October 26, 2016 • 28 mins
There have been numerous instances of ships found adrift with no one on board. Four of those nautical mysteries are featured here, with some truly chilling details.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Matt, I'm no, I'm Ben, and we are Stuff
they don't want you to know. Each week we cover
the latest and strangest in fringe science, government cover ups,
allegations at the paranormal and more. New episodes come out
every Friday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, in anywhere else
you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
(00:23):
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. A couple of years ago, Holly researched
and we recorded and a show on the Mary Celeste.
(00:44):
Pretty creepy story about a ship that was discovered a
drift without its passengers or crew in eighteen seventy two.
And there are lots and lots of theories about what
happened to the Mary Celeste, how it came to be
adrift and apparently abandoned. Uh no really how percent definitive
answer though, so, the Mary Celeste is the most famous
(01:05):
of a whole collection of similar nautical history mysteries, so
much so that a lot of the other ships we
were about to talk about are described with names like
the Welsh Mary Celeste, or New Zealand's Mary Celeste. She's famous,
that Mary Celeste. Yep on the side. Note, the ships
that we were talking about today, we're all either owned
(01:26):
or captained by people from Europe or North America. And
obviously there are nautical mysteries from other parts of the
world too, But aside from more recent stories of ghost
ships often full of bodies, that have been made headlines
in the last couple of decades, a lot of the
older stories from the rest of the world don't quite
fit the definition of what we're talking about today. So,
(01:46):
for example, numerous Japanese vessels wound up off the coast
of northwestern North America in the nineteenth century, but all
of them had either been very obviously wrecked in a
storm or there were survivors on board to explain what happened,
so they don't quite fit into the ghost ship genre
that we were talking about today. However, if you know
(02:07):
about some historically substantiated ghost ships from other nations, send
us a note and we would be happy to hear
about them. Because I looked real hard and did not
have success. So we're gonna jump right in, and the
first ship that we're talking about is the Resolving and
this was a merchant brig originally built in Nova, Scotia
(02:28):
and it worked as a cargo ship between Canada and
Wales in the late nineteenth century. Its home port was
Everest with whales, and it carried a crew of about eleven.
In August of eight, four sailors from the Royal Navy
gun boat h MS Mallard spotted the Resolving off the
coast of what's now Newfoundland and the Labrador and it
(02:49):
was moving kind of erratically. So the Mallard hailed the
Resolving and didn't get a response, So sailors from the
Mallard boarded the other ship and they found it absolutely
abandoned these erratic movements or because the sales were all
still set, but there was nobody at the helm. This
abandonment had happened quite recently to the time that they
(03:09):
discovered it. There were fires still lit in the galley
and lamps were still burning, and a table was set
with food in preparation for a meal that looked like
it was just about to be eaten. The last entry
in the log had been made about six hours before
the Mallard spotted it adrift, and contained nothing that suggested
a problem. There was no sign of struggle. There was
(03:31):
no indication that the ship was or had been in
some kind of serious distress. A yard arm was broken,
and there was some tackle that was dangling, but none
of this was anything to suggest that the ship or
the crew had been in some kind of major peril.
The lifeboat was gone, but there was really no clear
reason that anyone would have taken it. There was not
a reason that was evident that they would have abandoned
(03:53):
the ship, and plus the light the lifeboat itself was
never recovered, nor was any crew who might have taken
it away. It also didn't seem like the ship had
been robbed. A bag of gold coins that was kept
in the captain's locker to secure cargo was still there,
but the personal fortune of the captain, John James was missing.
(04:15):
Of course, speculation about what had happened started immediately. The
initial theory was that the Resolver had run into an
iceberg that the Mallard's crew had spotted nearby, and the
idea was that the inexperienced sailors aboard had been panicked
and abandoned the ship. Uh There was even a theory
that the ship had actually become lodged on the iceberg,
(04:37):
and the crew, thinking that they were permanently stuck, had
abandoned the ship. But then the Resolver had worked itself
free after they had already abandoned it. Another theory was
that the crew had taken one of the boats and
left for some reason, intending to return right away, but
then something befell them on route. But that raised the
question of why the whole crew would have gone and
(04:58):
why they would have done so with all of the
ship's sales set. There was a third theory that, since
John James's fortune was missing, maybe it had been a
case of mutiny and theft. But then that raised the
question of why if you were going to steal John
James's fortune, you would not also steal the ship's purse. Tragically,
the disappearance of the captain's funds did mean that his
(05:18):
widow died in poverty. Eventually, the Resolvern was towed into
harbor and put back into service, sailing out of Cardiff.
After a series of other less serious accidents, the re
outfitted Resolve and was lost off the coast of Nova
Scotia in so a little while after this, all happened,
(05:38):
people started to sort of think that the story of
the resolve In was apocryphal. It became part of the
local lore and family stories, but there wasn't any kind
of written record to back it up. That changed thanks
to will Wayne, who's the great grandson of John James.
He started trying to research the ship and figure out
what had happened to his great grandfather. And while he
was doing this research, he found the HMS Mallard's log
(06:01):
book for the period of time that included its discovery
of the resolving The strange discovery was indeed detailed there
in the log books, so finally a primary source account
from the time that this weird thing had happened. As
the story of John James's mysterious disappearance had been handed
down through Will Wayne's family, another family in Newfoundland had
(06:24):
a story of its own. A few generations prior, a
couple of men had found an unknown sea captain in uniform,
deceased sitting under a tree. They didn't report the fine
and instead buried him in an unmarked grave. Later on,
members of that family were mysteriously in possession of gold coins.
The discovery and burial was about a month after the
(06:47):
resolving was found adrift, in Wayne was planning a trip
to Newfoundland to try to figure out if this family's
mysterious wealth and this sea captain had purportedly been found
and read was really related to his great grandfather's lost fortune,
although he doesn't seem to have publicly announced yet what
he discovered when he went on this trip. So this
(07:10):
could be a developing ghost ship story. It could be
a developing ghost chip story. Uh. The part of this
that's the creepiest to me is the part where the
fires were still lit the so certainly indicates very recent people.
People were just there. Yes, we are going to take
(07:30):
a brief break before we get to the next story
because we don't want to jump into it and then
immediately stopped for a pause, So we will be back
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so almost as if to do the Resolve in one better. Next,
we have the Sea Bird. The SPC Bird was another
(09:17):
merchant brig, and while the Resolving had been traveling across
the North Atlantic between North America and Europe, the Sea
Birds sailed north to south from New England to Central
America and back. In seventeen fifty, as it was returning
from Honduras, the Sea Bird ran aground on Eaton's Beach,
Rhode Island. And the reason it ran aground once again,
(09:38):
nobody was on board. Here's how it's like a slightly
amplified version of the Resolving. The Resolving had had the
fires and lamps still lit. The Sea Birds still had
coffee brewing and tobacco smoke in the air. Although it
had no human occupants still aboard, there were a dog
and a cat there. So the dog and the cat
made the coffee and had a cigarette. The obvious explanation
(10:03):
was that they were they were setting up a sort
of dog's playing poker. S Exactly where this gets really
odd is that the seabird was on its way to Newport,
Rhode Island. Eaton's Beaches in Newport and is one of
the city's public beaches today. So the seabird made it
through the last leg of its journey, navigating shoals, rocks,
(10:24):
and breakers, and came to rest on the beach basically
at its destination, rather gently, but apparently with no one
at the wheel. The seabirds longboat was also missing, which
led to the speculation that the crew had abandoned ship
for some reason. But just the same there was not
a reason that was clear why they would have done this.
(10:45):
There had not been any rough weather in the area,
and the ship itself was basically undamaged. Even considering the
fact that it had come to rest on a beach
with no crew they're steering it. It had come through
all that more or less unscathed. Neither the longbed nor
the crew were ever recovered. After all this, the merchant
who owned the sea Bird, Mr. Isaac Steel, sold it
(11:07):
to another merchant named Henry Collins. I don't think the
reasons for this are really documented, but I imagine him going, no,
this is a little too weird for me. I don't
want this vote anymore. There are a lot of different
versions of the Sea Bird story. Because it happened so
long ago and because it became part of the local
lore in Rhode Island, various fictionalized versions of it were
(11:30):
written and printed in the century or so after it happened,
and some of those were then sort of picked up
by people who thought they were a historical account and
not a fictionalized story. So if you go and look
this one up, you might find some discrepancies and things
like the years, various other details. Uh, there's one that
that says that in addition to the cat and a dog,
(11:51):
there was a canary. There are just little oddities that
are slightly different from one telling to another. And a raccoon,
and it's just out there to be a bunch of
cookie animals that have a ship. I'd love it where
they made coffee and smoke. Yeah, I mean, this is
the start of a great show. The next one that
(12:11):
we're going to talk about is the Envy Joioda, and
it had a bit of a history before its mysterious
final voyage. It was originally built as a luxury yacht
for director Roland West and film star Mary Pickford. Was
a frequent guest. The U. S. Navy acquired the yacht
just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and put it
into wartime service patrolling in the Pacific. After the War
(12:33):
of the Joyoda was used as a cabin cruiser in
the Southern Pacific Ocean. It's captain, Thomas Henry Miller, was
from Wales and most of its crew were from the
Southern Pacific, including New Zealand, Carabas and Samoa. Fifteen of
the twenty people aboard on the last voyage were from
the island nation of Tokalau, which had a population of
(12:55):
only about six hundred people. There's who were aboard that
day included sixteen crew and nine passengers. In October of
nineteen fifty five, the Joida left the port of Appia
in Western Samoa now simply Samoa, and it was bound
for Toklau with oil, timber, food and supplies in its
(13:16):
cargo hold. The trip from Western Samoa should have taken
about forty hours, but on the way the Joida just vanished.
If it made any distress calls, Those calls were never
received and a search was mounted, but they didn't find anything.
And then on November tenth of nineteen thirty eight, days
(13:37):
after the Joda set sail from the port of Appia,
the Tuvalu spotted a badly listing ship off the coast
of Fiji. In spite of a huge hole in the side,
it was still afloat, but it was almost six hundred
miles off course. This was of course the JOIDA, the
two volus and a boat over to investigate, and when
the captain radioed Fiji to make a report of he
(14:00):
had found, he said, quote, it sounds like another Mary Celeste.
We have no theory yet what happened. There was no
sign of the passengers or the crew. The lifeboats and raft,
which were more than adequate to remove both the passengers
and the crew, were gone, although there weren't enough life
jackets for all twenty five people aboard, along with all
(14:20):
the food from the galley, The ship's log and sextant
were also gone. The ship was towed to Fiji and
all the water was pumped out of the hull, but
that just deepened the mystery. When they originally found the boat,
there was an obvious conclusion, which was that the whole
that was obviously there had caused the ship to take
(14:40):
on water and list, but once they actually pumped the
water out, that conclusion was quickly dismissed. Instead, based on
the position of barnacles and the condition of the rest
of the ship, it seemed like the ship had actually
taken on water from Raine and possibly very big waves
on rough seas. The damaged hull had been a re
salt of those pounding seeds, not the cause of the
(15:03):
boats taking on water. The lights, though not working, we're
all set to the on position, and the ship's clocks,
which had been powered by generators, had all stopped at
ten fifty three. It seemed as though the generators had
taken some kind of damage. There was a mattress covering
one engine, and the other looked like someone had been
working on it. Once all of the water had been drained,
(15:26):
it also became clear just how much was gone from
the wrecked ship. In addition to the lifeboats and the rafts,
the sextant food from the cargo hold, just about everything
else that had any use or value and was movable
was gone. The refrigerators in the galley, on the other hand,
still contained meat. There are lots of theories about what
(15:47):
happened a lot of them, hinge on the idea that
there had been some kind of problem on the ship,
a mechanical failure or a collision, and that the crew
and passengers had abandoned it. But the big issue with
that theory is that Captain Miller was highly experienced, and
it seems unlikely that he would have abandoned a seaworthy
ship in a well traveled part of the ocean rather
(16:07):
than waiting for rescue. The other big theories all tie
in some way to criminal activity. That pirates may have
robbed the vessel and then murdered everyone aboard and left
a derelict, or that somebody on board might have mutinied
and stolen everything and then forced everyone who wasn't part
of the plot into a lifeboat. There was a whole
conspiracy theory involving a fleet of murderous Japanese fisherman, and
(16:32):
the captain was actually scheduled to be in court in
Wales because his wife was divorcing him, and some people
suggested that he had tried to orchestrate a quote accident
to get out of that. There is no evidence at
all for any of these, and in particular, the story
of the murderous Japanese fisherman is probably a lot more
related to the recently concluded World War Two than anything
(16:55):
based in real events. In two thousand two, David Wright
published a book called Joida Solving the Mystery, in which
he concluded that a corroded pipe in the engine cooling
system had been leaking water into the ship for some
time before anyone had noticed, and then broke and flooded
the vessel. He theorized that the crew had sent a
(17:18):
madeay signal, but that the radio wasn't actually working uh,
and they did that before abandoning the ship via lifeboats
and rafts. If that really is what happened, it's probably
the saddest possible scenario, since it means that the people
who were on the rafts would have slowly died of hunger, thirst, drowning,
and sharks while waiting for help that wasn't actually coming.
(17:41):
In addition to that, this was devastating for the island
nation of Tokalau because, I mean it's population was so
small and there were so many people on board who
were from there. Um, there have been memorials and things
set up in more recent years, but like that was
just a huge percentage of the population to be lost
in one maritime incident. Uh. And now we're going to
(18:06):
have another brief sponsor break before we get to our
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it's environmentally friendly. You can consume amazing magazines that you
know and love. So our last ghost ship is the
Carol A. Deering, which was a schooner built in Bath,
Maine by the G. G. Deering Company in nineteen nineteen.
In January of ninety one, the ship, which had an
(19:30):
experienced crew, was returning from Brazil to Virginia. On January
twenty nine of that year, the Deering passed the lightship
at Cape Lookout. If you are I know most of
our listeners are probably not all that familiar with the
coast of North Carolina. There are lots of little islands
and things. It is very treacherous, so there are lots
(19:50):
of lightships and lighthouses to try to guide ships. And
so they passed the lightship that was at Cape Lookout
and the lightship keeper Captain Jacobson. Later we're ported that
somebody aboard who did not seem to be an officer,
told him that the ship had lost its anchors. Now,
Captain Jacobson was kind of suspicious of this. Of this situation,
the crew was kind of milling around aimlessly, and the
(20:13):
fact that the person who was telling him about the
missing anchor did not seem to be in charge was
kind of odd, but UH Captain Jacobson's radio was out,
so he could not radio the Coastguard to tell them
of his concerns. At about five forty pm the next day,
the s S. Lake Elon spotted the ship and noticed
(20:35):
that it seemed to be on an odd course. And
then at six thirty am on January thirty one, the
schooner was spotted once again. This time it was a
ground on Diamond Shoals off of Cape Hatteras. CP. Brady
of the Cape Hatteras Coastguard Station was the first to
spot the boat and suspected that it was the deering,
although the sea was too rough that day to really investigate.
(20:58):
It would be February four for a wrecker named the
Rescue could get close enough to confirm the ship's identity
and verify Brady's report. As has been the case with
all of our other UH ghost ships that were operated
by sail power, the sales were all still set, the
anchors were indeed missing, as had been reported to the
light shipkeeper at Cape Lookout. Food was set out as
(21:21):
though a meal were about to be served, and the
crew were all gone, along with all their personal belongings,
their navigational equipment, and some of the ship's papers. The
lifeboats were gone as well. There were three cats on board,
but no other signs of life. I would be the
fool that tried to take the kiddies on an escape boat.
(21:44):
It wouldn't go well. I'm just saying, I know it's foolish. Uh.
The Daring continued to rest there on the shoals until March,
when it was starting to break apart and become a
hazard to other ships, and at that point it was
towed out to see and scuttled. The scuttling was only
partially effect, like a big chunk of it floated back
to Ogracoke Island. Uh. And the mystery continued even after
(22:08):
the ship had been destroyed. That April, Christopher Columbus Gray
reported that he had found a note in a bottle
that detailed the Daring having been taking over by pirates. Ultimately,
this was confirmed to be a complete hoax, and that
Gray had actually written the note himself. A month later,
the wife of the ship's captain, Lula Wormle, teamed up
(22:28):
with its former captain, William H. Merritt and her pastor,
the Reverend Dr. Addison Lormer to try to persuade the
government to investigate what had happened. They started with Senator
Frederick Hale of Maine, and then they met with Secretary
of Commerce Herbert Hoover. And although an FBI agent did
visit Dare County and found plenty of people willing to speculate,
(22:49):
there were really no conclusive results. Leads that he tried
to track down included Bolshevik pirates and rum runners. One
frequent theory in this whole situation, as the crew was
dissatisfied with its captain W. B. Wormal, He had actually
replaced Merritt just a few days after the Daring first
departed Virginia in August of nine. This is because Merritt
(23:12):
had been taken ill suddenly. Captain Balance of the Cape
Hatteras Station theorized that the crew had taken everything of value,
abandoned it, and then wrecked it into the shoals on purpose.
On the other hand, the prevailing opinion of the coast
Guard was that it was a terrible location for doing
such a thing, because the seas were so treacherous there
(23:33):
that it would be incredibly difficult to bring in a lifeboat. Safely.
You had another mystery. Uh, these are the four ghost
chips that I found the most substantiated information about. There
are many others, but a lot of their accounts boiled
down to we found about there were no people on
it the end like that. We don't know anything else
(23:55):
about the history of the ship, or the history that
people on it, or what the theories where it's like
a paragraph. Studn't spooky, but not so much of a narrative. Yeah, yeah,
we could. We could just list off a bunch more.
Also was another ship that was found with no people
on it. Next year we'll do spooky one liners. I
also have some listener mails. This listener mail is from
(24:19):
Erica and it is a throwback all the way to
August when we were doing some African history and Erica
says dear Tracy and Holly. I recently started listening to
your podcast, picking and choosing from the older episodes with
titles that sound most interesting. I was exceptionally excited about
the August Dahomye. I was an art major in college
and studied studied a lot of African art history. I
(24:43):
narrowly missed obtaining a minor in African studies by just
one class. Anyway, I took a short winter break study
abroad trip to Wieda in the winter of two of
two thousand and six and have been to the museum
palace you spoke of in the episode, as well as
many other monuments to the slave trade, including the Arch
and Gate of No Return on the beach of Ouida.
(25:04):
The study abroad trip was specially organized by the African
art history professor. I had taken multiple classes with who
had lived in Ouida as part of her graduate studies,
thus gaining connections with a prominent local family who fed
and guided us while we were there. Benin is or
at least was ten years ago, hardly the placed quote
tourists went, and I really cherished being able to visit
(25:27):
such a historical place that not many Westerners can or
do travel to. This podcast brought back so many memories
for me. I even went back and pulled out my
old travel journal and read my entry from the day
we traveled to the museum, and I wrote about the
Amazon warriors and the throat I saw that sat a
top four very real human skulls. My experience in Benin
(25:47):
was my first time traveling out of the country and
it forever changed me in so many ways. Words can
hardly describe the feelings one has walking the same road
the slaves walked, standing at the same spot where the
auctions were held. Although I don't have other real insights
about the topic to share and the podcast is from
quite a while ago, now, I just had to tell
you about my experience there and that this podcast really
(26:07):
really resonated with me. I can't wait to listen to
the follow up episode on the Amazon Warriors next to
lighten the mood. Here are a few attached her a
few photos I took during another outing from our trip
to the Village of Gambi also known as the Village
on Stilts, as well as the Venice of Africa applet
named is as accessible only by boat. There's a lot
of interesting history with the founding of this village and
(26:29):
its linked to the slave trade or attempt to escape
the slave trade. More accurately, that might make a great podcast, hint, hint,
But even if not, certainly it is another interesting facet
to the slave trade history out of Benin that I'm
sure you'll be interested in learning more about for your
own personal amusement. Take care, ladies, Erica. Thank you so much,
Erica for this note and these pictures. I kind of
(26:52):
love it when people send us notes to tell us
that they have listened to and enjoyed older episodes. Um,
sometimes we get questions about older episode that past hosts
have done and we can't answer them, So just be
forewarned if you write us about things that are really old,
we might not be able to answer your questions. But yeah,
I'm always so delighted when number one, when people um
(27:14):
stumble onto older things in the archive and get really
excited about it, and then number two, uh connect the
things that have been on their our show with their
personal travels or lives or homes. So thank you again, Erica.
If you would like to write to us, we're at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed in History
(27:36):
and on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler is
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Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. We
have an Instagram that is a missed missed in History. Also,
if you would like to come to our website, which
is missed in History dot com. You will find show
notes with all of our research for all of our episodes.
(27:56):
You'll find an archive of every single episode we have
ever done, and you can also kind to our parent
companies website, which is how stuff works dot com. You
can find lots of other information about lots of other
weird maritime things that have happened. You can do all
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or history dot com. For more on this
(28:19):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot
com
I'm Matt, I'm no, I'm Ben, and we are Stuff
they don't want you to know. Each week we cover
the latest and strangest in fringe science, government cover ups,
allegations at the paranormal and more. New episodes come out
every Friday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, in anywhere else
you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
(00:23):
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. A couple of years ago, Holly researched
and we recorded and a show on the Mary Celeste.
(00:44):
Pretty creepy story about a ship that was discovered a
drift without its passengers or crew in eighteen seventy two.
And there are lots and lots of theories about what
happened to the Mary Celeste, how it came to be
adrift and apparently abandoned. Uh no really how percent definitive
answer though, so, the Mary Celeste is the most famous
(01:05):
of a whole collection of similar nautical history mysteries, so
much so that a lot of the other ships we
were about to talk about are described with names like
the Welsh Mary Celeste, or New Zealand's Mary Celeste. She's famous,
that Mary Celeste. Yep on the side. Note, the ships
that we were talking about today, we're all either owned
(01:26):
or captained by people from Europe or North America. And
obviously there are nautical mysteries from other parts of the
world too, But aside from more recent stories of ghost
ships often full of bodies, that have been made headlines
in the last couple of decades, a lot of the
older stories from the rest of the world don't quite
fit the definition of what we're talking about today. So,
(01:46):
for example, numerous Japanese vessels wound up off the coast
of northwestern North America in the nineteenth century, but all
of them had either been very obviously wrecked in a
storm or there were survivors on board to explain what happened,
so they don't quite fit into the ghost ship genre
that we were talking about today. However, if you know
(02:07):
about some historically substantiated ghost ships from other nations, send
us a note and we would be happy to hear
about them. Because I looked real hard and did not
have success. So we're gonna jump right in, and the
first ship that we're talking about is the Resolving and
this was a merchant brig originally built in Nova, Scotia
(02:28):
and it worked as a cargo ship between Canada and
Wales in the late nineteenth century. Its home port was
Everest with whales, and it carried a crew of about eleven.
In August of eight, four sailors from the Royal Navy
gun boat h MS Mallard spotted the Resolving off the
coast of what's now Newfoundland and the Labrador and it
(02:49):
was moving kind of erratically. So the Mallard hailed the
Resolving and didn't get a response, So sailors from the
Mallard boarded the other ship and they found it absolutely
abandoned these erratic movements or because the sales were all
still set, but there was nobody at the helm. This
abandonment had happened quite recently to the time that they
(03:09):
discovered it. There were fires still lit in the galley
and lamps were still burning, and a table was set
with food in preparation for a meal that looked like
it was just about to be eaten. The last entry
in the log had been made about six hours before
the Mallard spotted it adrift, and contained nothing that suggested
a problem. There was no sign of struggle. There was
(03:31):
no indication that the ship was or had been in
some kind of serious distress. A yard arm was broken,
and there was some tackle that was dangling, but none
of this was anything to suggest that the ship or
the crew had been in some kind of major peril.
The lifeboat was gone, but there was really no clear
reason that anyone would have taken it. There was not
a reason that was evident that they would have abandoned
(03:53):
the ship, and plus the light the lifeboat itself was
never recovered, nor was any crew who might have taken
it away. It also didn't seem like the ship had
been robbed. A bag of gold coins that was kept
in the captain's locker to secure cargo was still there,
but the personal fortune of the captain, John James was missing.
(04:15):
Of course, speculation about what had happened started immediately. The
initial theory was that the Resolver had run into an
iceberg that the Mallard's crew had spotted nearby, and the
idea was that the inexperienced sailors aboard had been panicked
and abandoned the ship. Uh There was even a theory
that the ship had actually become lodged on the iceberg,
(04:37):
and the crew, thinking that they were permanently stuck, had
abandoned the ship. But then the Resolver had worked itself
free after they had already abandoned it. Another theory was
that the crew had taken one of the boats and
left for some reason, intending to return right away, but
then something befell them on route. But that raised the
question of why the whole crew would have gone and
(04:58):
why they would have done so with all of the
ship's sales set. There was a third theory that, since
John James's fortune was missing, maybe it had been a
case of mutiny and theft. But then that raised the
question of why if you were going to steal John
James's fortune, you would not also steal the ship's purse. Tragically,
the disappearance of the captain's funds did mean that his
(05:18):
widow died in poverty. Eventually, the Resolvern was towed into
harbor and put back into service, sailing out of Cardiff.
After a series of other less serious accidents, the re
outfitted Resolve and was lost off the coast of Nova
Scotia in so a little while after this, all happened,
(05:38):
people started to sort of think that the story of
the resolve In was apocryphal. It became part of the
local lore and family stories, but there wasn't any kind
of written record to back it up. That changed thanks
to will Wayne, who's the great grandson of John James.
He started trying to research the ship and figure out
what had happened to his great grandfather. And while he
was doing this research, he found the HMS Mallard's log
(06:01):
book for the period of time that included its discovery
of the resolving The strange discovery was indeed detailed there
in the log books, so finally a primary source account
from the time that this weird thing had happened. As
the story of John James's mysterious disappearance had been handed
down through Will Wayne's family, another family in Newfoundland had
(06:24):
a story of its own. A few generations prior, a
couple of men had found an unknown sea captain in uniform,
deceased sitting under a tree. They didn't report the fine
and instead buried him in an unmarked grave. Later on,
members of that family were mysteriously in possession of gold coins.
The discovery and burial was about a month after the
(06:47):
resolving was found adrift, in Wayne was planning a trip
to Newfoundland to try to figure out if this family's
mysterious wealth and this sea captain had purportedly been found
and read was really related to his great grandfather's lost fortune,
although he doesn't seem to have publicly announced yet what
he discovered when he went on this trip. So this
(07:10):
could be a developing ghost ship story. It could be
a developing ghost chip story. Uh. The part of this
that's the creepiest to me is the part where the
fires were still lit the so certainly indicates very recent people.
People were just there. Yes, we are going to take
(07:30):
a brief break before we get to the next story
because we don't want to jump into it and then
immediately stopped for a pause, So we will be back
after a quick word from a sponsor. So, building a
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so almost as if to do the Resolve in one better. Next,
we have the Sea Bird. The SPC Bird was another
(09:17):
merchant brig, and while the Resolving had been traveling across
the North Atlantic between North America and Europe, the Sea
Birds sailed north to south from New England to Central
America and back. In seventeen fifty, as it was returning
from Honduras, the Sea Bird ran aground on Eaton's Beach,
Rhode Island. And the reason it ran aground once again,
(09:38):
nobody was on board. Here's how it's like a slightly
amplified version of the Resolving. The Resolving had had the
fires and lamps still lit. The Sea Birds still had
coffee brewing and tobacco smoke in the air. Although it
had no human occupants still aboard, there were a dog
and a cat there. So the dog and the cat
made the coffee and had a cigarette. The obvious explanation
(10:03):
was that they were they were setting up a sort
of dog's playing poker. S Exactly where this gets really
odd is that the seabird was on its way to Newport,
Rhode Island. Eaton's Beaches in Newport and is one of
the city's public beaches today. So the seabird made it
through the last leg of its journey, navigating shoals, rocks,
(10:24):
and breakers, and came to rest on the beach basically
at its destination, rather gently, but apparently with no one
at the wheel. The seabirds longboat was also missing, which
led to the speculation that the crew had abandoned ship
for some reason. But just the same there was not
a reason that was clear why they would have done this.
(10:45):
There had not been any rough weather in the area,
and the ship itself was basically undamaged. Even considering the
fact that it had come to rest on a beach
with no crew they're steering it. It had come through
all that more or less unscathed. Neither the longbed nor
the crew were ever recovered. After all this, the merchant
who owned the sea Bird, Mr. Isaac Steel, sold it
(11:07):
to another merchant named Henry Collins. I don't think the
reasons for this are really documented, but I imagine him going, no,
this is a little too weird for me. I don't
want this vote anymore. There are a lot of different
versions of the Sea Bird story. Because it happened so
long ago and because it became part of the local
lore in Rhode Island, various fictionalized versions of it were
(11:30):
written and printed in the century or so after it happened,
and some of those were then sort of picked up
by people who thought they were a historical account and
not a fictionalized story. So if you go and look
this one up, you might find some discrepancies and things
like the years, various other details. Uh, there's one that
that says that in addition to the cat and a dog,
(11:51):
there was a canary. There are just little oddities that
are slightly different from one telling to another. And a raccoon,
and it's just out there to be a bunch of
cookie animals that have a ship. I'd love it where
they made coffee and smoke. Yeah, I mean, this is
the start of a great show. The next one that
(12:11):
we're going to talk about is the Envy Joioda, and
it had a bit of a history before its mysterious
final voyage. It was originally built as a luxury yacht
for director Roland West and film star Mary Pickford. Was
a frequent guest. The U. S. Navy acquired the yacht
just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and put it
into wartime service patrolling in the Pacific. After the War
(12:33):
of the Joyoda was used as a cabin cruiser in
the Southern Pacific Ocean. It's captain, Thomas Henry Miller, was
from Wales and most of its crew were from the
Southern Pacific, including New Zealand, Carabas and Samoa. Fifteen of
the twenty people aboard on the last voyage were from
the island nation of Tokalau, which had a population of
(12:55):
only about six hundred people. There's who were aboard that
day included sixteen crew and nine passengers. In October of
nineteen fifty five, the Joida left the port of Appia
in Western Samoa now simply Samoa, and it was bound
for Toklau with oil, timber, food and supplies in its
(13:16):
cargo hold. The trip from Western Samoa should have taken
about forty hours, but on the way the Joida just vanished.
If it made any distress calls, Those calls were never
received and a search was mounted, but they didn't find anything.
And then on November tenth of nineteen thirty eight, days
(13:37):
after the Joda set sail from the port of Appia,
the Tuvalu spotted a badly listing ship off the coast
of Fiji. In spite of a huge hole in the side,
it was still afloat, but it was almost six hundred
miles off course. This was of course the JOIDA, the
two volus and a boat over to investigate, and when
the captain radioed Fiji to make a report of he
(14:00):
had found, he said, quote, it sounds like another Mary Celeste.
We have no theory yet what happened. There was no
sign of the passengers or the crew. The lifeboats and raft,
which were more than adequate to remove both the passengers
and the crew, were gone, although there weren't enough life
jackets for all twenty five people aboard, along with all
(14:20):
the food from the galley, The ship's log and sextant
were also gone. The ship was towed to Fiji and
all the water was pumped out of the hull, but
that just deepened the mystery. When they originally found the boat,
there was an obvious conclusion, which was that the whole
that was obviously there had caused the ship to take
(14:40):
on water and list, but once they actually pumped the
water out, that conclusion was quickly dismissed. Instead, based on
the position of barnacles and the condition of the rest
of the ship, it seemed like the ship had actually
taken on water from Raine and possibly very big waves
on rough seas. The damaged hull had been a re
salt of those pounding seeds, not the cause of the
(15:03):
boats taking on water. The lights, though not working, we're
all set to the on position, and the ship's clocks,
which had been powered by generators, had all stopped at
ten fifty three. It seemed as though the generators had
taken some kind of damage. There was a mattress covering
one engine, and the other looked like someone had been
working on it. Once all of the water had been drained,
(15:26):
it also became clear just how much was gone from
the wrecked ship. In addition to the lifeboats and the rafts,
the sextant food from the cargo hold, just about everything
else that had any use or value and was movable
was gone. The refrigerators in the galley, on the other hand,
still contained meat. There are lots of theories about what
(15:47):
happened a lot of them, hinge on the idea that
there had been some kind of problem on the ship,
a mechanical failure or a collision, and that the crew
and passengers had abandoned it. But the big issue with
that theory is that Captain Miller was highly experienced, and
it seems unlikely that he would have abandoned a seaworthy
ship in a well traveled part of the ocean rather
(16:07):
than waiting for rescue. The other big theories all tie
in some way to criminal activity. That pirates may have
robbed the vessel and then murdered everyone aboard and left
a derelict, or that somebody on board might have mutinied
and stolen everything and then forced everyone who wasn't part
of the plot into a lifeboat. There was a whole
conspiracy theory involving a fleet of murderous Japanese fisherman, and
(16:32):
the captain was actually scheduled to be in court in
Wales because his wife was divorcing him, and some people
suggested that he had tried to orchestrate a quote accident
to get out of that. There is no evidence at
all for any of these, and in particular, the story
of the murderous Japanese fisherman is probably a lot more
related to the recently concluded World War Two than anything
(16:55):
based in real events. In two thousand two, David Wright
published a book called Joida Solving the Mystery, in which
he concluded that a corroded pipe in the engine cooling
system had been leaking water into the ship for some
time before anyone had noticed, and then broke and flooded
the vessel. He theorized that the crew had sent a
(17:18):
madeay signal, but that the radio wasn't actually working uh,
and they did that before abandoning the ship via lifeboats
and rafts. If that really is what happened, it's probably
the saddest possible scenario, since it means that the people
who were on the rafts would have slowly died of hunger, thirst, drowning,
and sharks while waiting for help that wasn't actually coming.
(17:41):
In addition to that, this was devastating for the island
nation of Tokalau because, I mean it's population was so
small and there were so many people on board who
were from there. Um, there have been memorials and things
set up in more recent years, but like that was
just a huge percentage of the population to be lost
in one maritime incident. Uh. And now we're going to
(18:06):
have another brief sponsor break before we get to our
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it's environmentally friendly. You can consume amazing magazines that you
know and love. So our last ghost ship is the
Carol A. Deering, which was a schooner built in Bath,
Maine by the G. G. Deering Company in nineteen nineteen.
In January of ninety one, the ship, which had an
(19:30):
experienced crew, was returning from Brazil to Virginia. On January
twenty nine of that year, the Deering passed the lightship
at Cape Lookout. If you are I know most of
our listeners are probably not all that familiar with the
coast of North Carolina. There are lots of little islands
and things. It is very treacherous, so there are lots
(19:50):
of lightships and lighthouses to try to guide ships. And
so they passed the lightship that was at Cape Lookout
and the lightship keeper Captain Jacobson. Later we're ported that
somebody aboard who did not seem to be an officer,
told him that the ship had lost its anchors. Now,
Captain Jacobson was kind of suspicious of this. Of this situation,
the crew was kind of milling around aimlessly, and the
(20:13):
fact that the person who was telling him about the
missing anchor did not seem to be in charge was
kind of odd, but UH Captain Jacobson's radio was out,
so he could not radio the Coastguard to tell them
of his concerns. At about five forty pm the next day,
the s S. Lake Elon spotted the ship and noticed
(20:35):
that it seemed to be on an odd course. And
then at six thirty am on January thirty one, the
schooner was spotted once again. This time it was a
ground on Diamond Shoals off of Cape Hatteras. CP. Brady
of the Cape Hatteras Coastguard Station was the first to
spot the boat and suspected that it was the deering,
although the sea was too rough that day to really investigate.
(20:58):
It would be February four for a wrecker named the
Rescue could get close enough to confirm the ship's identity
and verify Brady's report. As has been the case with
all of our other UH ghost ships that were operated
by sail power, the sales were all still set, the
anchors were indeed missing, as had been reported to the
light shipkeeper at Cape Lookout. Food was set out as
(21:21):
though a meal were about to be served, and the
crew were all gone, along with all their personal belongings,
their navigational equipment, and some of the ship's papers. The
lifeboats were gone as well. There were three cats on board,
but no other signs of life. I would be the
fool that tried to take the kiddies on an escape boat.
(21:44):
It wouldn't go well. I'm just saying, I know it's foolish. Uh.
The Daring continued to rest there on the shoals until March,
when it was starting to break apart and become a
hazard to other ships, and at that point it was
towed out to see and scuttled. The scuttling was only
partially effect, like a big chunk of it floated back
to Ogracoke Island. Uh. And the mystery continued even after
(22:08):
the ship had been destroyed. That April, Christopher Columbus Gray
reported that he had found a note in a bottle
that detailed the Daring having been taking over by pirates. Ultimately,
this was confirmed to be a complete hoax, and that
Gray had actually written the note himself. A month later,
the wife of the ship's captain, Lula Wormle, teamed up
(22:28):
with its former captain, William H. Merritt and her pastor,
the Reverend Dr. Addison Lormer to try to persuade the
government to investigate what had happened. They started with Senator
Frederick Hale of Maine, and then they met with Secretary
of Commerce Herbert Hoover. And although an FBI agent did
visit Dare County and found plenty of people willing to speculate,
(22:49):
there were really no conclusive results. Leads that he tried
to track down included Bolshevik pirates and rum runners. One
frequent theory in this whole situation, as the crew was
dissatisfied with its captain W. B. Wormal, He had actually
replaced Merritt just a few days after the Daring first
departed Virginia in August of nine. This is because Merritt
(23:12):
had been taken ill suddenly. Captain Balance of the Cape
Hatteras Station theorized that the crew had taken everything of value,
abandoned it, and then wrecked it into the shoals on purpose.
On the other hand, the prevailing opinion of the coast
Guard was that it was a terrible location for doing
such a thing, because the seas were so treacherous there
(23:33):
that it would be incredibly difficult to bring in a lifeboat. Safely.
You had another mystery. Uh, these are the four ghost
chips that I found the most substantiated information about. There
are many others, but a lot of their accounts boiled
down to we found about there were no people on
it the end like that. We don't know anything else
(23:55):
about the history of the ship, or the history that
people on it, or what the theories where it's like
a paragraph. Studn't spooky, but not so much of a narrative. Yeah, yeah,
we could. We could just list off a bunch more.
Also was another ship that was found with no people
on it. Next year we'll do spooky one liners. I
also have some listener mails. This listener mail is from
(24:19):
Erica and it is a throwback all the way to
August when we were doing some African history and Erica
says dear Tracy and Holly. I recently started listening to
your podcast, picking and choosing from the older episodes with
titles that sound most interesting. I was exceptionally excited about
the August Dahomye. I was an art major in college
and studied studied a lot of African art history. I
(24:43):
narrowly missed obtaining a minor in African studies by just
one class. Anyway, I took a short winter break study
abroad trip to Wieda in the winter of two of
two thousand and six and have been to the museum
palace you spoke of in the episode, as well as
many other monuments to the slave trade, including the Arch
and Gate of No Return on the beach of Ouida.
(25:04):
The study abroad trip was specially organized by the African
art history professor. I had taken multiple classes with who
had lived in Ouida as part of her graduate studies,
thus gaining connections with a prominent local family who fed
and guided us while we were there. Benin is or
at least was ten years ago, hardly the placed quote
tourists went, and I really cherished being able to visit
(25:27):
such a historical place that not many Westerners can or
do travel to. This podcast brought back so many memories
for me. I even went back and pulled out my
old travel journal and read my entry from the day
we traveled to the museum, and I wrote about the
Amazon warriors and the throat I saw that sat a
top four very real human skulls. My experience in Benin
(25:47):
was my first time traveling out of the country and
it forever changed me in so many ways. Words can
hardly describe the feelings one has walking the same road
the slaves walked, standing at the same spot where the
auctions were held. Although I don't have other real insights
about the topic to share and the podcast is from
quite a while ago, now, I just had to tell
you about my experience there and that this podcast really
(26:07):
really resonated with me. I can't wait to listen to
the follow up episode on the Amazon Warriors next to
lighten the mood. Here are a few attached her a
few photos I took during another outing from our trip
to the Village of Gambi also known as the Village
on Stilts, as well as the Venice of Africa applet
named is as accessible only by boat. There's a lot
of interesting history with the founding of this village and
(26:29):
its linked to the slave trade or attempt to escape
the slave trade. More accurately, that might make a great podcast, hint, hint,
But even if not, certainly it is another interesting facet
to the slave trade history out of Benin that I'm
sure you'll be interested in learning more about for your
own personal amusement. Take care, ladies, Erica. Thank you so much,
Erica for this note and these pictures. I kind of
(26:52):
love it when people send us notes to tell us
that they have listened to and enjoyed older episodes. Um,
sometimes we get questions about older episode that past hosts
have done and we can't answer them, So just be
forewarned if you write us about things that are really old,
we might not be able to answer your questions. But yeah,
I'm always so delighted when number one, when people um
(27:14):
stumble onto older things in the archive and get really
excited about it, and then number two, uh connect the
things that have been on their our show with their
personal travels or lives or homes. So thank you again, Erica.
If you would like to write to us, we're at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed in History
(27:36):
and on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, or also on
Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. We
have an Instagram that is a missed missed in History. Also,
if you would like to come to our website, which
is missed in History dot com. You will find show
notes with all of our research for all of our episodes.
(27:56):
You'll find an archive of every single episode we have
ever done, and you can also kind to our parent
companies website, which is how stuff works dot com. You
can find lots of other information about lots of other
weird maritime things that have happened. You can do all
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or history dot com. For more on this
(28:19):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot
com
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