 17, 1920.

The Spanish 2,974-ton steamer Yute sailed from Baltimore on November 14, 1920. On November 17, she radioed for help, giving her position as 240 miles off the New Jersey coast, southeast of Cape May. Rescue vessels found no trace of her. (Spencer, p. 108.) She was bound for Dunkirk. ("More Ships Added to Mystery List," The New York Times, June 22, 1921.)

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 79.)

More details from the time it happened: 

The sixty-mile gale yesterday, accompanied during a part of the day by rain, caused a number of minor accidents on land and sea, and delayed the shipping entering and leaving the harbor, but did not do any serious damage. The United States Weather Bureau records showed that the wind was blowing at fifty-six miles an hour by 10 o'clock yesterday morning, and dropped to forty miles at noon, and reached its maximum of sixty miles velocity at 4 o'clock. Toward night the wind shifted to the northwest and dropped to thirty miles before 8 o'clock. The prospect for today is diminishing northwest winds and fair weather. 

During the forenoon four appeals for aid from ships in distress were received at the Naval Radio Station. The first came from the Spanish freighter Yute, Baltimore to Dunkirk, disabled 240 miles east-southeast of Cape May, NJ. The United Sates Coast Guard cutter Seneca was sent to her assistance finally and towed the Yute into port. ("Storm Winds Blow on Land and on Sea," The New York Times, November 18, 1920.)

Now, that towed into port thing would be a zinger if it was true. But probably the reporter was just rash in assuming that she had been successfully salvaged. After all, the Yute wasn't added to the triangular rolls by Bermuda Triangle writers, but by further newspaper articles and government investigators, which would be less likely to make mistakes than our sensationalist friends.

I'll have to check that with other papers and Lloyd's if I get around to it. Either way, the mystery is solved, as the Yute was damaged or lost, whichever it was, in a storm.

The Yute was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased.

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

General Morne

General Morne, October 19, 1920.

The British schooner General Morne sailed from Lisbon, Portugal, for Newfoundland on October 19, 1920, and vanished. (Spencer, p. 108.)

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 79.) That, however, is quite irrelevant in this case, as her course was not even close to the Bermuda Triangle. If you include the General Morne among the triangular victims, you have to include every ship that ever vanished in the North Atlantic. Thus, whether a storm got her or not, the case is solved for our purposes.

The General Morne was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased.

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names.

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

Albyan

Albyan, October 1, 1920.

The Russian bark Albyan sailed from Norfolk on October 1, 1920, and vanished in or near the Bermuda Triangle. (Spencer, p. 108.) She was bound for Gothenberg (Gothenburg, Sweden?). ("More Ships Added to Mystery List," The New York Times, June 22, 1921.) Simpson calls her the Albyn and asserts that while she was claimed to be a free Russian ship that refused to recognize the soviet government, she was in fact a Finnish four-masted bark from Nystad, and indeed bound for Gothenburg, Sweden. (Simpson, p. 113.)

The winter of 1920–21 was one of the worst on record in the North Atlantic. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 79.) From the weather maps: A southern storm passed over the Eastern Seaboard through October 1, the day the Albyan sailed. It looks like she sailed after the worst was over in Norfolk, but she may have found that it was worse than expected at sea. If she made it through the ass end of that one, Horta in the Azores reported a strong gale (force 9) on October 17.

The Albyan was one of a number of ships claimed by the Bermuda Triangle in late 1920 and early 1921. The record number of vanishing ships aroused suspicions that Russian reds were hijacking ships and sailing them to soviet ports. When government investigators realized how severe the storms had been, investigations ceased.

While most or all of those ships were probably really storm victims, it is of course not impossible that some ships were hijacked by communists. A correspondent of The Washington Post saw several ships with their names painted out in Vladivostok. (Group, p. 36.) However, I tend to think those may very well have been Russian ships that had their tsarist names painted out, pending renaming with, uh, "good socialist/communist" names. 

Finally, those ships not sunk by storms may be victims of insurance fraud.

"The commercial morality of the world seems to have been markedly lowered as a result of the war," said one underwriter today, when asked for an explanation of the situation. "The demand for bottoms after the armistice raised shipping to unprecedented values. Insurance valuations increased correspondingly. Then the slump came and values were lowered and owners faced tremendous losses, but insurance policies continued at an artificially high mark. What we term 'moral risk' naturally increased and sinkings began. That is our notion how it all came about." ("Suggests Storms Sank Lost Mystery Ships," The New York Times, June 24, 1921.)

William O'Brien

William O'Brien, April 18, 1920.

The William O'Brien was a 2,850-ton (sources disagree) steamer of the France and Canada Steamship Company that sailed from New York for Rotterdam on April 14, 1920. The next day she put back into New York. The captain reported he had had trouble with the crew.

She sailed again on April 16. Whether the unruly crew had been disciplined or replaced is not known. (Group, pp. 35.) Simpson reports the captain replaced the chief engineer. (Simpson, p. 120.)

On or about April 18, the steamer Baltic received a radio message from the O'Brien that the latter was 500 miles east of the Delaware River and required assistance. (Spencer, p. 107.) She had been hit by raging storms and lost a hatch cover. The message or the manner it was sent aroused suspicion that it had been altered. (Group, p. 35.) When the rescuers got there, the O'Brien was gone.

Spencer claims she was a wooden-hulled ship, although new. (Spencer, p. 107.) Even if she had not lost a hatch cover, wooden hulls and steam engines do not mix in oceangoing vessels. Given the vibrations and stresses, she may easily have sprung a leak without further provocation if she had a wooden hull.

It doesn't look like she really was a wooden ship, though: She was a modern steel-hulled oil burner launched in 1915 at New York Shipbuilding. That's probably a misunderstanding due to the fact that she was at a time intended as a lumber carrier (though at the time of her sinking she was carrying coal). Somebody apparently mistook a ship built for carrying lumber for one built out of lumber.

While we're at it, here's the full article I just linked.

NEW YORK, April 19. — The steamer William O'Brien, which reported yesterday she was in distress 500 miles east of Philadelphia, is taking water rapidly, according to a radio message received here today. The message was relayed by the liner Baltic, which left here Saturday for Liverpool, but there was nothing to indicate the Baltic was nearby. 

The O'Brien, operated by the France and Canadian Steamship corporation, is an oil burner of 3,143 tons and carries a crew of 40. She left here last Thursday with 6,500 tons of coal for Rotterdam. ("Ocean Liner Is Sinking," The Miami News, April 19, 1920.)

Either way, three months later, the mother of a crewman got a postcard from France, allegedly in her son's handwriting, that said he had been on a ship with Edsel Ford. When it was found that Ford had been in Detroit at that time, the matter was judged a hoax. (Spencer, p. 107.)

During the Carroll A. Deering investigation, the NYPD claimed they had uncovered a plot by the United Russian Workers of the United States and Canada to ship out on steamers, mutiny, and sail them to soviet ports. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, p. 70.)

By itself, this case is not mysterious. The O'Brien probably really lost a hatch cover and was swamped in a storm. That tended to happen back when hatch covers were from wood and canvas.

What makes it interesting is the claims about the trouble with the crew, the "altered" radio message, communists, and the postcard, which lend themselves well to conspiracy theories. Yet that's what it is — only claims.

For now, the facts look like this:

LONDON, April 27. The White Star liner Baltic has arrived at Liverpool. She reported that in mid-Atlantic during a gale she received a wireless summons from the steamer William O'Brien, reporting that the hatch covers had gone, and that she was making water rapidly. The Baltic immediately steamed to her assistance, but the wireless messages became undecipherable, except for the word "sinking," repeated several times. Other vessels also searched the spot, but found no trace of the vessel or her crew. ("An Ocean Tragedy," The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania), May 1, 1920.)

Not one hatch was gone, but the plural. The O'Brien was making water rapidly. And she radioed she was sinking.

Once I find an article on what was supposed to be fishy about that message, I'll post it here. Stay tuned. 

Amelia Zeman

Amelia Zeman, February 10, 1920.

The schooner Amelia Zeman was lost (vanished?) east of Norfolk, Virginia, with a company of nine. (Berlitz, Without a Trace, p. 23.)

Bayard Hopkins

Bayard Hopkins, January 4, 1919. 

The schooner Bayard Hopkins was lost (vanished?) east of Norfolk, Virginia, with a company of six. (Berlitz, Without a Trace, p. 23.) 

Researching the case of the Benjamin F. Poole, I came across this article on ships lost and in peril in a snowstorm. 

NORFOLK, VA, Feb. 14. — A message from the Diamond Shoals Lightship sent the cutter Seminole racing to the aid of the schooner Bayard Hopkins, in a sinking condition, twenty-five miles southwest of the lightship. ("Tramp Steamers Safe," The New York Times, February 15, 1914.)

And more: 

NEWPORT, RI, Feb. 15. — The revenue cutter Seminole picked up the distressed schooner Bayard Hopkins off Diamond Shoals to-day, according to a radio message received here. The message said: 

"Seminole found distressed schooner Bayard Hopkins at 3:30 this afternoon, three miles west of Diamond Shoals. Vessel is in bad shape from recent storm. One man on schooner injured. Seminole towing Hopkins to Beaufort, SC." ("Cutter Rescues Schooner," The New York Times, February 16, 1914.)

That leaves us with three options. 

Option A: The Bayard Hopkins got towed out of her sinking condition in 1914 only to vanish in the Bermuda Triangle in 1919. 

Option B: There were two schooners called Bayard Hopkins in distress off Norfolk in five years. 

Option C: Berlitz got the date and all the other details totally wrong, as usual. 

Until I find an original source for A or B, I'll assume it's C. 

E. E. Armstrong

E. E. Armstrong, August 17, 1918. 

The "139-foot Canadian cargo schooner E. E. Armstrong, which left Kingston, Jamaica, British West Indies, on August 17, 1918, in cargo of flour and mangrove bark destined for the French colony of Martinique," allegedly vanished skirting the southern fringe of the Bermuda Triangle. (Quasar, p. 57.) 

Hurricane Two of the 1918 hurricane season, a Category Two hurricane, blew from August 22 to August 26, 1918, affecting the northern coast of South America and the southern Lesser Antilles with tropical storm force winds. If you look at the illustration of the hurricane's track in the Wikipedia article, the storm must have hit the E. E. Armstrong like an oncoming truck. 

USS Cyclops

USS Cyclops, March 5, 1918.

Photographs of the USS Cyclops courtesy of the US Navy.

Maybe the most famous Bermuda Triangle incident is the loss of the USS Cyclops, one of four Proteus-class colliers built for the Navy before World War I. Incredibly, two (!) of her sister ships, the Proteus and the Nereus, vanished in the Bermuda Triangle as well, both in 1941. Only her third sister ship, the USS Jupiter, survived any triangular tribulations, possibly because she escaped from her arduous collier duty when she was converted in 1920 into the first US aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, to be lost in a Japanese air strike on February 27, 1942.

The Cyclops displaced 19,360 tons fully loaded, was 542 feet long and 65 feet wide, drew 27 feet, 8 inches of water, could attain a speed of 15 knots, and had a complement of 236. Although a modern TI Class ultra-large crude carrier displacing 509,484 tons would make them look like toy ships, back then, these ships were among the largest freighters in the world, just as their names implied. (Some passenger liners and battleships were bigger.)

The vanishing of the Cyclops with 306 crew and passengers remains the single largest loss of life in the history of the Navy not directly involving combat. She was also the largest Navy ship to ever vanish without a trace and the first big radio-equipped ship to vanish without an SOS. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, p. 59.)

The fact that all that can be attributed to the Bermuda Triangle gives the triangular mystics a field day. How can there possibly be a rational, naturalistic explanation for the vanishings in the Bermuda Triangle of three out of a class of four freighters, huge for their day, sturdily built to Navy specifications? While all three vanished in wartime (World War I and II respectively), the enemy did not claim or admit to have sunk any of the ships.

To the rationalist, of course, occurs the thought that possibly precisely their almost unprecedented size may have carried the seed of their doom. Whenever the technological envelope is pushed to new and hitherto unknown dimensions, those poorly understood new dimensions may give rise to design flaws in the first, experimental ships of their kind. While liners and battleships of those, and even twice those, dimensions had been built before (the Lusitania, launched in 1906, displaced 44,060 tons), they didn't have to cope with the stresses her heavy cargo exerts on a bulk carrier.

The Cyclops was completed in 1910 by William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia. Her master was Lieutenant Commander George W. Worley of the Navy Auxiliary Service.

On January 9, 1918, she was assigned to the Naval Overseas Transportation Service and sailed to Brazilian waters to fuel warships in the South Atlantic. One of her two engines broke down, so that she was able to make only ten knots. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, p. 60.)

For those who believe in such things, there were plenty of bad omens on the voyage south. Even if you don't, there was plenty of fodder for conspiracy theorists, too.

Leaving Norfolk Navy Yard, the Cyclops nearly collided with the USS Survey. Then the Cyclops blew a cylinder head, disabling one of her two engines. She overshot Rio de Janeiro and nearly ended up on the rocks. When the executive officer, Lieutenant Forbes, who had plotted the course correctly, challenged Worley as to why Worley had changed it so that the ship headed for the rocks, Worley placed Forbes under arrest. In port, a sailor was drowned when Worley felt an urge to turn over the engine(s) while the sailor's boat was next to the propellers. Coaling, the Cyclops scraped along the side of the cruiser USS Raleigh, causing some damage. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 100.) (Sources disagree on how many engines he could have turned over. Some say one engine remained out of order for the whole voyage, while others claim it was repaired, but later broke down again.)

Captain Worley sure had his detractors and enemies. They described him as an old salt like Captain Bligh (the fictional version), a drunkard who ruled arbitrarily and abused his crew.

Conrad A. Nervig claims he served as an ensign on the Cyclops on her last voyage south to South America and thus became the last man to leave her alive when he was transferred to the USS Glacier in Brazil. He calls Worley "a very indifferent seaman and a poor, overly cautious navigator." Nervig blames all of the above incidents on Worley's poor navigation and seamanship. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 100.)

It should, however, be noted that there are doubts whether Nervig really was on board on that voyage. As at least some of these alleged incidents appear to originate with Nervig, they should be taken with a shaker of salt unless and until they can be independently verified. Quasar claims he couldn't find Nervig on any crew documents and sounds pretty convinced he was not on board. (Quasar, p. 60.) "And the idea that he is somehow omitted by accident, that somehow he is overlooked in every page, is patently ridiculous." Yet, qua mystic, Quasar has a history of casting doubt on anyone who offers a rational explanation for a Bermuda Triangle mystery.

Among yarn spinners, Worley has become (in)-famous for parading around the ship wearing long underwear, a derby hat on his head, and a cane in his hand. Yet this apparently originates with Nervig, who claims Worley kept visiting him in this getup during Nervig's dog watches. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 99.) It would thus not be that strange for Worley to be in his underwear when he couldn't sleep and got up for a chat, in tropical nights and at a time of night when few crewmen except Nervig — the officer he trusted — and a helmsman or so would be likely to see him on the short way from his cabin below the bridge up to the bridge proper. Back then, most people would never go anywhere bareheaded, and Worley seems to have been attached to his cane, his only attribute of a gentleman.

On the voyage home, the Cyclops had to transport five convicts: two deserters and three who had been involved in a murder on the cruiser USS Pittsburgh. In addition, forty-two men from the Pittsburgh were sent Stateside on the Cyclops for reassignment. Some of them were said to be friends of those convicted in connection with the murder. Rumors were flying about the Cyclops: James Coker, the murderer from the Pittsburgh, would be transferred to the Cyclops for his execution; their friends would mutiny to free his accomplices; the crew would mutiny to free Lieutenant Forbes; Worley was going insane. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 100.)

The Cyclops sailed from Rio de Janeiro on February 16, 1918. When the Glacier was anchored in Salvador, Bahia, Nervig saw the Cyclops one last time. However, he saw the latter enter the harbor from the north, not from the south, as she should, coming from Rio. For Nervig, another example of Worley's stellar navigational skills, overshooting another harbor — "navigation as practiced aboard that vessel." (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 108.)

Then, US Consul General Alfred L.M. Gottschalk boarded the Cyclops for his trip Stateside. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 109.) He claimed he would enlist to fight in the war. Yet before the war he had been strongly pro-German, and he was of German ancestry. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 121.)

Did Gottschalk finally decide to side with America against his ancestral country? Or was he planning to sabotage the Cyclops, or even to turn her over to the Germans?

The Cyclops had orders to sail from Salvador on February 22. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 108.) Worley had orders to proceed directly to Baltimore. The Cyclops had been supplied with more than enough coal and provisions to get her there. Yet Worley stopped over in Bridgetown, Barbados, on March 3 and 4. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, pp. 111.)

What happened next, the US consul in Barbados describes in this telegram:

Secretary of State,

Washington, D. C.

April 17, 2 p. m.

Department's 15th. Confidential. Master CYCLOPS stated that required six hundred tons coal having sufficient on board to reach Bermuda. Engines very poor condition. Not sufficient funds and therefore requested payment by me. Unusually reticent. I have ascertained he took here ton fresh meat, ton flour, thousand pounds vegetables, paying therefor 775 dollars. From different sources gather the following: He had plenty of coal, alleged inferior, took coal to mix, probably he had more than fifteen hundred tons. Master alluded to by others as damned Dutchman, apparently disliked by other officers. Rumored disturbances en route hither, men confined and one executed; also had some prisoners from the fleet in Brazilian waters, one life sentence. United States Consul-General Gottschalk passenger, 231 crew exclusive of officers and passengers. Have names crew but not of all the officers and passengers. Many Germanic names appear. Number telegraphic or wireless messages addressed to master or in care of ship were delivered at this port. All telegrams for Barbadoes on file head office St. Thomas. I have to suggest scrutiny there. While not having any definite grounds I fear fate worse than sinking though possibly based on instinctive dislike felt towards master.

LIVINGSTON,

CONSUL.

If Worley had indeed executed a crewman, he was in deep trouble. On the other hand, this rumor may be based on a misunderstanding involving the aforementioned rumor that Coker, the murderer, was to be transferred to the Cyclops for his execution.

Dutchman, of course, in those days didn't mean a native of the Netherlands, but a German, just like kraut or Hun. Dutch would be a corruption of Deutsch, the German word for German.

Worley was on record with the Navy as born in San Francisco, but it later transpired that he was born Johann Friedrich Georg Wichmann in Germany and entered the US as an undocumented immigrant when he jumped ship in San Francisco in 1878. In port, he'd hang out with German merchant ship captains, even once he commanded the Cyclops. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 116.) Did Worley need the extra coal and food for a run to Germany, or at least to a rendezvous with a German ship?

Given Worley's and Gottschalk's questionable loyalties and the presence of the "many Germanic names" on the Cyclops, the Navy half expected to find her in a German port after the war. Right after the armistice, Navy investigators were sent to check the German navy files, but it was found that the Cyclops had never arrived in Germany and that no U-boats, surface raiders, or mines had been near her course. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 117.)

On the other hand, capturing the Cyclops would appear to be a secret mission, not for the German navy, but for their secret service, so that it would not appear in their navy files, but in their secret service files, which would be, like, secret. Or the Germans may have doctored their navy files. (I guess this is like the young earth fundies' argument that their god faked the fossil record.) Winer holds that if so, word of the operation would have leaked eventually, but that's not certain. In any event, there is no hard evidence either way.

Brockholst Livingston III, the consul's young son, later told how the Cyclops left the harbor steaming south, instead of north, as she should have. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 113.) This might mean everything or nothing. Mistaking south for north may have been the most egregious example yet of "navigation as practiced aboard that vessel." Or it may have been Worley's barefaced getaway, ship and all, to escape punishment for murdering that hypothetical crewman, or to hand the ship over to the Germans. Or it may have been just a compass test. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 116.)

Sources disagree on whether the Cyclops was bound for Norfolk or Baltimore. Her course on the ocean would have been the same either way, though, as both cities are located on Chesapeake Bay. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, p. 53.)

The next day, March 5, the Cyclops was in radio contact with the liner Vestris and reported fair weather. Afterwards, the Cyclops was never seen or heard from again in this world. She was reported overdue on March 13. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 113.)

Quasar claims the Cyclops was twice encountered by a British patrol boat over the two days after leaving Barbados. Both times she was off course, and both times the patrol boat guided her back on course. (Quasar, p. 58.) If that is true, was that more evidence of "navigation as practiced aboard that vessel," or was it Worley trying to make a run for Germany?

The Office of Naval Intelligence listed the six main theories that had been suggested:

(1) The crew mutinied and absconded with the ship.

(2) Gottschalk handed the ship over to the Germans.

(3) The Cyclops was torpedoed by a U-boat.

(4) The cargo of potentially highly incendiary manganese dioxide exploded.

(5) The Cyclops sank due to excessive stresses from rolling.

(6) Worley surrendered the ship to the Germans or was part of a conspiracy to destroy her by U-boat.

However, the Navy could find no hard evidence for any of the theories. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, p. 56.)

In 1920, Lieutenant Commander Mahlon S. Tisdale, who had served on the Cyclops and other Navy colliers, came forward to claim that the Cyclops had capsized. When he was on board the Cyclops, Tisdale had noticed that all the manhole plates on the topside tanks were open. When he reported that to Worley, the latter laughed and replied that he always left them off, in accordance with instructions from the navy yard. If the Cyclops sailed into bad weather, the cargo may have shifted, the ship heeled over, and the sea rushed into the open tanks, capsizing the ship without leaving any debris or any time for an SOS.

Commander I.I. Yates of the Norfolk Navy Yard, on the other hand, held that Worley, a known jokester, pulled Tisdale's leg. When Tisdale discovered the manhole covers were open, the Cyclops was in light condition, so it didn't matter whether they were on or off. In fact, the topside tanks were probably full of ballast water at that point. According to Yates, there were no such orders from the navy yard, and Worley wouldn't have sailed with a loaded ship with the covers open. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, pp. 56.)

Other sailors thought that the Cyclops' top-heavy superstructure of coal loading derricks may have slowed her righting herself in heavy seas, causing the cargo to shift and the ship to capsize. In fact, a high-density cargo like ore that only partly fills holds would be more likely to shift than lighter cargo that completely fills holds. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, p. 58.)

Nervig said in 1969 that he thought the ship had broken in two, as he claimed that she had been working so heavily that one could hear the sound of steel plates rubbing together and see the deck amidships rising and falling as it conformed to the contours of the sea.

This problem may have been exacerbated if she was improperly loaded by an inexperienced officer who concentrated all the cargo in the amidships holds. However, the Cyclops was apparently loaded under the personal supervision of Captain Worley and of foreman Manuel Pereira of the Brazilian Coaling Company, who had many years experience. According to Pereira, the ship could have safely carried an additional 2,000 tons, and the cargo had been properly trimmed throughout the ship. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, pp. 58.)

Winer, however, claims that the Plimsoll mark was under water and the Cyclops thus dangerously overloaded. I guess he got that from Nervig, apparently his main source. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 107.)

Captain Charles H. Zearfoss of the Munson Line offered another, but related, explanation:

I think the Cyclops was sunk by her cargo. Manganese is a very difficult cargo to handle and the collier's crew was used to handling only coal. It has a tendency to settle down, grinding away whatever is below it. The Cyclops was not a 'tween deck ship and the cargo was loaded in the lower hold. I think the end came suddenly when the bottom practically dropped out. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 118.)

According to Winer, manganese ore needs extra shoring and bracing to keep that from happening. Yet the only man aboard the Cyclops who knew how to load manganese ore was Forbes, as he had worked on Lakers, specializing in transporting heavy ores. But Forbes was still confined to quarters thanks to Worley's irrationality, so the story goes. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 106.)

The fact that the Cyclops was loaded under the personal supervision of Worley and Pereira would be irrelevant for this theory. Worley was the captain of a collier, and Pereira worked for the Brazilian Coaling Company, so they while they were qualified to load coal, they didn't necessarily have experience with manganese ore.

Winer doubts that the bottom would have dropped out of all holds at once. Yet he ignores the fact that not all holds would have to be flooded to sink the ship. I could quit my day job if I had a dollar for every ship, from the Republic and the Titanic down, that the papers claimed was nearly unsinkable on account of having x watertight compartments, of which y could be flooded for the ship to remain afloat, where nobody could imagine any possible accident damaging more than y compartments, and that then had a freak accident open y+1 compartments to the sea and went down like a stone (Republic: x=8, y=2; Titanic: x=16, y=4).

In defense of his capsizing theory, Tisdale adds:

Perhaps the cargo was braced to prevent shifting — but this would have required very strong braces, far beyond the capacity of the ship's carpenter. Unless these braces were installed at the loading port, they were probably not installed at all. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 119.)

This would be as relevant to the grinding theory. Winer is confident that Worley would have installed at least some sort of braces and that, as far as capsizing is concerned, they wouldn't all have given way at the same time, so that there would have been time for an SOS and for the lifeboats. (Winer, Devil's Triangle, p. 120.) Given how Winer's own Nervig rags Worley, that's a lot of confidence.

In 1968, a Navy diver, Dean Hawes, was looking for the lost nuclear submarine USS Scorpion. On the seafloor he found a ship that had the same strange superstructure as the Cyclops: a bridge supported on steel stilts, and uprights all along the deck that may have been her trademark derricks. The location of the wreck was 70 miles east of Norfolk, in 180 feet of water. Hawes had to surface before he could explore her, however, and his ship was driven from the scene by bad weather. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, pp. 59.)

Anyway, everybody knew that the weather had been fine, so all those theories that were predicated on bad weather and heavy seas, like capsizing or breaking apart, had to be wrong. Right?

Kusche calculated that with the speed she could get out of her one operational engine, the Cyclops would have been off Norfolk on the night of March 10. While for decades, every investigator and researcher had believed that the weather had not been bad enough to sink the Cyclops, he found out that at that time there had in fact been a bad storm off the East Coast.

On March 9, gale warnings had been issued from Maine to North Carolina by 5 PM. Wind speeds reached 60 miles an hour on the tenth, and 84 miles an hour was recorded in New York City. The gale warnings now extended south to Florida.

The steamer Amolco, 375 miles northeast of Norfolk, had to ride out the storm from noon of March 9 to the afternoon of March 11, suffering $150,000 worth of damage. One of her officers, W.J. Riley, told The Virginian-Pilot that he was sure the Cyclops had been sunk by that storm. Here, for your online perusal, is the same story from The Washington Times. ("Cyclops Lost in Great Gale, Says Mate of Amolco," The Washington Times, April 19, 1918, p. 11.)

The Navy was looking for the ship in the West Indies, where she had been heard from last, spring storms were nothing unusual, and this storm had been worse at sea than on land, so that it wasn't widely reported. News of the storm and Officer Riley's statement were quickly forgotten and never caught the attention of Navy or other investigators.

In fact, as the Navy was busy fighting World War I, there never was an official inquiry into the loss of the Cyclops. If there had been one, the weather reports would certainly have been discovered, and the loss of the Cyclops would never have been considered a mystery. (Kusche, Bermuda Triangle Mystery, pp. 60.)

I can't give all the details of Kusche's calculations and the weather reports here, so if you want more evidence, read his book.

Quasar, as always, is busy denying everything Kusche discovered.

His "meticulous research" led to his overlooking the 1,500 papers amassed on the USS Cyclops and the ten-year search and investigation, contained in such unimaginable repositories as the National Archives (boxes 1068–1070, Modern Military Branch). His desire to solve it based on his own hunches led to a statement that could make even Ripley sit up and blink: "I confidently decided that the newspapers, the Navy, and all the ships at sea had been wrong, and that there had been a storm near Norfolk that day strong enough to sink the ship." The documents at the National Archives and Records Administration make it clear there was no storm. Yet Kusche wrote: "Contrary to popular opinion, there never was an official inquiry into the disappearance… Had there been any investigation, the weather information would surely have been discovered." He claimed there was a storm on March 10 off the Virginia capes. But throughout his entire recital he never mentioned the Cyclops's ETA at Baltimore on March 13. If he had, his wishful storm of March 10 would have been exposed as long before the Cyclops was even due off the Capes.

In the final analysis the acrimony he directed at others can be returned to him. His solutions were based merely on faulty newspaper articles, elastic conclusions there from, and on the whole trying to explain away why there was no debris or SOS. Combined with his inability (or reluctance) to even travel near the Triangle, his research was no more informed than anybody who browses their Daily Blatt during their morning coffee. (Quasar, pp. 93.)

And… The acrimony falls back right where it belongs, to Quasar, the mystic and sensationalist.

The records of the Weather Bureau and the reports from the Amolco prove that there was a storm. If "documents at the National Archives and Records Administration" claim otherwise, they are mistaken. Who should know it better, the National Archives and Records Administration, or the Weather Bureau and a ship that actually was in that storm?

This, by the way, from Quasar, who faults Kusche for relying on archival records instead of hanging around the Triangle. Apparently, to Quasar the relative value of archival records and firsthand reports varies according to how useful they are in prolonging the existence of triangular mysteries.

Kusche said only that there never was an official investigation. He didn't say the Navy had no files on the case. Whether he read all the Navy files on the case, I don't know. But his claim that there was no official investigation doesn't prove he didn't. Likewise, the existence of those files doesn't mean that there was any official, systematic Navy investigation that extended to checking weather records.

Quasar's criticism of Kusche as a manic debunker, however, collapses completely with a link from the Wikipedia article on the Cyclops to a June 1929 article in Popular Science by one Alfred P. Reck that makes all of Kusche's major points and more. (Reck, Alfred P. "Strangest American Sea Mystery is Solved at Last." Popular Science (June 1929) 15–17.) I can't find a citation in Kusche's book, so either both came up with the same theory independently, corroborating it, or Kusche is guilty of plagiarism, but not mania. I can't imagine a writer of Kusche's stature committing plagiarism, but find it equally hard to believe that as a research librarian he could have missed that article.

Hmm… Looking over Kusche's chapter, it looks to me like he found only the The Virginian-Pilot coverage, indeed. I guess he didn't have the benefits of the internet and Google Books. Had he had those tools back in the seventies, he'd probably have truly kicked the shit out of the Bermuda Triangle.

(By the way, Reck is a great name for a writer on a shipwreck, isn't it?) Reck, like Quasar, went through the Navy files — and reached diametrically opposite conclusions.

(1) The Cyclops was heavily overloaded. She could carry 8,000 tons of coal, but was carrying 10,835 tons of ore and 4,000 tons of water. Her maximum deadweight (combined weight of cargo, ballast water, fresh water, fuel, provisions, passengers, and crew) was 14,500 tons. She was over that from cargo and water alone, not even counting fuel and the other items.

(With coal, which would be loaded by volume, there was no way to overload her. At 8,000 tons of coal, her holds were full. But as ore is much heavier than coal, she could already be overloaded with ore when there was still empty space in her holds, something coal handlers like Worley and Pereira may not have realized, or they realized it, but being unused to loading by weight, miscalculated the resulting deadweight.)

(2) The ore cargo had very probably not been trimmed level, but left higher in the middle, just asking for it to shift in a storm. (By the way, the cargo had been placed on wood dunnage, which seems to rule out the "grinding out the bottom" theory, if the dunnage was thick enough.)

(3) According to Worley's complaint to the Navy, most of his crew consisted of raw recruits.

(4) The molasses tanker Amolco (spelled Amalco in the article) passed the Cyclops off the Virginia Capes at a distance of five miles on the evening of March 9, according to the tanker's log.

(5) According to the same log and to Weather Bureau records, there was a severe storm off the Virginia Capes on March 10. It was the heaviest storm the captain of the Amolco, C.E. Hilliard, had ever experienced. The waves almost sank his ship.

(6) The captain of the Amolco was positive that the Cyclops must have foundered in that storm: " 'If I had been carrying manganese ore,' Captain Hilliard reported, 'I could not have survived the gale.' "

(7) The storm was not widely known due to wartime restrictions on ships' weather reports.

(8) There was no SOS sent because U-boats were feared to be in the area. An SOS would have been as likely to attract the enemy as rescuers.

One slap of such a giant wave, and the Cyclops doubtless keeled over. Once on her side, the shifting cargo and the weighty superstructure would have prevented the vessel from righting herself, and she must have dropped like a huge steel weight to the bottom of the ocean. This explains why no lifeboat or even as much as a spar of the ship was ever found.

Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy at the time the Cyclops vanished, endorsed the solution offered in Reck's article.

QED. This, I think, merits a promotion of this case to "solved" status.

The so-called mystery of the Cyclops had been solved before the Bermuda Triangle was invented. Kusche solved it again, and now the latter-day mystics are trying to muddy the waters once more.

Any serious researcher independently reaches the conclusion that the Cyclops perished in that storm. Any attempt to deny that amounts to recalculating her speed so that she would have been ahead of or behind the storm, preferably both at the same time.

Weather can also be ruled out. The only rough weather were high winds off Cape Hatteras on the 10th of March, but they dissipated the next day. Cyclops should not have been around there yet, being due on the 13th. Her engine had been fixed, regardless of popular rumor, so she was not traveling on one engine but was making normal speed.

This is truly mind boggling. On the one hand, the Cyclops was behind the storm, as she was not due before the thirteenth. On the other hand, she was ahead of the storm, as her other engine had been fixed and she was now faster.

Apparently, to a true mystic a ship can be at the same time ahead of and behind a storm. As long as she is not in the storm, as that would allow for a naturalistic explanation of the "mystery" of her vanishment.

And that's ahead of and/or behind a storm that raged along the whole East Coast, not just "off the Virginia Capes" or "off the Carolinas." There were storm warnings all the way down to Florida, and Reck's article is accompanied by a map prepared by the Weather Bureau, from reports of vessels on March 10, that shows that the storm stretched all the way from Canada down to the sea off Florida, almost to The Bahamas.

Finally, Quasar apparently got the March 13 ETA from Worley. As we know by now, if Nervig can be trusted, Worley's ETAs cannot — they were based on "navigation as practiced aboard that vessel."

However, on March 3, 1918, Worley sent a surprising message: "Arrived Barbados, West Indies, 1730 [5.30 P.M.] for bunker coal. Arrive Baltimore, Md, 12013 [March 13,]. Notify Office Director Naval Auxiliaries, Comdr. Train (Atl), 07004. CYCLOPS."

I have not yet seen the Navy's files on this case, but given that Reck and Quasar both examined them and arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions, one of them has got some explaining to do. Given that Reck was a serious researcher looking for a "natural and logical" explanation and that Quasar is a mystic that at every turn uses the utmost sophistry to rule out any naturalistic explanation that would destroy one of his triangular pet mysteries, I have a hunch who has got the explaining to do. I guess the most charitable assumption is that the Navy disposed of some important files in the intervening eighty years.

But what about her two sister ships, the Proteus and the Nereus, which also vanished in the Bermuda Triangle? If three out of four ships of a class vanish, what does that suggest?

To the mystic, it suggests that the Martians consider this class collectible. To the rationalist, it suggests that this class suffered from a constructional flaw, possibly in conjunction with corrosion from acidic coal cargo and unusual stresses from the heavy ore cargos none of the colliers was designed for, but every one of them was carrying on her final voyage.

"Has it occurred to you that there are too many clues in this room?"

— Hercule Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express

Again, as we among others have seen in the case of the Mary Celeste and will see in the cases of the Carroll A. Deering and the Marine Sulphur Queen, there are too many possible naturalistic solutions, not too few. If the sensationalists and mystics want to show that there are any Martians, Atlanteans, or other paranormal powers in the Bermuda Triangle, as statistics don't bear it out, either they have to find a case where the Martians beamed up a ship under the eyes of witnesses with quality cameras, or they have to find a case for which no rational explanation is possible. Yet all their best mysteries have too many, not too few, possible rational explanations.

Thus, the mystics are out from the get-go. The question is not whether the solution is naturalistic or paranormal. The question is which naturalistic solution to the mystery in question is true: In the case of the Cyclops, some sort of treason, or some combination of overloading / careless loading / structural failure / cargo shifting / capsizing / bad weather. What is left to the mystics is to try and dismiss each reasonable explanation over a weak and sophistic objection, until they are left in ignorance, in the awe and horror of the paranormal and supernatural they crave.