The Boy's Book of the Sea by Eric Wood - HTML preview

MYSTERIES OF THE SEA
Strange Disappearances of Ships at Sea

IT is only to be expected that the sea, with all its glory and wonders, its tragedies and its romances, should have its mysteries too. Some of them have been cleared up; others remain unsolved to this day, despite all the ingenious attempts at explanation that have been made. Some of them go back to the distant past, such as the Gloriana mystery. She was a British brig, and in 1775 the captain of a Greenland whaler ran across her amidst the ice-fields at 77 degrees north latitude. She was a weird spectacle as she picked her way through a narrow channel between two great icebergs, which seemed to be closing in to crush her, with no one making an attempt to steer her safely through the danger. The Greenlander looked in amazement. The Gloriana’s sails were torn to shreds and frozen hard, her rigging was a tangled mass that had not been trimmed for Heaven knew how long; on her decks great mountains of snow were reared, and her sides glistened with ice; she was a spectral ship of the icy seas, a sight to strike fear into the heart of any superstitious sailor. For a while the captain of the whaler did not know what to do; the strange spectacle awed him; but clearly it was his duty to look into the matter, and at last, summoning up courage, he lowered a boat and rowed over to the Gloriana.

If he had been amazed before, he was staggered now. Clambering up the ice-cold side, he glanced in at a porthole and saw a man sitting at the cabin table, holding a pen as though about to write in the log-book that lay open before him. But there was no sign of life about the man. He was stiff, cold, dead! The Greenlander, stiffening himself up to the task before him, got aboard, walked gingerly, awesomely into the cabin and found himself standing by the side of a dead man, frozen hard. Peering over the dead man’s shoulder, he found that the last entry in the log was dated Nov. 11, 1762—thirteen long years before! What had happened? How came it that this man sitting in his cabin, writing, had met death so suddenly that he could not finish entering his log? The Greenlander could not say; no one could ever tell; and the mystery was made no clearer when it was found that there were several other dead bodies about, one of them being a woman. And not one showed any sign that would lead to the solution of the mystery of how they had met their death.

Then take the Marie Celeste, which, leaving New York on Nov. 7, 1872, with a cargo of petroleum and alcohol, was met a month later off the Azores by the brig Dei Gratia. Hailing her, the captain of the latter ship received no answer, and something arousing his curiosity, he went aboard—to find not a soul on her. To heighten the mystery, there were no evidences of mutiny, panic or disorder of any kind; the log showed nothing that could have caused the desertion of the ship, the last entry being dated ten days before the Dei Gratia came up with her. One boat was missing, and that alone showed how the crew, five men, and the captain and his wife and child had gone. All the gear was in order, her rigging being properly made fast, her companion-ways were open. Down in the cabin a little organ had open music lying in front of it, a sewing-machine had a piece of unfinished work in it, the men’s chests in the fo’c’sle were unopened and not ransacked, the captain’s dinner was half cooked in the galley.

And all was silent. Though a score or more theories have been advanced, no one has yet cleared up the mystery of what tragic happening had taken place on the Marie Celeste to make her crew desert her.

These mysteries of the sea are not all of an early date; even recent years have them on record. Thus in 1910 the Inverness-shire, which left Hamburg in March, bound for Saint Rosalia, in California, was met off the Falkland Islands in June by the Italian steamer Verina, with no living being aboard except a few cats. She, too, was in perfect order so far as arrangement went. Food was in a pot on the galley fire, an open copy of the “Ancient Mariner” lay on the captain’s table, as though he had been interrupted in his reading of the weird tale of the sea. Perhaps he could tell a weirder one than that. The sails were set, the deck shipshape, the cargo intact, and from the pack of cards which lay scattered about the mess-room table it would seem that the crew had been disturbed in a quiet game. And the explanation of it all? It was said that the crew, thirty of them, had become obsessed with the idea that the ship was unlucky; they broke out into mutiny, refused to obey orders, and the ship was deserted. In due course the Verina towed her into Port Stanley, where, of course, she received her share in the salvage.

In 1913 the tank steamer Roumanian came across a ship which was acting so queerly that the captain decided to investigate. It was ten days out from Port Arthur. The strange ship was a sailing vessel, but though some of her sails were set, they answered no useful purpose, for she was buffeted about at the will of the fickle winds. It took the Roumanian an hour or two to catch up with the erratic ship, and when she did so her captain boarded and found that she was the Remittent, a Norwegian barque. She was crewless, and the explanation of her queer actions was that the rudder was unlashed and was banging about as the vessel swung to the waves. There was nothing missing; her papers were all intact, her cargo was there, her water was fresh, her provisions plenty; and yet there wasn’t a man aboard, and no indication as to why there wasn’t. And all her lifeboats swung at the davits. Inquiries later showed that the Remittent had left Rio Grande do Sul on Oct. 25, 1912, with a captain and a crew of six men. The Roumanian towed her for many days, and then, a gale breaking upon them, had to cast her adrift, a danger to all shipping.

It is this aspect of the unmanned ship that makes her a thing to be disposed of. Whether derelict or simply deserted, she is a menace to other ships; she may loom out of the darkest night and crash into another vessel, to the danger of all aboard. On the other hand, she may voyage for months—nay, years—and never come into collision. For instance, the Fannie E. Woolsten, an American ship, was wrecked in 1891 off the United States coast, whence her battered hulk drifted across the Atlantic, passed down the coasts of Europe, and then swung out across the Atlantic again, going ashore a hundred or so miles north of the place where she had been wrecked, having covered 10,000 miles in her strange cruise.