WITHOUT A TRACE
When a catastrophe strikes a ship at sea and she goes to the bottom, there is
usually some clue to her fate - a bit of debris or perhaps a floating life jacket. Five
years after her sinking, a life jacket from the
Lusitania was found, for example,
floating along a wharf in Philadelphia - thousands of miles from where the ship went
down in 1915. But in the case of the British freighter
Waratah, and that of the US
Navy collier
Cyclops, no clues have ever been brought forward. The 16,800-ton
Waratah, only a year old, was last sighted off the coast of South Africa in 1909. The
ship had been described by some as top-heavy and may have flipped over in heavy
seas; with her vanished 211 people. Equally mystifying is the disappearance of the
Cyclops, a 19,000-ton ship with 309 people aboard, about seven months before the
end of World War I. She was last heard from in March 1918 while en route to
Baltimore from the West Indies. Since no logical explanation has ever been offered
for her disappearance, the US Navy file on the
Cyclops has never been closed.
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