The Ghost Ship Carroll A. Deering

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Pats and bats living together. I am going to be fired by Forrest, probably, because we gave Ed the night off. All this technology can be weaponized, and then we're talking about the ultimate weapon on the Earth. And that was all tied to Bob Bigelow and Bigelow Aerospace. Highlighter and regular pen? I don't think so, Forrest. I would know about it. This upends everything. This breaks the world. And what was allowed to be in the book is what he knows he can safely say. Did you ask it if it believes in aliens? Astonishing Legends. I'd like to thank BetterHelp, HIMSS, Squarespace, First Leaf, our contributors at patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. Tonight, we sail into the murky waters of one of the most perplexing maritime mysteries of the 20th century. The astonishing legend of an abandoned ship, a missing crew, and a century of unanswered questions. This is the story of the Carol A. Deering. Early in the morning of January 31st, 1921, surfman C.P. Brady manned his post at the U.S. Coast Guard's Cape Hatteras Station 183, scanning the horizon with a telescope. Brady and his co-workers were charged with protecting mariners from the relentless and imposing hazard of the treacherous Diamond Shoals. And on this day, winter weather was lashing the coast. Twenty- and thirty-foot waves with whitecaps produced a fog of mist that made it hard for Brady to do his job. Especially when the outer Diamond Shoal was almost six miles away from Station 183. But this morning, something caught his eye. Was that something out there? He only saw it for a moment. But it looked like there it was again, a colossal vessel, stationary, barely visible from shore. He rang the alarm, still unsure if his mind was playing tricks on him. It wasn't. Brady alerted the station's keeper, and the Hatteras surfman attempted to get out to the trapped vessel on a surfboat, which took them several times to lodge due to the relentless waves. When they finally reached the outer Diamond Shoal, they saw a beautiful 250-foot five-masted schooner plowed well and truly into the sand. All but one of her sails were up as though she were underway. And the wind and the waves were so bad, they couldn't even safely get close enough to make out her name on the transom. But one thing stood out to them. There was not a soul on the deck, and in fact, no signs of life at all. That ship was the 1,879-ton Carol A. Deering. It took days and multiple approaches to get aboard and assess the situation safely. As is often the case with an astonishing legend, rescuers and salvagers were only left with more questions than answers. For over a century, theories have swirled around this ghost ship. Was it mutiny? Piracy? Paranormal? Or something far more sinister? Tonight, we dive into the evidence, examine the theories, and attempt to unravel the secrets of the Carol A. Deering. Join us as we navigate one of the most baffling cases of nautical history. The tale of the ship that came home without its crew. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. Like a flying Dutchman, the five-masted schooner Carol A. Deering loomed through the mists about Diamond Shoals today. All sails set, but unmanned. The Washington Herald, February 3rd, 1921. Join us tonight as we take a look at the 100-year-old mystery of the abandoned ghost ship Carol A. Deering. And we're back. That we are, folks. Arrgh. I don't think there's any pirates in this story necessarily. Well, we did mention the possibility of piracy, but... Yeah, we did. Okay. There's always could-be pirates. I'll tell you what, though. I love a maritime mystery, so we're excited for tonight's show. A couple of very quick announcements. 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So, if you're looking to get a good deal on that hoodie, beanie, or an astonishing camping mug, now is the time. Okay, and for those of you interested in prying into my private life, my wife, Emily Spivey, was just a guest on our dear friend Rachel Dratch's podcast, Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch. That's the name of her show. Rachel is a former Saturday Night Live cast member and the infamous Debbie Downer, among hundreds of other amazing characters. But her show is, as she says, adjacent to Astonishing Legends, in that she and her co-host, Irene, have guests and friends on to talk about woo-woo things, and it's pretty great. It's a lot of fun, too. Oh, indeed, it is pretty good. Really entertaining, great conversation. Terrific name for a podcast, by the way. I wish we could. Yeah, it's your favorite expression, woo-woo. Well, we fell into it, I think. Yeah. It was aimed at us, and she's just embraced it. Also, you can see Rachel on American Home Shield warranty commercials. She's the running character there. So, American Home Shield. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of those on our streaming channels, but she's funny and terrific in those. And, by the way, we got a plug on that app, right? Yep, she and, of course, my wife, Emily, they gave us a good shout-out. Oh, terrific. Well, and then you were going on her show, too, aren't you? Yes, I am. I am. We just got to work out of time, so I'll be going on there as well. I feel like if I come marching in the door with File 10, that's going to put our listeners off the feed. They like to have fun, so I don't know what story I'm going to tell you. Either that or we just lose all credibility. But, yeah, don't know where my invitation is. I just lost in the email. Maybe it's coming. Maybe it's coming. Very good. Excellent. And all that, well, we've got a lot of show. On a terrific mystery for you folks, so let's dive in. Yeah, that's the first organic reason for us to use that metaphor, I think, finally. We've been saying dive in for 10 years. Oh, I get you. Yeah, okay. Nice. Well, one of the first things we like to do at the outset of something like this is cite our sources. And in the old days, it used to be that there was just books. But now there's a lot of shows out that do what we do, podcasts, people that we've had on our show, we've been on their show, people we respect very, very much. And that's the case here, too. Indeed, we do. And a lot of these folks are, well, much more professional and skilled at this than us. So they're actual scholars and writers and researchers, none of it cursory. But there's a terrific article, very comprehensive and very readable, a very fun read by a friend of ours, Nathaniel, or Nate, as we know him, Lloyd. And his podcast is called Historical Blindness. And we actually just saw Nate at the podcast movement in Denver. Oh, yeah, the one we went to in Denver. That's right. He stopped by and we chatted for a bit. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, he's very serious about this. Covered a lot of the same subjects that we do, as he says in his About page here. The principal purpose of historical blindness and blog is to dredge up interesting and largely forgotten stories from our past, with a specific focus on demonstrating the inscrutability, the ineffability, the unknowability of the past by examining cases of outrageous hoaxes, mass hysteria, baffling mysteries, and unreliable historiography, such as apocryphal accounts that contravene accepted history, thereby raising the question, can we trust history as we have received it? That's always a good question. And here, the accounts that we've gone over that we're going to source from tonight, there's a basic main story. It kind of follows the pattern of a lot of these mysteries. The basic main story that's been documented because these were investigated by official entities at the time. Yeah. Who come to no conclusion. Well, there are some conclusions, but you have to pick one that you like the best. But there's a lot of details that you think like, well, they got some of the details are conflicting between these accounts and maybe it doesn't matter. But a lot of these things, they do matter because these are like clues in a criminal mystery here, perhaps. And one little thing, it's like, well, was something smashed on purpose? Was it an accident? Was it the weather? Because it shows intent. And so a lot of these little details I found that, and some of them conflicting are very important, but you know, you're going to have to decide who to believe because that's what we're left with. So anyway, that's one of the great sources. It's a terrific article. We'll have a link to that in our show notes, of course. But that is from the Historical Blindness podcast titled, The Carol A. Deering, Ghost Ship of Cape Hatteras from January 9th, 2018. And there's another source that Nate has cited that I just read. There is just a chapter from another book, a compendium of great North Carolina coastal stories called An Outer Banks Reader, edited by David Stick. And there's a whole chapter on the Carol A. Deering, and it's from the time. This is actually an interesting source because this ended up as a radio program in the 40s. Oh, cool. Yeah. And it's authored by John Harden, I believe. Now, it gives a date of 1921, which would make it very contemporaneous. But I think he started maybe compiling these stories, had a keen interest in this mystery, and so started collecting newspaper articles, accounts, I think court documents, and testimony. And as the chapter says here, John Harden, while serving as executive secretary to Governor R. Greg Cherry in the 1940s, collected unusual stories and broadcast them into a radio program called Tales of Tarhealia over a Raleigh radio station. So all things Tarheel, all things North Carolina. And it goes on to say, in the following piece, based on one of his programs and published in 1949, as part of the, quote, The Devil's Tramping Ground and other stories, Harden deals with the most baffling shipwreck in the history of the Outer Banks. I think that part's true. Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. So great little chapter. A lot of the details. Doesn't have all of the details, though, that the book that you're going to describe next has in it. Yeah. So this book, again, this was a source that I found from Nate's website and from his episode on this. It was called, and I just want to say, if he hears this, I have not heard his episode on this topic. And if it's a case like this where we're covering something that someone else has covered, I actually, and I think Forrest does this too, we go out of our way not to listen to the other person's coverage because we don't want to ape anything or be accused of aping anything. We're going to come at it from our own direction. But we sure as heck were very much interested in the sources that Nate listed because he uses very reliable sources. And one of them that he suggested was this book called Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals, The Mystery of the Carol A. Deering by Bland Simpson. Another great name. Yeah, I know. It's just great. Bland is pretty cool, actually. This was published in 2002 by the UNC Press. That's the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. It's an amazing book. It's actually a blend of nonfiction and historical fiction. The approach is really great. And I'll describe that a little further here in a second. But I want to say that it has extensive research with dates and information. And Bland Simpson is actually a professor. He grew up near the Outer Banks in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. And he teaches creative writing at UNC to this day, as far as I can tell. And is also a member of the Tony award-winning band, the Red Clay Ramblers. The guy is a legend. And in fact, I kind of figured he was a big deal at UNC. And our former guest, Tom Maxwell, who we had on for the Blood Falls series, also from Chapel Hill, and the former lead singer of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, had Professor Simpson for a class at UNC. And has also seen the Red Clay Ramblers perform. So it's all full circle here. It's all connected. In the North Carolina mafia, as they say. An amazing coincidence. And yes. And we're back to a very mysterious and dangerous spot of North Carolina, right off the coast. So much lore that keeps dragging us back, because this is pretty close to the area where Roanoke happened. The state has a lot of interesting history. I love it. Obviously, I live here. And a lot of people have done a good job of documenting it and researching it over time. And again, this book was one of the best sources we could get. So we, of course, tracked it down, and we'll have a link to places where you can buy it in our show notes. It's available on Amazon still. There's some used copies, but there also appears to be new paperbacks I think you can still get. So if you like the story, when we get done with it, you'll have to read it, because we're only covering part of it. And Simpson's book gets into much greater depth. The historical nonfiction stuff in his book really colors out how the conversations might have taken place between some of the characters that this affected the most, this loss. Because what you said, Forrest, is interesting to me too, because you were like, well, there's a lot of documentation and investigation. And there is. And it's there for two reasons, loss of life and money, and probably not in that order. This was an expensive ship. In fact, I think it was $250,000 to build it. That's $1921. So today, that would be almost $4.5 million. So this was quite a ship. Oh, indeed, and large at 2,114 tons, I believe, a cargo ship. And one of the last, if not the last commercial masted schooners. Because the steamships were coming along. That's right, yeah. So what's happening is there were wooden schooners that were used to ship cargo, and steamships had been invented, and they were just getting to the point, and there was still some overlap happening. And you can only imagine what this was like anytime some completely new form of transportation comes along, and the old ones are kind of at their peak. I mean, these ships were unbelievable. And the deering that we're talking about tonight, it was 250 feet, which is huge. That is a huge vessel, folks. That's a 25-story building on its side. If you wanted to, and imagine five masts. And Perini Navy is making boats like this now to this day. It was one of those that actually just, in a fluke, sank suddenly while it was on a mooring or anchored in a harbor in, I think it was Italy. Oh, yeah, that's right. And only a couple of people survived only, I think. Yeah, it was a bad situation. But anyway, so I digress, something we haven't said in a while. But I know in the course of reading Professor Simpson's book, one of the ships that was in there was another captain that was friendly with one of the captains we'll talk about tonight. That guy was the captain of the Wyoming. There was another captain that one of the captains we'll be talking about tonight was friends with, who was the captain of a ship called the Wyoming. Yeah. And I went to look that one up, because they were trading war stories and also talking about some of the crew members and what you do if you have crew that's unruly. And the captain of the Wyoming is pretty amazing. When I looked that ship up, that was the largest wooden sailing vessel ever built. Yeah. 450 feet long. Wow. 450 feet. I believe that's longer than the yacht Jeff Bezos just had built. So I think his is 417, if I'm not mistaken. Right. So these are amazing, and they're just beautiful. You just can't beat what a beautiful wooden schooner looks like with all the mass and the sails. And it's just amazing. And that one actually wound up sinking not too long after this as well. But there were things about that one. And even about the deering that we'll hear about, they were so long and made of wood that they kind of flexed a fair amount, even while at sea. Right. And that's one of those things, I think I've mentioned this on the show before, but when I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island, which is a wooden roller coaster, I don't know if it's still there or in operation. But I remember when we got on it, they were like, yeah, you don't want to ride it on a cold day. It snaps your neck up there and like turn number four. But on a warm day, it's a lot more comfortable to ride the Cyclone. Because it's bending. Because the wood is bending. Just like, just crazy. So anyway, it's an interesting time. These ships are a dying breed. And in fact, the captain at the center of tonight's story is one who came out of retirement and got wrapped up in this fascinating legend. Yeah. And paid with his life, perhaps. We'll see. Or maybe, don't want to say it just yet, but is somewhere else, let's say, in another dimension. There, I said it. Now, the idea here, though, is that it's a real transition of times where we have the industrial age coming to bear in the maritime industry, let's say. And I guess it's kind of a green option. I guess Greta Thunberg would be happy. It's a sailing ship that's used commercially. So you're not burning a lot of oil. On the other hand, it was hauling coal. Yeah. It was filled with coal. Tons of coal. That was its purpose. But it's still useful in this age, but being phased out. So this is kind of the end of an era here. They're bringing that back now. They're building new cargo ships, full-blown tankers, I think, in addition to cargo and tankers that are sail-powered or have sails. Not the whole thing is not powered, but they're capable of traveling under sail power alone with large, you know, sail-by-wire sails that are, you know, huge. Well, talking about sail-by-wire, another thing that struck me as odd, and it does figure into tonight's mystery because one of the first things I wondered is why such a large ship like this would only have a crew of 10, 11, including the captain, I believe. I think at this point, they had things pretty well sewed up with the lines and the organization. They've got five masks to deal with. All five of them are pretty much identical. So you're going to figure out what you're doing to furl and unfurl the sails on those five. And, you know, the more complicated sails, but there's only a few of them are smaller, are the jibs up in the front. Right. I think a well-organized crew could handle that. Yeah, it's enough because that's, uh, these other ships that were of this size and capacity also had these smaller crews. I just, you know, from the movies, you look at a crew and there's like 50 guys on board. Yeah. I'm exaggerating. But, you know, a crew of 20 to maybe 30 people on something that large to handle all that. And, uh, on the flip side with today's technology, as you were talking about, I, uh, when I briefly kind of worked with Disney, uh, that's back when I think Roy Disney had just purchased a, uh, you know, beautiful mega yacht sailing vessel. And they, I said, oh, he's must have a crew. He's like, well, it's not that large because this is sail by wire. As you were saying, uh, you want the sails up? Punch a button. Oh, you want this to drop the anchor? Punch a button. Well, yeah. If you watch below deck sailing that's on Bravo, or if you ever see that show, or Peacock, I guess wherever that you can see it, that's a Perini Navi sailing boat, uh, P-E-R-I-N-I-N-A-V-I. It's an Italian boat builder. That's a sail by wire boat. And it's pretty cool. So they can raise and lower all the sails with buttons and trim the boom and everything. So like the only time that the deck crew on that has to worry about lines is when they're going into a marina or casting off the rest of the time, the boat is pretty much doing everything, which is pretty wild. Well, I just wondered in that, uh, figure of speech, safety and numbers, if there had been more people aboard, more crew members, if this situation, this mystery may not have happened, or if it would have happened, uh, no matter how many people were on board. But as we'll get into tonight, there was only one life form left on board, but we'll save that surprise for a little bit here. So let's get into your next point here. Talk about the outer diamond shoals where it was founded, kind of the location. Yeah. So this is on the outer banks and for, you know, a lot of people on the East coast, for the most part, I'm going to go ahead and say most people on the East coast of the United States are familiar with the outer banks because a lot of people travel there or want to, or have in the past. For those of you that are maybe out West and haven't been to the Carolinas, or those of you that are listening, um, from across the pond or in other parts of the world, the outer banks are barrier islands on the Eastern border of the state of North Carolina. And when you look at the shape of North Carolina on a map and you see the far right edge of it and you think, oh, that's the edge of the state, but it's not really, it's a strip of barrier islands. That's about 200 miles long and they're pretty narrow. They're very skinny. They're like the Florida keys or any other, you know, archipelago almost, except that they're connected. There's a road on them, like the keys where you can get out to it. But on the backside of that, there's 30 miles of Pamlico sound before you get back to marshy sort of mainland on the Eastern part of North Carolina. So there's a huge sound behind them. Now in some places they're as narrow as 150 to 500 feet at their widest parts or maybe two to three miles across their average width overall is one mile and their shapes constantly changing just like the shoals are because of erosion, because of the weather, because of hurricanes, you know, king tides, all kinds of things. They change a lot. I mean, overall they're not significantly different than they've been for a long time, but the skinny parts get skinnier and sometimes the thicker parts get thicker and you may have even seen on the news in some of the areas, the houses are falling into the sea, even in the past few weeks because of the erosion. Well, we got into that a little bit too with our Roanoke series. That's right. It was hard to kind of gauge where these people originally settled or some parts of the settlement because the waves, the erosion, the water, the wind has changed the land dramatically since that time, certainly, and so we're getting a little bit of that as well here, but still treacherous and known as the graveyard of the Atlantic. That's right. The graveyard of the Atlantic. And also I want to mention the town where the houses are falling in is called Rodanthe. It's spelled R-O-D-A-N-T-H-E, but we pronounce it Rodanthe. Those houses are like, you can go online and see them, waves breaking under them because unfortunately they've just, they've outlived their ability to survive. But yes, out here, the Outer Banks, what you see is you see stickers on all the cars and it's OBX. That's what everybody refers to it as. Another famous thing with the Outer Banks, the Wright Brothers, their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk is that's the Outer Banks. Because it has constant wind too, right? Coming offshore. Yeah, that's right. And there's beautiful beaches there. There's a lot of history there. There's in Chincoteague, which is up to the north, there's wild horses that live on the beach that people come from all over the world to see. It's really amazing. But as Forrest said a minute ago, it is also a place of death. It is the graveyard of the Atlantic, as they say. And there's more than a few places called that, but in my mind, this is the real one, the one off the coast of North Carolina. I guess there's an area in Nova Scotia called that too, but I think you guys need to come up with it. Well, the Atlantic- I'm talking to you, Jordan, nighttime. Oh, yes. We'll see if he hears this. No, the Atlantic is known, especially the North Atlantic, of course, but the Atlantic is known for its very stormy and treacherous seas. And I've talked to sailors like, oh, Pacific, like peaceful. That's the name, Pacific, pacified. Atlantic, different story just because of the weather here. But especially in that spot though, where as the colonies were becoming fortified and populated, of course, a lot of ships, and we're talking since the late 1400s, early 1500s coming ashore there, you've got now hundreds of years of shipwrecks and all not just due to weather, piracy, explosions, fires, mismanagement by the crew. And so perhaps some of these factors were also involved in the mystery of the Deering. Yeah. And one of the most dangerous parts of the Outer Banks is the Diamond Shoals, which we'll be talking about tonight. And the largest and most dangerous one of those is the Outer Diamond, which is where this ship ran aground. Now, the Diamond Shoals range from 10 to 14 miles long. They stick out off of a point of the Outer Banks, and they have varying widths. The water there can be as shallow as three to five feet. Now, the draft of the Carroll Deering is not readily available, but it would have likely been at least 20 feet. Yeah, for a draft. So there's no way it could have passed over the shoal. It would have to go around as all vessels would. And shoal being just a large sandbar or where the depth is very shallow. But you have wind and waves building these mounds, these long strips of basically sandbars, yeah, where it's just very easy to not spot them and get your ship trapped. And then you get pounded by waves, and then you're in trouble. Yeah. What's wild about these shoals is they're actually 20 to 30 square miles at any given time and constantly changing. And to your point, Forrest, about other famous ships and mysteries that have happened here, over 5,000 ships have been lost in the area they refer to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, which is really kind of the entire East Coast of North Carolina. But this area is where the wrecks are most concentrated. 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Which, so at this point, they're 110 years old, but they still coveted it, I guess, because it's pretty hard to see out there, especially if the weather's bad. The waves can be so large, ships can actually disappear between waves. Yes. Your line of vision here. But yeah, 1812, looking out for Brits. Coming to stomp on us again. Yeah, exactly. Again. He's out there, he's looking through the telescope, and he sees what he thinks is a ship, but then the waves are back and forth, and he can't really make it out. He keeps looking, and then it turns out there is something out there, and so he decides that he needs to talk to the commander of the post. And he gets everyone involved, they confirm that something's out there, so now they have to get to it. So in your mind's eye, you might be thinking, what? Okay, so you're on the beach, you look out, you see a boat, how hard can it be to get out? Well, the Outer Diamond Shoal is, as best as I can tell from Google Earth anyway, is five or six miles from the coast, at least it is now. And it might have been different in 1921, but it probably wasn't too different. And so that's a long ways out. So they can see that far with the telescope, but getting out there is another thing. So they got to take what they call a surf boat down to the water. And this thing's on a giant wagon-type chassis, and they've got this huge Belgian horse, like a workhorse, that brings it down. So it's got the blinders on, because they don't want it to freak out from the surf, which was bad at this point. So the horse is pulling this giant boat down. And when you think about, like, how big of a boat is it, what does it look like? Well, if you saw the Titanic movie, it looks like one of those lifeboats from Titanic. That's how big. It's a big wooden boat. So the horse pulls it down, and then when it gets near the surf, I guess, they disconnect the front axle, which are like wagon wheels. And the horse pulls that around and goes away. Okay, the front of the wagon thing that it's on, that turns into skids, so they can just slide the boat down into the surf. Now, this boat did have an engine. It had a motor, but it also had oars. And so they've got to get it out in the surf just to get past the surf to get to four or five miles away where they can see this large ship stuck in the sand. They go out there, and according to Simpson in his book, it's just repeated attempts to get it into the water, and they can't do it. Now, so think about this. The Deering was sighted at 5.30 a.m. They actually didn't get out past the breakers and out towards where this ship was until 11.30, six hours later, because it took them that long. Now, when you think about a hard job, folks, like there's a really amazing picture. We'll have it. It's public domain, so I'm pretty sure we're going to have it on our web page. It's a beautiful scanned at high resolution shot of the guys who were on duty when this happened. At least I know that surfman Baxter, I believe, is in the photo, and he's one of the ones that went out to the Deering. And the other thing that's interesting is when you start looking into these various ships disappearing and the accidents and all of that stuff, this same photo of these guys is like at the – it's the cover photo for like 15 different things that went haywire because that's all that was going on there. These were the guys that ran into the ocean after a storm and brought people ashore. Well, of course, there are rough seas and coastlines everywhere, but I often think of the Australian lifeguards and those life-saving teams when they got the dories, and they're trying to row out there. And you might not think as a landlubber, well, how hard could it be? You got a big boat, right, and a motor. Like, how hard can it be? Well, if you've ever been body surfing, boogie boarding, surfing, swimming out in a ocean with just three to four foot waves and you're bobbing up and down, it's relentless. And you will realize quickly how futile it is to try and get past that. You just keep getting pummeled one after the other by wave after another wave after another wave, and then you feel like your life's in danger. So just imagine being in a boat with much larger waves and bobbing up and down. You just can't get out there. And that's also why people, when they fall into the ocean, sadly, you'll see if there's waves coming in. And, you know, Hawaii, California coast, they get battered against the rocks because you cannot get out there. And a lot of times people who go to save them also end up injured or killed. So just very dangerous, and they could not get out there. I just want to point this out. I'm sure you've got it in your notes, but in mine, just that the weather at this point, I believe, you can confirm with me that the weather was calm, except the seas were rough. Essentially, what happened is when the ship probably ran aground, the weather was okay. But then it started getting rough, and the tiny ship was tossed. Sorry. Then it started getting rough, and they were unable to get out there to it, even though when it crashed, for lack of a better term, it probably wasn't that bad at that point. But there had been storms prior, and then this weather afterwards was not good. So they were having a lot of trouble, and so much trouble that they had to get the teams of surfmen to come from two other stations as well. So it took a lot of folks to get the boat out there and get it into the water. When they get out there, and they get as close as they can to the ship, but they're still like a mile away from it because of the rough seas, and the shoals are dangerous, they don't want the surf boat to get stuck either. Because then they'll need help. So they can't get close to it, but one thing they did see on that first day was that the davits were empty. They had two boats that the ship had had. They were gone. And a davit is like a crane-type device that you use to lower a boat over the side. So they could see that something had been lowered, but that was nowhere in sight. They couldn't see anybody on deck, and they couldn't even get close enough to read the name on the transom. So they had to abandon the cause after all of that and return to shore. I actually want to read this telegram that Simpson published in his book. This is pretty cool. This is on page 11 of Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals by Plan Simpson. Telegram to HQ in D.C., U.S. Coast Guard 7th District Headquarters, Pasquotank River, Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Monday, January 31st, 1921, 4.33 p.m. Coast Guard, Washington, D.C., unknown five-masted schooner, stranded, diamond shoals, sails set, boats gone, no signs of life, sea rough, stations number 183, 184, 186, unable to board schooner, 1,630 hours, 7th District. So it's pretty fascinating. You know, and that's, you know, 183, there was the guys that saw it. They had to get help from 184 and 186 just to get in the water. So unknown ship, we still don't know what it is. By the way, another thing I want to mention about Professor Simpson's book is that he's got a timeline at the back of it, which is awesome. It's just everything that happens, so well-researched. It's really great to have that, all the times that the ship was seen, who they ran into along the way, the weirdness, all spelled out on different days. So it's really cool. Like I said, great book. You got to check it out. So the next day, the surf boat goes out again, still cannot get to the ship. They try but can't. So now a Coast Guard cutter has arrived, and that's the Seminole. And the Seminole is prominent in all these stories, and it's pretty much always out there. When something's going wrong, the Seminole's there. But it's out there far enough that they can spend the night on it, and that saves them from having to try to get past the breakers anymore. So the surfmen spend the night on the Seminole. The next morning, February 2nd, it gets as close as possible to the ship, and it puts the surf boat in the water for them, still three-quarters of a mile away for safety. And it still cannot get to this ship. So as they're trying to get it out there, they can't get to it. They come back. And then the Seminole has problems with her boiler, which is what makes her go. So she has to retreat to Wilmington, North Carolina. Now, Wilmington is a port city at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. It's about 150 miles to the southwest, not far from the southern border of North Carolina with South Carolina. On February 3rd, nothing happens. The cutter is laid up in Wilmington, and they're still trying to figure out what they're going to do next. February 4th, this is four full days after the ship ran aground, a salvage wrecker ship named the Rescue out of Norfolk arrives, and they manage to identify and board the ship. The waters have calmed down considerably. It's at this point we find out that it is the Carroll A. Deering, a five-masted schooner, 255 feet long, with a 44-foot beam and a 25-foot depth. And as Forrest said earlier, 2,114 tons. And there's a lot of pictures of this vessel online. Hopefully, we'll be able to use some of those, too, on our website. It is gorgeous. It is a beautiful boat. As a former sailor, when I saw this thing, it actually kind of took my breath away. I was like, this is a really beautiful piece of woodwork. It's a gorgeous ship. So it came out of the G.G. Deering Company in Bath, Maine. There's a lot of shipbuilders in Maine. And they had a lot of ships called Deering. They had various names in Deering. This one was named for one of the sons of the family, Carroll, C-A-R-R-O-L-L. One of the sons who, ironically, never went to sea, apparently. No, but- There might be bad luck. I don't know. They're very superstitious. Yeah, no, we've talked a lot about that before, the maritime folks being superstitious and like all the little things they do and don't do because it's bad luck. Because it is a very treacherous business. But according to the Evening Express out of Portland, Maine, the newspaper here, they had an article titled, Namesake of Bath Built Ghost Ship Deering Die. So Carroll A. Deering, for whom that ship was named, he lived to be 84 years old and died in March of 1967. So his dad named the ship after him. And to get to do that, I think he built around 99 ships or that company did, the Gardner G. Deering Company. And they were headquartered out of Bath, Maine. So- Yes. A little bit inland, about 35 miles northeast of Portland, Maine, I believe. When they get to discover the ship, that it is the Carroll Deering, it is plowed fully into the outer diamond shoal. The captain of the rescue, the salvage vessel, estimated it to be at least 14 feet deep down into the sand at the bow. In fact, the deck up near the front was closer to the water than it was in the back. And that's because it was just getting just pounded from the back by the wind and the waves for days and days. So that's just continually driving it like a hammer, driving a nail into a piece of wood. All the sails were up too, so that's not helping. That's pushing it further into the sand as well, except for the flying jib, which would be that forward most triangular sail you see, generally attached to the tip of the bow spread. So it was fully underway when it hit the shoal, which is weird because there's nobody on it. Why is it rigged to go full speed? Okay. So that's another clue to this mystery here is that if you have all these sails, which I guess if you wanted to rig or have the wind help you out of being grounded, you would have had those sails up. Yes. So it was like they weren't trying to use the wind to help themselves get unstuck. Right. Because there are steps you can take to get unstuck and there are steps you can take to avoid as well. And it didn't seem like those steps have been taken either. It's kind of like when you get to the car accident and you're investing the accident, somebody is at fault and the first thing you check for is skid marks. Did they ever even apply the brakes? Exactly. So there are things that you can look for here. In this case, it would seem to indicate that they perhaps were not on board when the ship was grounded. Right. So Professor Simpson says that the boarding party described the ship as undulating in the surf. So imagine the deck bending with the waves, like making wooden waves of its own as it's starting to come apart. And the two ends, the fore and the aft, twisting independently. Yeah, are twisting. So it's being wrung out like a dish rag. It's so large and there's so much wood and there's so much twisting and turning that you are constantly pumping the bilge. Water is coming into the ship all the time. And for a lot of folks who don't know this, essentially one of the things you learn when you're at sea is that all boats leak. All boats have water coming into them. That's why you have bilge pumps and it's why it's bad if the bilge pump stopped working because you can't stop the water from coming in in most cases. So with these wooden vessels, you can just imagine them twisting and turning even when they're at sea under perfect conditions and water is going to seep through a little bit and you've got to fight to get it back out of there so you can get where you're going. Well, the deering was unrecoverable by tug. It was too buried. It was a total loss. And on top of that, here's the other interesting thing. We'll talk a little bit more about its journey here in a minute. It had no cargo aboard. It was returning from a delivery of coal that it had taken down to Rio. But at this point, it was empty, which means in addition to sitting high in the water, it also would have been able to move faster. And then on top of that, it didn't have a lot of value beyond the value of the vessel itself. So that's something to think about if we get to talking about piracy or ulterior motives with this. Right. Think of the reasons for that. Also, no major holes in it. I'm not spoiling any kind of conclusions here. But people thought, well, was it a leftover mine from World War I? Right. Because this is around that time frame. And perhaps they hit a mine and they had to abandon ship quickly. The other thing, the lifeboats, I believe the lines, as they're called on a ship, not ropes, the lines were cut. So what they noticed was it was not a panicked departure, but perhaps a hasty one. Right. Right. So what you're looking at here, there's no major catastrophe to the ship at this point, other than now it's getting battered by wind and wave. And so, yeah, what you're seeing here is there's no value, perhaps, in a large scale, other than perhaps the boat itself. That also ties into some theories we're going to get to at the end, of course. And like all great ghost ship lore, you got to have food left out. Like, wait, is there somebody here to finish this meal? Like, who's the kettle's whistling? But in this case, they're still looking for people on board because they want to know, like, is this abandoned yet? Are people down below decks? What's going on here? And so as they're investigating and crawling over with a fine-toothed comb every inch of the ship for clues, they do see that food is left out and was being prepared, right? That's right. There was a pot of pea soup. There were some spare ribs in a pan, and there was coffee in a pot on the stove. The stove was not on, and I don't know what kind of stove it was. But there was no indication that it was hot coffee, but that there was coffee in a pot on the stove. Yeah, so for my reading, it was like food had been recently served, and also it was planned for either later that day or the next day. Yes. Essentially, what we're seeing here is that it wasn't as if things were being stowed because it was going to be departed or abandoned, and they had time to do that. It seemed, like I said, that was my point here. It was kind of hasty, but not totally panicked. No signs of violence, as we know, just that it was kind of left there and purposefully. Oh, that's right. So that's what's going on in the galley. And then up on the deck, the steering gear had also been completely destroyed. The wheel was broken, and the binnacle had been smashed. Now, for folks who don't know what a binnacle is, you've all seen it. You probably just didn't know it was called that. There's some of you that will know, but that's the compass housing. I was like, if you've ever toured a ship in a shipyard or at a museum or something like that, it's a big, usually kind of a big R2-D2 almost looking thing that has glass on it, and you look into it, and there's a compass down inside. The binnacle protects the ship's compass, and it also magnetically shields it so that you don't, like, take a bad reading and wind up going to Tahiti when you went to be in Maui or whatever. But it's lighted, generally, so you can see at night, and it has adjustments so you can calibrate it for corrections. And then it's something that is absolutely critical to navigation. So why was it destroyed? And in addition to that, not too far from it, they found a nine-pound sledgehammer. So it did appear that maybe someone had taken the sledgehammer to the binnacle and purposefully destroyed this critical navigation aid. The rudder was also severely damaged, but that could have been from it being pounded by the storm and the wind and the waves while it was stuck. So it wasn't clear whether or not what had happened with the rudder was something, some kind of sabotage or intentional damage or it happened after, you know, because they couldn't get on it for four or five days. And it was, you know, it went through several tide cycles during that. Yeah. What's obvious here, though, is that it wasn't all just natural damage, organic damage. Somebody tried to disable the sailing capability of this ship. Now, why? And, of course, the first thing you think is, like, as they left or as they're departing, or it had happened to the ship while the original crew was there that they did not want to happen because they still wanted to sail at home. Right. Somebody wrecked this thing because they did not want that ship sailable. Right. That's obvious. And so they don't know what the sledgehammer that was there. They don't know if that was there to destroy it or if it was there to, like, just make repairs under duress, under some kind of disaster scenario. But it was definitely stove in, as the description says, and that somebody damaged it purposefully. Yeah. But why? And when? And for what purpose? The other thing that was really unusual about this was that the tenders were missing, tenders being boats that you use to go ashore from a large vessel like this because you can't always get it right up to the beach or to the marina, depending on where you're going. They had a dory, which is a smaller tender that was missing. It's something Forrest referenced a minute ago, a dory. And then they also had a 24-foot yawl. Now, a yawl has two masts, has a tall main, and then a shorter, smaller mast aft. Now, the cool thing about yawls, and it's Y-A-W-L, is that they're- Oh, you're not just saying in a southern way, everybody? Y'all, welcome to North Carolina. The cool thing about y'alls is that they're easy to maneuver, so they're good for coastal sailing, but they're stable, too, for open or blue water sailing. They're kind of all-purpose. They're great for racing, too. So this tells you how big the deering was, though. One of the go ashore boats was a double-masted 24-foot sailboat. So that tells you how big the deering was. Anyway, both of those were missing. They were both missing. And the other thing that was really strange, and this is one of the things that I thought was super strange, actually, was there were several lights on the ship. There were the running lights on the edge of the deck, most likely, or on the bow, and they were burned out. And then two emergency red lights, which would have been up on top of a couple of the masts, and that signals that you're a hazard of navigation or you're having trouble. Those were burned out, too. So all four of those were burned out. And what's strange about that is, first of all, those lights last forever. Secondly, why would all four of them be burned out at once? Because we already know, and we'll find this out in the timeline, it was underway and sighted by other vessels just a day or two earlier. So it doesn't make sense for those bulbs to be... It's not like it had been sitting there for weeks and months and years. So that's a little bit strange that all four of the lights were burned out. What's baffling about that is that it seems like they were all lit simultaneously. Yes. So you have running lights, and then you have emergency lights. Those are way up high, I believe, on the rigging for other ships to see. That's right. Way up high. And you know what that, though, you know what, Forrest, you just made me think of? Having all those lights on might been an act of consideration by whoever set it off by itself to help other mariners avoid running into it, even though they knew they were trying to wreck it, maybe not wanting to cause an intentional collision with this unmanned vessel. Perhaps, but that was intentional. So all of these lights are lit. Yeah. The emergency lights indicate an out-of-control vessel, so you know to either stay away from it and also get help. Yeah. And it's just a signal. So we know those were burning and for a while. Right. Again, this is part of the mystery. It's like, okay, so you're going to damage it so it can't be sailed. Like, okay, so it gets boarded by rescue craft. And it's like, well, you're going to want to sail this thing back, even if everybody had to leave. Right. Why would you render it inoperable? Yeah. But also signal that you're in trouble. Right. That this thing should be boarded. So just another mystery. But maybe you're right in that it was a maritime courtesy thing because the seas are so treacherous. The converse point, though, is maybe they weren't just burned out. You know, they didn't have a lot of time to examine it. It was in danger. Right. I can't imagine how much time they actually spent on it. I'm not sure. I know that they salvaged some items, so maybe they were there for a few hours. But the other thing is maybe they were intentionally burned out somehow so that it could crash in darkness and never be found. Well, there you go. But I don't know how you wouldn't intentionally burn it out. You would just disconnect it or disable it somehow from, you know, your ship's engineer maybe would know where the wires came down. And that might have been something that they didn't have a chance to investigate. Because they had limited time. So their perception of them being burned out, it could have been another reason why they weren't lit. Perhaps. Yeah, you'd have to look into that. Disconnected from the battery. You know, it could be anything. Yeah, we don't really know why other than they were, yeah, they were non-functional. Right. Yeah, it could be another part of sabotage where you don't want it to be found because ships not wanting to be found, we're going to come across that as well. That makes more sense than them being lit and all four burning out in a matter of 24 or 36 hours. Yeah. Yeah. See, we're professional investigators, folks. 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But it was also soaking wet from the waves crashing all over the ship. Yes, that's true. Right. But I think the bed, you would be able to tell if the ocean unmade the bed or the bed actually looked unmade. I think it probably looked unmade. It goes to point that there was, again, some haste. Yes. Some, I'll stop saying the word haste. They were under pressure, I think, to get out of there, but had time to do it in an orderly fashion, it seems, for the most part. But someone had been staying or sleeping in the spare bed that was in the captain's cabin. That's what they thought. That's what it looked like. Right. They didn't say it for sure, but they said that's what it looked like. Yeah. Captain Carlson said from the tug, yeah. Yeah. So no one would be allowed in there. He didn't have any visitors or guests. Yeah. And unless, well, again, depends on when it was slept in. If Captain Carlson's bunk, his rack was slept in and also the spare bedroom or the spare bed, could it be that someone occupied the captain's room, but didn't want to sleep in the bed that he slept in? Right. So keep that in mind. Well, the other possessions of the captains were also missing. So his trunk, his steamer trunk, his grip and a canvas bag were missing. A grip being a smaller bag with your personal effects in it. I guess you can think of it as a larger like dop kit, you know. Yeah. It's kind of like a briefcase type thing. Yeah. A valise. Right. So you keep your more important stuff. Think about an airline pilot when they go on board and they got their kind of their box briefcase with their charts and their maps in it. Something like that, except with more personal effects that the captain would board with, along with his clothing, which would go in the trunk. So. Right. Instead of having all your small items rattling around in that bigger trunk, you have a smaller bag. Well, what's the importance of that? Well, the other guys on the ship would know that it's the captain's shaving razor. Right. His combs. You know, just why would you want that if you're taking stuff? Unless he had nice stuff, I guess. But it's just kind of like personal items that you wouldn't normally. Right. To your point, I think this is what you're saying. Don't let me put words in your mouth or thoughts in your brain. But it seems like you're saying it's something that the captain would take, but not necessarily someone else if they were leaving. Again, you would think so. But then, you know, listen, people, I'll say this throughout, people do weird things. It's like your most intimate, personal things that you wouldn't use somebody else's toothbrush. But some guys out there, especially a rustic, salty crew might do. We had, you know, ivory handled combs and items and stuff. It's like whatever they could sell. So you can't rule that out, which is an odd thing to take, unless it was the captain, I would think, that he was going to, again, the trunk was missing. So that's a larger, heavier item. All of his stuff is gone. All of his stuff is gone. Except for some clothes. Yeah. So another strange thing, if you're getting on a lifeboat, you wouldn't be taking a big trunk, you would think. You know, you don't need two weeks of clothes. Right. Perhaps. Well, certainly not in the dory, but on the y'all, you could have taken it. On the y'all. And if you're the captain, you might have that privilege. But again, if you need to get off the ship rather quickly, it's just something you wouldn't leave behind. Like, you know, when they tell you your airliner has to ditch, you don't bring your computer bag. Like, you know, even though it's like, well, it's my computer, my laptop, all my stuff. So there's like, sorry, stay in the overhead bin, get off, get down the slide. But the other thing that's odd, and there may be a little bit of contention about what room exactly, but there's a small side room next to the captain's cabin. And in that room, three pairs of boots were found, which did not belong to the captain. Right. So who goes in there to leave their boots? That's another odd thing. It's a little strange. A little strange. So on the chart room, they go in there and the ocean chart is there on the table laid out. So the interesting thing about that is if you were leaving and taking all that other stuff, you'd think you would take the ocean chart, except the coastal chart was missing. Right. So there's an implication there that whoever made a decision about the chart room decided to take what you would need to go ashore and maybe was inside of shore when they did that or close enough that they figured they could find it versus going back out to blue water sail, you know, in the deep water or whatever. So that's, maybe that's a clue. I would think it would be. I don't know why you would abandon ship without the ocean chart unless you were close to shore of some place that you knew where that shore was. I think they were confident that not heading out to open sea, but trying to get inland for safety reasons or to disappear. And so what they needed though, was the coastal charts. Right. And again, in that hurry, you don't grab everything. Like I said, well, why not just, it's an extra roll of paper, grab some ocean charts. Well, you're not going to need them. They knew that. Right. Whoever this was. So that's missing. Also the navigational instruments were missing as well. So the chronometer, the log, the charting gear, the sextant, I believe. Yeah. It said nautical instruments, but I would presume that's a sextant. You're always going to have, no matter what the state of your tech is, you always have a sextant in case the tech fails. And so I'm imagining that it's probably that or an equivalent navigational instrument for dead reckoning and that sort of thing. And the chronometer is one of the most important things there is in primitive sailing. You need to know what the time is to know how fast you're going, where you're going. It plays into all parts of navigational computation. Exactly. Since the discovery of longitude. That's right. There's a terrific documentary about, it's all about longitude. Because think about it, folks. Latitude, yeah, you know where you are, north and south on the globe. But longitude east to west, measuring that with transatlantic sailing and exploration, you need to know that. And so the most important things were the charting of longitude, like how many degrees are you from your starting point, again, going east or west across the globe. And you need to know how long it takes. So the other really important thing for accurate navigation was a chronometer. How long have you spent going in this one direction? That's right. And at one point, I can't remember the specifics of it. I think there was either a prize or a reward. There was. Yeah. That's in the, I think that's also mentioned. That might be in the documentary you're talking about. It was to develop a clock because they didn't have electronics at that time. And it was to develop a clock, a pendulum or a weight-oriented clock that could keep time at sea on a rocking ship. And that was a big, big deal when they finally figured that out. Exactly. So you had clocks that worked on weights and measures, you know, like a grandfather clock, but you can't have something like a pendulum on a ship. Just doesn't work. You're walking around. So you need something that keeps really accurate time with some other kind of mechanism back in an age, an era when you could not, or it was very difficult to machine fine parts like that for some kind of watch. You need a design. And I believe this is just off the top of my head. This is documentary came out years ago, decades maybe. In that the prize offered by, I can't remember the king, one of the French kings. Yeah. I can't remember which one. Oh, we're going to have to look it up now. The prize was equivalent to like $20 million in old timey money. And the guy won it. It took him like four years to build this thing. Oh, yeah. Here we go. John Harrison, famous for inventing the marine chronometer as his answer to the problem of finding longitude at sea, for which Parliament had in 1714 offered a reward of 20,000 pounds. 20,000 pounds in 1714 today would be worth 3.58 million pounds. Okay. Well, there you go. Quite a bit of prize money. And the guy did it. And so then you could accurately navigate and chart. So anyway, those are the three things that I had seen. Also, a telescope. Yes. And the ship's papers were taken. So three important tools, at least, the ship's papers, meaning that whoever left the ship was planning on doing a little bit of navigation themselves to get back to dry land. Or, again, a hideout place, a safe harbor, just any coastline with population. Yeah. One of those. But that was enough foresight to grab those things on the way out. So then what you get is the rescue, which was the wrecker. And, again, this was Captain James Carlson, the first person to, like, successfully board the ship or among the first group that actually got on it. And as Forrest said, I think it's a tug, but it may have also had salvage gear attached to it, cranes or something like that. So Captain James Carlson of the wrecker was acting on behalf of the Merritt and Chapman Derrick and Wrecking Company, such a great name, to attempt to salvage the Deering. And they were a fairly famous salvage company. Their nickname was the Black Horse of the Sea, which I thought was pretty cool. And, again, this was hard, hard, dangerous, dangerous work. We were doing some research on this. We look at some of these salvage companies. There was another one. It wasn't this particular one. There's a photo on the internet. And I'm going to see if it's public domain. We'll get it into our pictures as well. It's a whole crew of guys. And they're in front of a building. No, they are from this company. They're from Merritt and Chapman. And then there's another picture of the headquarters of one of these salvage companies. And it's the front of their warehouse. And it's the nameplates from all the ships they salvage. The whole front of it. It's just wild. Or you think about that, derelict vessels. And so the other thing about this, I don't want to get into this here because this would take a lot of research that we didn't do for this episode. But marine salvage law is very complicated. And there's certain codes that are associated with it that people just sort of know. But it varies from country to country. And if you're in international waters. And the first code is that you have to give aid. If somebody needs aid, you have to get it. It's like the ships that heard the Titanic, they're supposed to go to the Titanic. That's the case. If somebody's in distress, you go and you have to give aid. So in the process of giving this aid, you're entitled to some type of compensation. And in the case of a ship that needs to be salvaged, that's generally might be the ship itself or its contents, especially if you're saving the lives of the people on it. So there's rules. And they've evolved over the years. We've been at sea a long time. So they get updated. I think there was a big update in 1989. I can't remember what the last one was. But the long and short of it is, you go to the vessel ostensibly to see if there's anyone there that needs saving. That would be the first job of Captain Carlson here. Get on board. Are there people in distress? Does anyone need help? Once there's nobody in distress, and it's also obvious what the situation is with the boat, you can pull the boat out. And I'm pretty sure if you do, you get to keep it or all of its contents unless somebody buys you or you're entitled to get paid or compensated for it. Like the Deering Company could pay him if he brought it back to them. But it was unsalvageable. So his crew went about salvaging what they could from it. They took down a few sails and some other things. But there wasn't a whole lot to take off of it because, first of all, it was empty. Right. So it was not like there was a cargo you could offload, which you wouldn't be able to do at a shoal anyway, I don't believe. But secondly, there just wasn't a whole lot left on it. I actually wanted to read this excerpt from Professor Simpson's book. This is from the bottom of page 23. From the Deering that Friday, all that rescues men salvaged were one forsel, one mizzen sail, two jibs, an American flag, a Union Jack, 22 code flags, three cabin chairs, a lounge, two sidelights, two riding lights, one red light, and one bell. Foreman Samuelson picked up Captain Wormel's Bible, which, by the way, he did not take with him if they found it on the ship, and carried it to Carlson, who would then send it to the captain's family. The other thing they found, three starving cats. Ah, yes. Now, what I wouldn't give to know what these cats, they know what happened. They know everything. They were there. Yeah, but they're too busy staring at ghosts in the corner. Ah, well, just can you imagine, like imagine that ship with nobody on it, just sailing towards the North Carolina coast at God knows, you know, how many knots, and then slamming into this shoal, and these three cats being on there with no food, and I guess the cats didn't find the spare ribs in the kitchen. Well, there you go. Because you'd think they would have gotten to that, but they may have been down in the holds. This is a very, very, very, very big boat, you know, and traditionally, you have cats to kill rats on boats like that. Yeah. But everyone who is all the cat lovers out there will be pleased to know that Captain Carlson adopted them, and they went to live on the rescue, on the wrecker. So there you go. Yeah. You can always use a cat, I see. Yeah, at least one mewling gray kitty was found in the galley, I think. So, which is also odd, yeah, that they wouldn't get to the ribs. Yeah. Oh, so one of them, you read that one was found in the galley. See, I didn't read where they were. Ah, well, that's just, again, that's one differing account. Maybe it was too weak to jump up on the counter. No, no, I think it can't, yeah, you know, listen, just run the can opener, they'll come running. Well, so listen to this, though. So there was a final sale, and this, I want to read this too, just because I thought this was really interesting. Everything Carlson and the rescue wreckers had left aboard the Deering, and that the local boys from Hatteras Island had subsequently retrieved, now went on public sale at Hatteras Village. Under the authority of W.L. Gaskell, the wreck commissioner, first went the food, small quantities of beef, pork, ham, and bacon, of coffee and curry, peas, beans, pepper, and salmon, of mustard, yeast, hops, tapioca, grits, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, molasses, mutton, milk, prunes, and lard. Most of it sold for anywhere from a nickel to 90 cents, though the ship's sugar brought three dollars, her flour, five and a half. The buyers, all of them living between Buxton and Ocracoke, which is right there, paid $44 and five cents for the Deering's groceries. Furnishings out here at the edge of the sea were harder to come by than food, and these the bidding public valued much more highly. A table sold for $12, a chiffonier for $13.50, a set of chairs for $14.50, and a bedstead for $22.50. Lanterns went for two bits, though lamps got as high as $2.25. Eight mattresses were brought forth. Just what you want, a mattress off of a ship. Annie Austin made off with two for $1.75, but Irish Willis paid $12 for his. Brooms, buckets, doors, tables, pillows, blankets, linoleum, hoses, boxes, twine, everything must go. More than one of the six single-space legal pages listing the Deering's items was devoted to rope. There's a ton of rope, you know, what sailing vessels have. Lines. C.B. Foster paid $19 for his rope, but Commissioner Gaskell only paid a dime for his. But, you know, he's the guy running it, so he's got that sideline there. Irving Stowe bought some nautical charts for a quarter. I bet you get a fortune for those on eBay today. The nautical charts from the Deering? Certainly, they might be accursed items, but it would be cool to have a little end table from the Deering, wouldn't it? From the Deering? Yeah, no, I mean, how cool. J.C. Gaskell of the Creeds Hill Coast Guard Station got the captain's trunk, which I guess is a different one from the one that wasn't there, for $5, and A.J. Gray got his desk for $35. Yeah. Imagine the desk. Well, that's a lot of money back then, so I don't know. You don't have to get your old-timey calculator, but I would guess a couple of hundred dollars. Well, it's right here. So listen to this. All right, so the wrecked ship was sold to Lee Robinson for $25. Now, I can't figure that out. I can't figure out, A, why it's so cheap, but B, also why it's worth anything, because it's stuck. It's not going anywhere. So I don't know how that works. That might be a legal thing involving title, or is there something going on? Yeah, just to kind of retire it or something. Yeah, it's like when you buy somebody's house for a dollar, and then you give it back. Yeah, well, if somebody knows nautical or maritime history, and you know why you would buy a derelict ship that you're never going to be able to get to, let me know. So the total for material and food taking off the ship came to $8.4175, less the wreck commissioners, 5%, less the cost of a watchman in advertising, $25.67, and less than the salvers, 60%. Okay, so the law at this time must be, just so you know, to what we were saying earlier, the salvagers, they were entitled to 60% of whatever could be salvaged from the ship in exchange for attempting to salvage it. So that left a balance of $309.60. Commissioner Gaskill added in the vindue value of the wreck, again, less his 5%. So to the faraway owners of the latest Outer Banks shipwreck, and by the way, I read this in the book, we didn't talk about it, but people had shares in this. It was too expensive for any one person to back. Some people had more shares than others, but even those folks only had one or two shares. And I think each share on this, I can't, don't quote me on this, I can't remember, it's somewhere in Professor Bland's book, but I think the shares were like $2,750 a piece, or maybe $3,750, I can't remember. So you had to have a good chunk of change to invest in something like this. Well, it's always been risky, but people have done that since the beginning of time. Well, the beginning of commercial seafaring trade and- This is venture capital. You can make a lot of money, but your ships can also sink. And think about how much Spanish treasure was lost off the coast of Florida and the eastern United States on their way through the bad storm that they're still trying to dig up. That kind of gambling or venture or speculation has made people very rich and very poor, bankrupting them if your ship does not come in. That's the expression, your ship has finally come in. So that's what Richard Branson says. The difference between billionaires and millionaires is that millionaires started airlines. Yeah. Back in regards to the cat, it's a little like Jonesy the cat from the movie Alien. And I managed now to work in aliens into the scenario in a roundabout way. Oh yeah, so you had to. You worked it out. Yeah. So if Jonesy could talk, it's like, yeah, there's some giant monster that oozes goo and killed everybody. Yeah. Except for Sigourney Weaver. I just want to read these last two sentences on page 29 of Bland Simpson's book. And you can see why he's a creative writing professor. Such a great book. This book reads so well. He says, To the faraway owners of the latest Outer Banks shipwreck, now relieved of their loss and burden, Commissioner Gaskill, after the late February vendue, turned over the paltry sum of $333.35. So all those people that had shares in the boat, they had to split that up. Then he writes, The schooner Carol A. Deering herself, the ship that had cost a quarter million to build, stood three weeks pounding on the world's worst shoals, then came apart. And that's something to talk about what happened to the ship afterwards. They couldn't pull it out of there. And it continued to get bad. I think it got battered by at least one more storm. I'm not sure. But ultimately, it disintegrated. There was another vessel that came across a huge, like a 75-foot piece of it way out at sea. And they marked it where they had found it. And that piece, they wound up destroying with gun cotton bombs, just some kind of like thermite thing. I'm not even sure. I don't know a lot about it. Well, let's look it up. That's what they used to blow that up. Nitrocellulose. Well, the idea here is that gun cotton flash string. If you've ever seen magicians, when they do the little trick where they can light that on fire and it just completely goes up. Flash paper. Yeah, flash paper. It's a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid. There you go. And that's what you use to nitrate cellulose. Highly flammable. It was also used to replace gunpowder as a low order explosive in mining and other applications. So, yeah, the idea is that it's a propellant and an explosive and was used to basically destroy the ship. Now, here's another point of contention. There are some accounts that say that the ship was not blown up. Some say it was. I think in most, the overriding narrative is that dynamite was used or gun cotton to destroy the ship because it was deemed a nautical hazard. A navigation hazard. Yeah. And that it's going to get other ships in trouble and damage them. There is at least one account that says that, and Nate will say it's the more dramatic one as he does in his article, that they intended, gave the order to go out and blow it up, but a sudden and mysterious squall spewed up, preventing the ship from being blown up. Like it was a preventative measure from some unseen force. Well, I'm going, that's a little bit much, but basically they went to go try to blow it up and they couldn't. So they just kind of left the weather to batter it up into pieces. Well, my question about that is, and this is the thing, the piece that Simpson writes about, that's just one piece of it. That's only 75 feet. It was 250 feet. There was a good chunk of it that was left on the shoal until it broke free and came ashore. And so that piece, and there's pictures of that sitting on the beach. So that's different from the piece that got blown up in the ocean, but supposedly the piece on the beach was eventually destroyed as well because it also became a navigation hazard. Maybe due to tide or whatever, it got out, you know, the shoreline shifted and it was a danger maybe to locals because it was up on the beach. I don't know, but that could have also been what they went to go blow up when they destroyed it. Because at some point it said it was completely destroyed, what was left on the beach. There are parts of it though, in a museum at Hatteras, the ship's bell is there. And I know there was a piece, there's a picture online of one of the captains that like, you wrap the, you know, ropes around a huge, by the way. Some of the details are murky. So let's talk a little bit about the journey. What happened? How did the Carol A. Deering arrive on the Outer Diamond Shoal? Where was it leading up to this? And why was the captain who was on it, on it? So it starts out being loaded with coal on August 26th, 1920, exactly 49 years to the day before yours truly was born. That's when this went down. It then sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, which is around the area of Virginia Beach and Norfolk and that general area. And loaded with this coal, which is ostensibly, I think, I didn't read this, but it's probably from Pennsylvania. That was what it was built to handle, or it was built, purpose built to carry coal from Pennsylvania to other parts of the world. And it sailed up north to Delaware. And at some point while it was there, Captain Merritt, who was the regular captain for her, became ill, fell ill, and he didn't want to go to sea. And then on top of that, he did not like the crew. And this is very important. The crew that he was supposed to go out with, he was particularly worried about the first mate, but also some of the other crew members. And the only person that he really trust was the engineer, a guy named Herbert Bates, who he had sailed with before and a lot of his friends had sailed with before. So Captain Merritt calls on another friend of his, a neighbor of his from Portland, Maine, which by the way, pretty much everybody that lived in Maine was a captain at this point in time. That's where they go to hang out and retire. And they all knew each other. Yeah. And so he calls this other captain, Willis B. Wormel, or Wormel, W-O-R-M-E-L-L, a friend of his, and he's like, I need you to go and take the Deering from Delaware down to Rio de Janeiro with its load of coal for me. Wormel had been retired. He was 66 years old, and he had been off the sea for, I think, several months, not a super long time, but he'd been off the sea. And I think his family was probably glad to have him around. He had survived a long career at sea, but he came out of retirement as a standby captain to take this trip, this sort of on-call guy. Merritt told Wormel he didn't trust the crew. And he was particularly, again, worried about everyone but the engineer, specifically the first mate. So Wormel takes the job. He gets on the boat. They sail toward their destination of Rio on December 2nd, 1920. So it's near the end of the year in 1920. Make it there. They offload the coal, probably around Christmas time. And in January of 1921, they start heading back toward Hampton Roads or home. Along the way, on January 9th, they stop in Barbados, Bridgetown. And during this time, there was a blowup between first mate Charles McClellan, a Scotsman, and by all accounts, apparently quite a heavy drinker, and Captain Wormel. And at some point, there was a fight, and McClellan threatened Captain Wormel and tells him, I'll kill you before it's over, old man. I'll kill you, I will. You have to put the, I will. Yeah, I can't. Old time, I'll kill you. And that fight took place on the boat, apparently. So Wormel kicks him off the boat, and he leaves the boat. But the whole crew goes with him, which gives you a little bit, starting to smell a little bit like a potential mutiny here. The crew goes with McClellan into town, and they start a five-day bender, just like a hardcore, just drinking and carousing and doing whatever they're going to do there. And at some point, this culminates in McClellan getting arrested and thrown in jail. So during these five days, Wormel, I guess, is talking to other friends of his. There's a lot of captains down there that are people that he knows, again, from Maine. Captain Norton from the Augusta W. Snow, he had told him that McClellan was habitually drunk and horrible to the rest of the crew. His first mate, he would be in charge of everybody else. And just saying that he was an over-disciplinarian and just generally a mean person. Later, Captain Norton sees McClellan himself. And McClellan comes up to him and says, my crew is lazy, and whenever I go to discipline them, Wormel won't let me. And then he asks Norton for a job. And Norton is like, hell no, and puts him in his place. You're not coming to work for me. And then he said that McClellan said to him, well, then I'll get the captain before we get to Norfolk, I will. Yeah. See, there's your eye wheel. That's what I was referencing. There is some indication in the later investigations after this all kind of cleared up that Captain Merritt himself may have used or feigned a severe illness to get out of captaining that ship and taking his son with him. Because his son was his first mate on that voyage as well. So it's like, ah, I'm too sick for this. I'm going to get off. And then that's a good excuse to get somebody else aboard because he didn't get a good vibe from the crew. Yeah, maybe he was trusting his gut. Yeah. Right. Could be. Or he was just genuinely ill, but they put off in Delaware, I think, to recover. And then he's out of this mess. Yeah. Smart move on his part, sickness or no. And again, he's able to get his son off with a good excuse. And so they leave. But yeah, there's just a bad, ill will feeling all around with this crew particularly. And with that captain and the next, from the accounts, I get the impression that they weren't totally incompetent, but just maybe dysfunctional. No one's getting along. It's not a happy crew. Right. Yeah. For a big ship, there's only 10 of them. So you have to get along. Not a good working environment, which then starts to point more heavily towards one explanation over others. So that lends a lot of credence to the idea, possibly, of some kind of mutiny. And Captain Wormel also met with another captain, G.W. Bunker, also from Maine. And they went for a walk on the beach in Barbados. And Captain Bunker asks Wormel, he's like, do you think the crew is going to turn on you? And Wormel said he wasn't sure. And I guess Bunker might have said to him, I mean, and this is according to Bland Simpson. And like I said, some of the book is historical fiction. So it's hard to know how many of these conversations are super accurate. But I think a lot of them are based on accounts that were told in other places later. But one thing is true. It's possible that Bunker may have mentioned a recent mutiny that took place. And he might have said to Wormel, a mutiny only takes a few, especially armed, not everyone. And he mentioned a ship that was mutinied by just one crew member and two stowaways, the Senator Schroeder. And that's S-C-H-R-O-D-E-R. It was a German ship. So I went to look that up. That was commandeered by Hermann Neufkin, who was a German sailor and militant communist. He was active in the early 20th century. In the 1910s, Neufkin had become involved with the communist movement and worked to organize labor unions and revolutionary activity among sailors and dock workers. He is remembered as a prominent figure in the communist movement among German sailors and dock workers in the early 20th century. While not a household name, Neufkin's memoirs and legacy contribute to the understanding of communist agitation and labor activism within the German merchant marine industry in the early 20th century. That tells you a little bit about him. So in 1921, this is from Wikipedia, this portion here, he hijacked the ship Senator Schroeder to transport Franz Jung, Claire Jung, and Jan Appel to the Second World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. So I guess he was on that ship and he took it over with just a couple of people and made them take him to Russia. Yeah. So he could go to this communist meeting. Yeah. I mean, it only takes one person to hijack a plane with a weapon. Right. That was only five months before all of this was going down. So that was still probably pretty fresh in all of these captains' minds. You know, they're all thinking like, what can happen? I'm stuck on this boat with these people I don't really know that well. Yeah. So Wormel speculates with all of his friends. They're all captains. They're all a little worried about his situation. But he probably also wonders like, what are mutineers going to do with an empty ship? The deering was unladen. Yeah. You know, the coal was offloaded. I mean, it's a valuable boat, but it's going to be a hard thing to hide and use if you steal it. Well, that's the other thing is that it also sticks out, as the accounts say. It's a five-masted grand schooner that basically sticks out like a sore thumb. So maybe also not good for smuggling. Right. Unless that was your cover. You know, it's like, oh, it's a holiday ship for tourists. It's a pleasure craft now. And that's really what you're doing to draw attention away from it. But if it's not, it doesn't go that fast either. So you'd be much better off stealing a steamer that looked like a lot of other steamers out on the seas than this thing. Well, and here's an interesting after note. So on January 16th, Captain Norton, who had talked to Wormel and warned him about this, saw a five-masted schooner about five miles away from him that was clearly drifting and rotating out of control at sea. And he couldn't, from the distance he was seeing it, he couldn't tell if it was the deering, but he knew that something was wrong on that vessel. So that's interesting. That's on January 16th. However, the deering made progress after that point. Two days later, she was off Cape Canaveral. Two days after that, Beaufort, South Carolina. January 23rd, 1921, she passed the frying pan light vessel off Cape Fear, NC. That's just south of Wilmington, where the Cape Fear River comes out into the Atlantic Ocean. And a light vessel is a pre-lighthouse where you have a boat out in the water with lights on it to warn passing ships. A light high up on its mast. At first reading, you would think that, oh, maybe it's just a very, it's made out of balsa wood. It's a very light ship. No, no, it's a ship with a light on it. No, yes, it's not that. No, but it's often used in- In fact, they're usually steel, in fact. Yeah, no, they're sturdy because they have to be out there in bad weather as well and stalwart- And anchored. And anchored to provide a beacon to ships and also in places where it's not practical or too deep to build a lighthouse. Exactly. For one reason or another, you can't build a lighthouse, but you need some kind of warning so you have a light ship. I was going to also say about the ships that were the wreckers or bankers, they were called sometimes, that would salvage these ships. Sometimes they were not run by the most scrupulous people and what they would do is put a false lantern out on the shore of a rocky point, trying to get ships to like, oh, it's safe. Yeah, let's go in there. And then they would ground, purposely ground them and then go basically loot them. So that happened quite a bit, but not as much, I think, in the first part of the 20th century. That and piracy were things that were seeming to be going away. You know, also there's a Coast Guard station nearby. So you want to give around, you don't want to get away with too much shenanigans. No, this isn't a smart place to FAFO, as they say, because the Coast Guard is everywhere. The whole coastline is watched. Yeah, exactly. It's watched, but that did happen, or they would place the light around a horse, I think, and kind of march him up and down the beach or just let it go. Yeah. Yeah. And then a ship's pilot would think it was safe there and then run around on a shoal or rocky outcropping. And then basically you have a lot of sellable stuff on board. In this case, not that much sellable stuff. So that also doesn't figure in completely, but then you wonder if people who are going to do that actually know what's on board. Well, on January 29th, 1921, after a bad storm, one of the most significant final sightings of the Carroll A. Deering happened. And the Lookout Shoals light vessel off of Cape Lookout, NC, just 70 miles southwest of Cape Hatteras in the Diamond Shoals, was at sea. And there had been a storm, but it had abated. And around 4 p.m., the Deering sailed past the Lookout Shoals light vessel at about four knots. It was a beautiful day at sea that day. And the light vessel even got a picture of her passing. It's possibly the last picture of the Deering at sea. You can find it on the internet and hopefully on our webpage. Deering, however, had no wireless radio, but it was close enough for someone on the deck to yell to someone on the light vessel. Whoever that person was, they yelled through a megaphone, quote, we've lost both anchors and chains in the gale off frying pan shoals. Forward word to our owners, end quote. But even though the light ship's master thought that the sails looked neatly trimmed and that the ship was making good headway, he also noticed that things didn't look right on board the Deering. He said the crew was all over the decks. They were scattered around like no one was in charge. And more specifically, they were on the quarter deck. The quarter deck is a sacred space for the captain on all ships. I'll give you some more information about this. It's where all the scenes with the captains take place in every pirate movie you've ever seen. It's the ceremonial command center of the ship. It's for the captain and senior officers only. Meetings, discussions about navigation and decisions. The most prestigious location on the ship and a symbol of authority and the hierarchy and rules of access. And it was raised up to denote its importance. Also, anybody that's watched Star Trek knows about the meetings in the quarter deck. So why then were regular crew members up there when it sailed past the light ship and there was no captain to be seen. So where was the captain? Was he below deck? Was he dead? Was he floating far away in the ocean? We don't know. Okay. So we've established that as it was observed, the crew members are running around in a disorderly fashion, not like they were regularly working or supposed to as from the eye of a captain peering over at it. That it seemed to be guys running around in disarray. They, as you said, they're up on the quarter deck, which is the raised kind of a portion where only the captain is. So that's a no, no. So that would let you know that the captain's not around or he's down below tied up. Who knows? They are kind of running amok a little bit, but not running around with their hair on fire. Just like not something ain't right about the way they're moving. And so, because a ship has very limited real estate, you have to move in an orderly fashion or do your work in orderly fashion. And so that becomes very routine and noticeable by people who've worked on ships for years and years. But this is a bit of a clue is, as you said, so somebody was reported to have yelled through a megaphone from the Deering, the currently Deering stating, as you said, we've lost two anchors, send word to the Deering company, let them know. And it was reported that, there are some reports that the man described was tall, thin, with red hair, and spoke with a Scandinavian accent. Yeah. There were certainly some Scandinavian people on board, that would make sense, but that's who it was described, but it was unknown from that description exactly what crew member that was, as far as I know. Yeah, so here was, we have Willis B. Wormel, the master, Charles McClellan, the mate, doesn't say where he's from, Johan Fredrickson. Boson. Yeah. James A. Benjamin, Stu, Hilbert Pillsbury, Bates, engineer, that's the one they trusted. Niels P. Nielsen, N-I-E-L, able-bodied seaman. Niels M. Olesen, able-bodied seaman. Christian Peterson, able-bodied seaman. Peter Sorensen. So I would say Nielsen, Olsen, Peterson, and Sorensen, that's one, two, three, four guys there, definitely Scandinavian. But McClellan, Charles McClellan, the first mate, is the one that was so rowdy and apparently drinking all the time. Right, right. He was arguing to the other captain about not being able to discipline the crew the way he wanted to. But then Captain Wormel was like, he's trying to discipline them too much. So they disagreed on that. But then also when Wormel kicked McClellan off the boat for threatening him, a lot of the crew went with him. Right. Why would a crew that's being abused by McClellan, it just sounds like there was some very complex dynamics going on there between all these guys. Exactly. And so imagine being an outsider here. Well, in this case, it's the captain of the light ship, James Steele. And he's the one who spotted or had the report of a tall, thin, red-haired man. Also, the red-haired man did not seem to be like an officer, did not act like an officer. Right. So somebody on the lower crew level, which again, why are they making that announcement? Why is it the captain of the first mate if they're still around? So he found that to be odd. And then, as you said, also the report of losing the two anchors. If you are trying to get away, why would that be your message? So it's just kind of odd and doesn't add up unless there's something else going on. Okay. So at least that message gets relayed to Captain Steele, except their radio is also on the blank, not working. They can't report that message. And they're hoping that another passing ship will be able to relay it for them. Because again, that's maritime law. You have to communicate. It's very dangerous out there. People's lives could be lost, plus a lot of money and ships. So the thing is like, let's all help each other out as much as possible. That's a mandate. However, when a ship does come close, a steam ship, and this is shortly after they start going south, they pass this other ship. Well, Captain Steele has them put up a signal flag. You've probably seen it before. Semaphore, I think, is the name of the process. And so the flags RQK, that signifies have important message. So stop, pay attention. Listen to what we've got to say. Please relay this. Well, here's the weird thing. This steamship did not come any closer. So the light ship, captain by James Steele, they blasted their steam whistle four times. Now, this is so powerful that you can hear this horn five miles away. And it means, hey, pay attention. Please come over here. Get a board to relay. Well, at this, the steamer changes course and steers away from them, accelerates, and here's the odd kicker. As Captain Steele is looking at them, obviously through binoculars or a telescope or a spyglass, the crew drops a canvas over the stern, I think on the transom, to cover up the name of the ship. So he can't see it. Yeah. So there's some shenanigans going on there. Yeah. See, this reminds me of that time I was riding on the back of my friend's motorcycle and he was speeding down this street. Oh, dear. And we went past a police car and he made me cover up the license plate with my hands. With your hands. Okay. Now, did it work? We got away. Yeah. Anywho, back onto this steamer, the Hewitt, because this is another strange other ship tale, right? So in the middle of all of this, there's a steamship named the SS, or SS standing for steamship, or single screw ship, single propeller ship, called the Hewitt. And that also vanished, also without a trace. A lot of people had seen it. It had made its way past certain points into the ports it was supposed to go to, but then it just didn't show up. And this coincides with February 1st, 1921, Coast Guardsmen and other eyewitnesses on the shore saw a flash of light at sea and heard an explosion after that. Question is, could that have been the Hewitt? But nobody knows. Nobody knows what it was. And they went out and they looked for wreckage and they couldn't find a thing. But there was definitely an explosion. Maybe it was a UAP. Possibly. Because it reminds me, speaking of that, it reminds me a little about Flight 19 and the Martin Marauder aircraft that went after them and was also missing. And the only thing found there- It's the flying gas can, they call it that way. Right. And it was an oil slick. There was another ship that reported a flash of light, perhaps, and some smoke, but they pulled up and could not find anything. That's also, I would say, fairly common, but that does happen where another ship that's connected to it also goes missing in a mysterious way. That steamship, though, was that known to be an oiler, meaning it was a fuel ship, refueling ship? The Hewitt? Yes. I can't remember. I think it might've been. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think one of them prominently was- There's a lot of details on it in- That would explain the explosion, in my mind. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the lots of smoke being seen. Yeah, that's true. Something can go wrong. These things, as we said before, a lot of the crashes and tragedies that happen off the coast are not just from weather, but also explosions, fire, all these other things that can go wrong with a steamship or just any ship. Right. So that's another odd thing, though, that that also goes missing. And later on, as we'll visit here, that happens to be one of the reasons that the government and Secretary of Commerce at the time, Herbert Hoover, later President Hoover, would take an interest in investigating this because so many ships in this area seem to go missing. Yeah. It was a bit of a pet project for some of these people, like, what's going on here? Before really talk of the Bermuda Triangle was happening. Although I must say, before we forget, this is mentioned, this case, in Charles Fort's book, Low. That's right. So he thought it was odd enough to add to his collection there. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. 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And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. Ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 24-7 dot org. I'm Chris D'Armory, and when I'm not knitting sweaters for cryptoids, aliens, and monsters, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. Well, on January 30th, this would be the last sighting of the deering underway. The SS Lake Elon sees her around 3.30 p.m. about 25 miles southwest of the Diamond Shoals light vessel, which would not be far from where it would be found. I actually want to read, this is a letter from the master of the Lake Elon. This is on page 66 of Simpson's book. The wind was southwest moderate, and she had all sail set and steering about north-northwest, making about seven miles. We passed her about 5.45 p.m., about one-half mile off on our port side we were, then about 25 miles southwest, true from the Diamond Shoal light vessel. From the description of the deering, we think that this schooner was her, but we could not read her name. There was nothing irregular to be seen on board this vessel, but she was steering a peculiar course. She appeared to be steering for Cape Hatteras, which is, folks, where she wound up. The Diamond Shoal is right off Cape Hatteras. We sighted Diamond Shoal light vessel about 7 p.m. and passed it at 8.32 p.m. The lookout on the schooner should have sighted Cape Hatteras light, also the light ship at Diamond Shoal a little later than we did, but in plenty of time to avoid going on shore as the weather was clear and cloudy with good visibility. There were a couple of more ships in the vicinity steering a course parallel with us, which should have convinced the captain of the schooner that he was steering a wrong course. Hoping that this may be of some value, we are very truly yours. Henry Johnson, Master SS Lake Elon, EV Ferrandini, Chief Officer. So what's interesting about that is it seems like at this point, this is the day after it passed the lookout shoals light vessel and said they lost both their anchors. So people were on the ship at that point. Whether it was the captain or not, they were human beings and they seemed to be controlling it, no matter how disciplined they were or not. The next day, it's sighted from several miles away by the SS Lake Elon. And by that captain's account, it's headed straight for the shoals. It's underway straight for the shoals. And there's enough evidence that it should have seen the light ship at Diamond Shoals or the lighthouse at Hatteras or all the other vessels not going that way. And a good captain, which Wormel was a super experienced captain, an expert in all of these waters, would have said, oh, oops, we're not doing the right thing here. And so theoretically, would have any decent navigator or junior officer or even other crew member might have been like, this isn't right. So there's some question, I think at this point, this January 30th sighting that the Lake Elon is seeing, if anyone was on board at that point, if they had already set the sails and maybe somehow tried to lock the rudder or just get it pointed toward the shoal, and they had already gotten off the ship, everybody, for whatever reason and in whatever way. Yeah, to scuttle it or to kind of ground it. Yes. But also, as you were saying, and I think this happens to be the case with the Elon, is that they were able to see the deering through binoculars or telescope and saw no one on the upper decks, which was odd. But they ignored it thinking like, yeah, they've got to have seen this. They're going to get more. Don't worry about it. And so they ignored it. Yeah. Well, you wouldn't have any reason to think. I mean, you might be like, oh, well, that's a weird course. But if the sails are all unfurled and it looks more or less under control, you're not going to be like, oh, no one's on that. That's not your thought. Yeah. So no matter what the circumstances are. So it's highly unusual. So that's the last time it's seen. The next time it is discovered is by C.P. Brady through his telescope in the morning on the day that we started this whole story. So now we come down to the question. We've gotten to the point where this ship has crashed. The real question is, what happened? And unlike a lot of ships, ships that are lost at sea or disappeared, you don't know anything. They go out and you don't even figure out they're missing for weeks and weeks. You don't know anything could have happened in a long span of time leading up to their disappearance. But in this case, it's really only one day since it had people on it. It's one day. So what do we know? We know that McClellan couldn't stand Wormel and Wormel was leery of McClellan. So they were butting heads already. Is there going to be a mutiny? McClellan was kicked off the ship by Wormel and Barbados. And then a bunch of the crew went with him on a five day bender. So who knows what happens there? McClellan goes to jail, Wormel bails him out, which is interesting. It's like, hey, look, you know, I hope you slept it off. Let's get out of here. We got work to do. We need to get the ship back. They get back on the boat. And along the way, something goes bad. Now, this isn't indicated in Simpson's book. So I don't know for sure. But I believe that there would be no alcohol on board. This was during Prohibition, which we're going to talk a little bit more about in a minute. But even if it weren't, I'm pretty sure that you can't have alcohol on board of a merchant marine ship at all, period. You know, maybe the captain has some hidden away. But I don't think you're allowed to have it. So I don't think there's a circumstance where, in theory, McClellan would be allowed to get sauced and then go crazy on the ship. Although, you know, who knows? A big boat, he could have hidden some on there and brought it back. But yeah, just not the best working conditions. You know, unless you're in the British Navy in centuries past, where that was the only thing to look forward to. Also was the only good drinking water is some grog or rum. And as the old saying goes, the British Navy ran on rum and butter. In this case, though, yeah, especially with guys that are, as McClellan has described as, well, he's an alcoholic. And so that's not, it was constantly drunk, I think, even sometimes on duty. I think you're right here. There may not have been any on board because it's just kind of hard to do your job if that's all there's to look forward to and the only recreation. After this, the next thing that we know that happens is this ship crashes on the shoals. It gets run aground and it's stuck there. And no one except for a couple of kitties are on board. Well, now the investigation begins. And so it is kind of a thorough investigation. There's certainly a lot of people that have joined in. You have the Coast Guard, you have other officials, you have the U.S. government, eventually, the Maritime Merchant Association. And they're all conducting an investigation. Also very much motivated by Captain Worrell's daughter, Wornell's daughter, Lulu Wornell. Right. She pressured a lot of people because her thing was, look, if they had gotten off for legitimate reasons, there was a problem on board and they made it to shore, I know that my dad would have eventually sent word to us and tried to get home or at least got a message to us that he was okay. This is very much not like him. Something bad happened and possibly something criminal happened. So she was applying a lot of pressure for an investigation to happen, but they were investigating anyway. And during this, something else odd happens. A piece of evidence literally washes ashore. And what is that? It's a message in a bottle. Yeah. And this at first seems like something pretty compelling. Well, if you look at the clues when you first read it, it is. So tell us about that. And I love this name. Who's the guy that discovered it? Christopher Columbus Gray is the guy that found it. And now this is an interesting character. This is a guy that lived down there at the coast. One of the quotes in Simpson's book is that the guy that he was referred to as wild as a deer. Now, I don't know if Simpson, that's part of his historical fiction there, but it's funny because they basically were indicating whenever this, they went to talk to him about his find or ask him more questions about it. If he didn't want to see you, he just kind of disappeared into the woods and you would never find him. Yeah. But he did say that he found this bottle and that there was a piece of paper in it. Which he immediately gives to the Coast Guard for examination and evidence. Yes. And a couple of interesting clues are found out about this bottle and the paper that it's written on. You know, this is a federal investigation. So they have investigators looking at this and they find out that it's a type of bottle that's been manufactured in Brazil. And the paper, which the note was written on, was commonly made in Norway. So there we have a Scandinavian connection. Okay. So that's starting to cement as maybe this thing being real. Yes. Here's another cementing factor to this thing being genuine is that they look at the handwriting on the note and the people that knew the crew members of the Deering, of course, they've got family and friends. They have them examine it and people say it matches the handwriting exactly or very closely to the engineer that was aboard the Deering. Right. The only one that Wormel and the other captains trusted. Exactly. Yes. And he had an unusual way of spelling or writing and where he would capitalize words, each word in the sentence rather than just the first word of the sentence. So it was an unusual little spelling tick, I guess you could say. And written, you could say, with an unusual handwriting tick. Like, and matching people, there's a confirmation that like, yeah, the engineer, he wrote just like this. We know him. And this note then appears to be very genuine because there you go. They just came from Brazil, which would explain the bottle. There were Norwegians or Scandinavians on board. That explains the origin of the paper. And then the writing is confirmed. And what did the note say? The note said the following, Deering captured by oil burning boat, something like chaser, taking off everything, handcuffing crew, hiding all over ship, no chance to make escape. Finder, please notify headquarters of Deering. Well, that of course, once that hits the press, then you start having lots of talk about piracy because, well, here you go. Here's some proof. I mean, it seems pretty solid. And there was the Washington Post at the time that added in some reporting that a torpedo boat chaser, that's a boat that's an interceptor that's going after the prey here out on the open ocean, or maybe even a submarine that had been acquired just after World War I, like a German U-boat that had been absconded with. And now they're using that for piracy. Well, that's a fun and interesting angle. I think the New York Times reported that that doesn't seem very likely, but we can't rule that out. But now this is getting in the press and it's making headlines here. And now the theories start coming forth. So here's the interesting thing. There were all kind of experts that identified not only the random capitalization of some of the words on the message that Bates used to do, but also the shapes of some of the letters when compared with other papers that were supposedly written by Bates. But later, there got to be some detectives involved in this. There was a lot of investigation that went into this case. And people were very, very suspicious about this message in a bottle. So it continued to get investigated. And eventually this detective figured out that something wasn't right about it. And he would go to meet with Christopher Columbus Gray. And Christopher Columbus Gray would answer like one question and then run off into the woods, leaving the guy stuck with his son. And the son was like a little boy. He was like, well, I don't know where dad is. Kind of like. So it started getting weirder and weirder. And then eventually what they figured out was something wasn't right. And over, this is really spelled out in the book and it's too long to get into in the show, but essentially Christopher Columbus Gray had a habit in the old days of leaving notes all over town for the girls that he liked. Okay. He would drop them on the ground. This seemed to be an affectation of his. So the more they investigated it, the more it turned out that he was the person who provided not only the message in the bottle, but the other samples. He had forged all of them. So the handwriting matched because everything was his. The whole thing was a ruse. And he had come up with it really to try and get work or to get ingratiated with the Coast Guard so he could get work. Yeah. At the Hatteras Lighthouse, I think. That's where he wanted to work. At the Hatteras Lighthouse. And on top of that, he confessed to this. After being complied with a lot of drinks, I think. I think that was the one detective got very close to him and finally got him liquored up and he admitted to it being a hoax. But then he also ran away. And then from what I read that, so he took off and then not the most brilliant criminal move, but I think they advertised or they sent him a notice somehow that he had been accepted for a job at his dream place, the Hatteras Lighthouse. Like, come on down and fill out an application. And he did. And that's when they nabbed him again. Yeah. It's just like that thing where they're like, you know, come turn in your guns and they pick up everybody. So. Yeah. They nabbed Mr. Columbus Gray and he confesses, but it's just an odd thing. And it reminds me again, with the SS cam loops, there was contention about another message in a bottle by one of the survivors there. It was her name, Alice. And that was, I think there was some contention about if it being true. Again, they're not trying to get away with anything, but they're wondering, was she the last survivor of the cam loops and sadly froze to death? Oh, right. On the island. So again, it's a tantalizing clue, but ultimately it turns out to be false, even though very odd. But you're saying though, that he was leaving other notes with his handwriting on them and reporting to be coming from the engineer. Yeah. There's a lot more detail on that. Again, we recommend picking up Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals if you want to read more about it. It's pretty interesting. And the way that Simpson wrote the book, I was buying the message in a bottle. I was like, oh, wow, this is crazy. Because they had all these confirmations, just like any case where they're like, nope, this matches, this matches, this matches. Like when you watch Dateline or 2020. And then in the last 15 minutes, they're like, all of that was bunk. And then explain to us who Peter Sorensen is. Well, the interesting thing about Peter Sorensen is he's one of those crew members. He's one of the Scandinavian crew members. And his name turned up on some ships after the 11 crew members were missing. Well, it's a fairly common Scandinavian name. Yeah. So they didn't know, but the age matched and the ports matched. And there was supposed to be more looking into that to see if he might be the guy. But according to Simpson's book, that just is a dead, it didn't go, it didn't get pursued much further. Not sure there. But yeah, it is a very common name. So that seems kind of thin. But that could be him. What if that's him? But why would you keep your name? If you disappeared at sea, would you then continue to sail under the same name? Well, it's a good point, unless you had all your ID or it's just so common and you look like every other Peter Sorensen out there. It was a different time as well. Kind of the tail end, as we said, I think way back when we were covering the Count of St. Germain, past the Isadora, who wrote the book about him. We're talking about being able to change your identity or just going to another country. Now we're talking, of course, about early to mid to late 19th century where not many records are kept. So you can show up at a meeting of the Masons in Vienna with the same name or something like 60 years later. You're like, I knew this guy, but that was like 50 years ago. And so it's a little looser and easier to just assume a new identity back in that century. And now we're seeing kind of that phasing out. It's still easier though, I think in the 1920s, where you had records, some photos, but not a lot. And people just kind of went by what you wrote down and didn't have to provide a lot of proof. And we saw that with that ease of immigrating to, America with Ellis Island. I remember I have some relatives, beloved relatives by marriage, but they were Nielsen. So they were Danish. The story is though, that they got to Ellis Island and the guy goes, what's your name? Nielsen. And they're like, it's Nelson. I can't spell Neil. What is it? An E and I, nevermind. You're Nelson. And so Danes more so had the N-E-L-S-E-N spelling. Swedes, I think had the N-E-L-S-O-N spelling. I apologize if I got that wrong, but that's the way I was told. And it was just like, well, we're just changing your name a little to make it easier for our bookkeeping. So you could have come from Europe with a completely different spelled name, a different identity, and you got it reset as soon as you hit American soil back in the twenties. In this case though, I mean, this is all just some odd clues to this thing, which I think is why it's been in people's imaginations ever since. And you had people popping up again, maybe like flight 19, where there's a telegram from one of the guys in the squadron to the family. That's one of the more intriguing, weird things where he was- He's a nickname. That only his family knew. Exactly. And they're like, well, who would know that first of all? By the way, folks, if you haven't heard that, we did a series on flight 19, just look for flight 19 in a style. It's all connected. There's also chicken shoals. If you remember, there's shoals in that one. Anything around the coast, shoals are involved. There's a lot of shoals. Well, they are the grease traps, the sink basin traps of the mysterious and paranormal. Things get stuck to them. I'm being not totally facetious here that with maritime mysteries, shallow bits and things where mysteries get caught up. That's where you see them last before they get tossed out to sea forever. But here we're left with some interesting clues. Again, because this is thoroughly investigated by several entities of the time of the highest order and records were made, again, because there's a lot of money riding on this thing. And it's not the 1820s, it's the 1920s. So it's a little more sophisticated, but not completely. So what do we have here? Well, there's a lot of theories for this. Because we're missing so much information. It's weird. We have a lot of information. We know that people, as I keep saying, we know people were on it the day before it was last seen heading towards the shore. So we know that it's not like a lot of ghost ships where, okay, it was lost in the ice and it keeps turning up for 60 years or whatever. It's sailing alone by itself, abandoned, you know, or it's, well, they were supposed to be here three weeks ago. No, it was supposed to be here a few days ago. And a few days after that, it turned up stuck on this shoal. And the day before that, there were people on it. So what do we know? We know that the crew didn't get along. So anything could have happened there or might've been nothing happened. McClellan might've just had a big mouth and was surly and they, you know, never would have taken that next step. Maybe he just liked to talk a lot of smack, especially if he was drinking. Doesn't mean that he's a murderer, you know? Once you do that, you can't get work in this field again. So if you love the sea, now you're on the land totally, or you have to assume a completely different identity, which is hard to do because again, this is a tight knit community in ways that these crews, like I said, people knew other people that were on the crew. They knew crews on other ships. Captains knew of these other people. Yeah. It's a small community really, when you think about it. Right. If you're good and you want to get hired again, well, then you got a reputation to uphold. So if you're going to pull that trigger, you're kind of on the outs and done forever. Yeah. So, so what you're saying is if you kill your captain, you're unlikely to get another gift. It doesn't look good on the CV. Well, maybe you can go overseas. Well, here's the thing. Okay. Yeah. Maybe you can go overseas. You can go to Europe. But again, these are international waters. People know each other in different ports all around the world. Yeah. They're going to have heard about this. And certainly they did hear about this case. And so I don't know about that unless it was an accident and they thought it might look bad if they pulled a, you know, rolled into shore here with the captain missing, especially after all the bad words were exchanged. Well, all right. So let's get down to that. Let's talk about these, the different possibilities then, you know, of course, the first thing you think of is mutiny, but let's say, let's say it wasn't a mutiny. Let's say the crew all got off the ship together. They abandoned the ship for some reason that we haven't quite figured out. I mean, there's just so many things that could have happened here. And that's what's so crazy. Combinations of things, as I always like to think. Yeah. Because like one combination, for example, is McClellan got mad and smashed the binnacle with a sledgehammer, but didn't kill anybody and also broke the wheel or damaged the rudder and they couldn't control it anymore. The sails were up, but they couldn't control where it was going. So they abandoned ship. Of course, it doesn't really make sense. It doesn't seem to me if the wind was blowing that you would abandon ship with the sails up. You would want it to be going slow or stopped while you were lowering the yawl and the dory into the water. So maybe scratch that. But the other thing is the captain, there's a lot of ways the captain could have died. He was 66. He could have had a heart attack. He could have died of natural causes. He could have died during the storm they went through because they went through a pretty bad storm. But we also know they came out on the other side of it, but we didn't see the captain after the storm. So the captain could have died in the storm, either from natural causes or because of McClellan pushed him overboard, could be anything. And then after that, now they've got this ship, it's empty. They're supposed to go to Hampton Roads. The captain is dead. What are they going to do? If they show up in Hampton Roads without the captain, they're going to get prosecuted. That's explaining to do. Yeah. Right. So then maybe they decide to set the ship to scuttle and they get off the ship on the yawl and the dory and they try to make a run for it. Then what happens to them then? That's just a whole separate story. Now they're in the water in the yawl. The weather was not bad when the ship crashed, but the next several days it was bad. So the, or the waves and the wind were just nuts. So it's like they could have had serious problems, even if they managed to safely get off the ship. So let's say they killed the captain, then got off the ship in the yawl, they could still be lost at sea and they might've never made it ashore. Now there's at least one person in Simpson's book who says, you know, because folks are like, well, how come no parts of the yawl washed up on shore? There were no bodies that washed up on shore. And there was, um, I can't remember what page it was on in the book now. But there was a statement to the effect. It's like, you know, I've lived here my whole life. No body or wreckage from the outer shoal ever comes ashore because of the current. It just doesn't. The currents just haul it away. So it's like, there's no mystery there. None. So they could have gotten off at that point because then the next question is, well, when it hit the shoal, did they disembark then? But it doesn't seem like it based on what the Elon saw. If the Elon was looking at the deering, which it seems like it probably was. So the next question is, is it piracy? Well, that was a kind of, you know, Simpson's book suggests that that was sort of a far-fetched thing at this point. And it's something that you alluded to earlier that was sort of dying down, not really a thing. You're also doing it again, as you stated before, or I guess we both did, is that you have Coast Guard stations spotted throughout at equidistant measures. Yes. And so it'd be like robbing the store next to the police station. Yeah. They're standing out there 24-7 with telescopes watching the ocean. Yeah. And what you said earlier, it had offloaded its cargo in Rio de Janeiro and it was empty. It's not like it's a treasure ship. There's not much on board that's really worth it. Well, this brings me to one of the other theories that was alluded to lightly in Simpson's book. And I thought, well, this makes sense. It's very interesting. Barbados, home of rum, some of the best rum in the world. And so it's prohibition. There is a lot of rum running going on. There are ships that they're using like old blockade rudders from the war to get booze ashore or up to New York or to the big cities where there's a good market for it. The deering was big enough and had big enough holds that you could have very easily under the cover of darkness, if you could have managed it, loaded a lot of rum into one of the holds and the captain wouldn't have even known. The estimate in those days, prices would be at least $1 million worth of bootleg rum. And so definitely worth the money to take the... Well, again though, it's a slow ship comparatively to a steamer. It's a big, hey, look at us kind of a thing, unless that's your cover. But maybe it's not full. Maybe there's just a couple of barrels and they're just like, maybe they're not thinking big picture. Maybe they get a little bit and they're like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to kill the captain. We're going to take these 10 barrels of rum and we're going to get off the ship and go sell those and use that money to hide out or whatever. You're having to get off the ship. And as you said, no bodies washed up. Well, what about live people coming into port? Certainly the word was out by then. They would have noticed in town. How do you get by any civilization along the whole coastline there without hiking 50 miles inland? Yes. Very, very true, Forrest. And this points to one of the other super valid points for this theory section here. 11 people were never seen or heard from again. Right. Of course, let's say, okay, all 11 people lived or let's say two of them were killed and nine lived, even though they're criminals and they killed the captain and the engineer because he was trustworthy or put them to sea. A lot of times in the olden days, rather than actually kill you, they just put you out in a boat and like, good luck and you're probably going to die. So they could have done that too. That might be why both boats were gone and maybe why the coastal chart was gone. Maybe they took the captain and they're like, you know what? We're not going to kill you, but we're going to put you in the dory, the smallest tender. We're going to put you in there. You and Herbert Bates can go in there and you guys can try to get to shore. Good luck. And they never made it and their bodies weren't found and neither was the dory. Entirely possible. And then they were like, we're going to get off in the y'all and we're going to take five barrels of rum with us and go sail somewhere else and sell the rum. But if they did get away with it, let's say nine people got away with that. Then all nine of those people's families and everyone they ever knew that knew who they really were would have had to kept quiet. And it just doesn't seem possible. Yeah. I definitely think that they are missing. They're gone. Somewhere there would be a rumor. It's like, well, my great uncle, blah, blah, blah, was actually on the deering and he made it ashore. There's no stories like that, that we know of, you know, it's not impossible, but it just seems like, it seems like a little bit of a stretch for all those people to hide for that long. The other thing that I thought is one of the most interesting theories, and this is in Simpson's book as well. And a lot of the investigators apparently thought this too, was that whoever got off the ship, whether it was the entire crew under an amicable situation or the bad guys, the bad guys kill the captain or put the captain off in the dory, whatever they do, effectively murdering him, whether they do it directly or indirectly by the sea, they get off onto the Hewitt. Yeah. And they're on the Hewitt with plans to go somewhere. And maybe they're lying about what happened. Maybe they're like, oh, well, the captain had a heart attack and the ship, we can't sail it anymore. Can you give us a ride? And they get on the Hewitt, they have some other nefarious plan, or they have this perfectly good excuse for all getting off the boat and getting onto the Hewitt, but none of it matters because the Hewitt blew up. Right. And that's like, so it's like a complication on a complication on it. You just can never get to the bottom of this because that ship blew up. And we're not even sure that's what blew up. We just know something blew up and they couldn't find any wreckage. And then also the Hewitt never turned up. And then we have the other steamer, which was not the Hewitt because it was going a different direction, a different day that covered their transom and hid the name and sailed away from the light ship. It's like, what are those guys doing? What's going on? I mean, the whole thing's a mess. It's a mess. I mean, that's the thing. It's just an odd mystery. It's one of those things where you have just enough clues to make the mystery even greater. And that's the fact of seeing the crew top deck disorganized a little, places where they shouldn't be. To a captain's eye, it seems out of place. And you get that weird message of, you know, let the company know we lost our two anchors. Like anything else? No, you don't know anything else to say? That's it. And then kind of going on their way, you have several mysteries going on. The other unreported ship, not the Hewitt, the other steamer ship that kind of turns tail and gets away, not wanting to be recognized. Is that something else that's different? Some other kind of nefarious thing going on, or is it connected to this? That's certainly a mystery. Could be totally unconnected with just overlapping pieces of evidence here that are obtained by the authorities, other captains. You're talking about a yawl or a dory and who's on it? Where do those boats end up? Like if they did make it to shore, where's evidence of those? Those are too large to be carried by any crew inland to be hidden or anything. They would have washed up and they would have had to been left there. So those could have been discovered. So then you have to think that they did leave the ship. They were cut down. The lines were cut to drop them in kind of quickly. It would seem somebody got on those and something happened to them in those boats. And now we're back to the Mary Celeste where there's a dangling trailing rope, a line coming from the Mary Celeste trailing out the back and leading to the theory that something on board was dangerous, perhaps that denatured alcohol. And whoever was left on board, trailed out with a smaller lifeboat and somehow the rope got untangled or untied. And now they're drifting afloat on the seas to starve to death. So again, you have drifting lines here. You have no evidence of any lifeboats, but you do have a sighting the day before they go missing. So Lula Wormel, the captain's daughter, who you mentioned earlier as being the pioneer. And by the way, she really was, is a whole component of this story. Again, this is in Simpson's book about her going to Washington, DC, rattling cages, just really making sure that this investigation was thorough. And that's great because if she hadn't done that, we wouldn't even know what we know now, which is amazing because not as much effort will go into these things without somebody like that behind it. And one of the things that she did was she got the ocean chart that was still on board when Captain Carlson went on from the rescue. And that ocean chart had an interesting tale to tell. I want to read this one paragraph from page 169 of Simpson's book. Mrs. Wormel and Captain Peterson poured over and over the Carol A. Deering's ocean chart, following Captain Wormel's penciled markings of his noon position each day, to the point that his hand stopped making the northward record of the doomed ship's last sail, January 23rd, a week before she foundered. So if you look at January 23rd, that's the day that the Deering passed by the frying pan light vessel and was photographed, but no communication happened between the two. Later on the 29th, six days later, she was seen off Cape lookout. Now there was a storm which slowed everything down because those two places are not that far apart. But somewhere between the 23rd and the 29th, it would seem that the captain stopped marking the chart. So there's some question as to whether or not, and that was, you know, I mean, he stopped marking it on the 23rd. So why did he stop marking it on the 23rd? Well, you're talking about, right, his handwritten notes in the margins of the maps. Yes. And also the noon position every day. However, the writing in these charts didn't stop there, did it? No, it didn't. It continued, but it was clearly someone else's hand. So someone else was taking over navigational duties. Right. There was a comment apparently by first mate McClellan that another complaint that Wormel's eyes were so bad, his eyesight was so bad that he had to do most of the navigational duties. And so that was another complaint that he was saddled by more tasks than he should have been. And although Wormel was a very seasoned old salty sea captain and knew his job very well, there were some shortcomings of his being 66 and retired and that, yeah, it's like, well, I got to do a bunch of duties for him. Also, every time I try to discipline the crew, he steps in, he's micromanaging. I don't like that. I should be the captain. You do wonder. There's one of those in every course. Well, he's nearly closely the captain. Maybe he was captain of the ship towards the end there, but what's clear is that at some point the captain wouldn't have allowed somebody else to make the notes in the charts and notes had to be made. So somebody had to write something down. That's the other important thing. Well, if you committed a crime, that's evidence, you could see it, but it's important enough of a duty to have to continue. So somebody else was making notes in the charts to keep going for, would you say 11 days? I think. No, it was a week. A week. Yeah. That's right. Before no notes at all. So someone else was doing those duties, but we're not sure who is continuing on with the notations and the marginalia there. Yeah. It's just another odd clue that they continued on after, for some reason, captain Wormel did not continue doing his duty. Yeah. All right. Are you ready now for conclusions? Yes. Do you want to hear mine first? You know what? I do. What's yours? I'm waiting. You know who's at the fault of all this? Who? The cats. And you want to know why? Because it's just like the scenario in The Thing. Yes. They're the alien monsters. They killed everyone on board. Then they assume the form of sweet little innocent gray kitties mewling and starving. We didn't eat the ribs. But we ate the rest of the passengers. So yeah. Anyway, that's the... That's your theory. That's what you're going with. Could be. It's just like... Yeah. It's like the Huskies, remember? And Scandinavians at the Antarctic Station that gets discovered by Kurt Russell and his crew. Yeah. It's posing as a Husky. And of course, who wants to... You must be a maniac if you want to kill a Husky, as I personally do because we had Huskies. But the idea though is that this thing, whatever it was, killed the crew and just assumes its form and continues to live on. And in a nice comfy home though of... Which captain took him in? Captain Carlson on the rescue. That's right. Now, okay. All kidding aside. Well, I don't know. There's a lot of odd things. I think like probably most everyone else, some sort of mutinous, if not all out mutiny, perhaps some sort of mutinous action that perhaps went too far or something bad happened to Captain Wormel that they were afraid of, oh, that's going to look bad. It's going to look like... Yeah. Even if it was natural causes, they only show up with a dead captain. Yeah. I can see that. Like I said, maybe he... Especially after they've been fighting and arguing everywhere they go. Right. Hey, well, look what happened to Captain Kidd. He's the captain, but he reprimanded one of his crew members so badly, he hit him in the head with a bucket, split his head open. Yeah. And he got dinged for that pretty badly. Yeah. So there is some justice to be meted out. And again, if the captain passes away very, I don't know, just under suspicious circumstances, they may have taken a few drastic actions that just led to a tragedy of some kind, like one thing happening after another, comedy of errors. Yeah. And they all end up going over the side. I think it's a combination of factors, but like I said, if not all out mutiny, then maybe something that was not too above board, for a more sailing term here, that looks bad on them. So they took some action that ultimately caused them to either get in lifeboats. Because I think that's what we know too, is that they tried to get away from the ship. They collected up what they could, had time enough to do that. So are they not under total duress and not being battered around in a horrible storm? Because those are open boats. You're much more safe aboard the schooner. But also the masts and the sails were all up. Okay. So they're all unfurled. So that also doesn't denote like a huge hurricane. As was noted in all the reports, other ships were being battered about by the hurricane. Because that's another theory is that the hurricane had swept everybody aboard. But those two ships had steered away. The Deering and is it the Hewitt, I think, had both charted and had their courses going away from bad weather. So they were not expected to have been in it. Yeah. Yeah. So you can rule out, I think, hurricane weather having swept people aboard. So that doesn't make sense. So something got them off the ship and that's where they perished. Yeah. Probably got swept out to sea. And here's the funny thing. People say like, oh, come up. People will say it's the Bermuda Triangle. But you're 90 miles away or 60 miles away or so from the top corner of the triangle. It's like, these are totally defined borders on this triangle business. Right. Right. So there could be some weirdness. Like I said, a combination of something that disoriented them. It's the same thing with Flight 19. It's like, that should have all been routine. They're not that far out. This shouldn't have happened. But for some reason, and then we have a lot of comments when we did that series back then of Captain Charles Taylor leading the squadron, the training flight, in that why would he do that? It doesn't make any sense. He should know where the sun is. Yeah. He wouldn't need his compass. Yeah. Well, something happened to them that totally put the whammy on them. You know what I'm saying? Like in their perception, in their minds, something screwed them all up where even the other guys were like, hey, Captain, that's not the way to go. Yeah. Why start sailing your boat directly into the shoals where you know you're going to ground it? That's why the other guys are like, well, they must know what they're doing. They wouldn't intentionally do that. Yeah. So I don't, that's about all I got. It's just, it's just rather thin, but I do think, like I said, mutinies is the most common, maybe obvious kind of thing, but like that doesn't totally make sense because where do those guys end up? They may have tried to get away, but were swept away by the waves, never to be seen again. Or killed on the Hewitt, maybe. That's another thing too. Like maybe they successfully mutinied and then also died. It could have been the other ships, like I said. It's so complicated. I think for me, you know, there's a couple of things about it. I mean, one thing is weird. Yes, it came up under sail, just like it was going about its business. There's food in the galley. It seemed like people just got off of it while it was moving. So that's strange. It would have been stranger to me had the y'all and the Dory been aboard too, had the two tenders been on it. And like that would have been a whole different level of strange for me because it's like, okay, well, where did they go? They, what did they jump in the water? You know, there's, those boats are gone. So it does seem like people got off, somebody got off the boat. Someone definitely got off the boat or unless somebody like lowered all the boats into the water and just pushed them away and then jumped off the boat. There you go. Okay. I just thought of this. I didn't really, even really occur to me. That all made me think of sabotage, but then where do the guys go? Okay. Think about this. Somebody gets on board and what's clear is that, like you said, the binnacle is smashed. It's stove in. Yeah. That's the weirdest thing. Okay. Like somebody did not, as I said earlier, it's obvious to me that that's not an accident. Somebody took a sledgehammer, most likely they don't know whether they were trying to repair some part of the ship with the sledgehammer or if it was used to destroy it, but we can all assume it was. And somebody did not want that ship being sailed after whatever act was done. Right. What if somebody cut the lifeboats down, the y'all and the dory, so that people couldn't use them? You know what I'm saying? So they could not be used to escape on. Yeah, but then where did they go? Well, that's what I'm saying is that, so they were taken off the boat somehow by force or disappeared. But basically what I'm saying is that the boats were, again, what I had read was that the boats were not lowered in usual fashion. They seemed to be cut from the lines. That's true. Yeah, yeah. So it was a hasty cutting down of the boat. People can see that, like you flip the lever and the boats drop down, I think with people in them. Yeah. So you don't have to climb 80 feet down from the side of the Titanic to get in the boat. Yeah. So you're lowered into the water with you in them in a gentle fashion, but somehow these lines were cut in a more hasty fashion to get them down quicker. What if they were just kind of cut loose? And now, yeah, I don't know why. It just seems like more sabotage to me. Yeah. And that now you can't get away or you're taken off the boat. It's just another means of escape eliminated. Also, you're not going to be able to sail this thing. Yeah. Successfully. So that's another bit of sabotage or scuttling of a ship without completely destroying it. Right. Those things can be replaced, but when you're out to sea, that's pretty devastating because you're not going to get by without a wheelhouse functioning or a compass. In conclusion here, the mutiny seems the most likely first step of whatever happened to me. Right. Just on the dreaded Occam's razor thing, just like all the fighting and McClellan and the nature of Merritt not wanting to go out with McClellan and then Wormel going out and all the drinking and everything. It seems like a mutiny was at the root of it. So I guess if I had to go with what I think most likely happened for me, it is that there was a mutiny. And in the course of the mutiny, they either killed the captain or set him adrift in the dory with whoever wanted to be on his side. And then the rest of them set the ship to run aground and they got in the yawl and they departed too. And the only thing that happened and the ones in the yawl, maybe they met up with the Hewitt, maybe they didn't, but whatever the case, everybody who got off the deering into a smaller boat also died at sea and was not recovered. So in the end, whatever the plan was, really none of it worked out because nobody made it and it's so complex. And there was so much darkness at play that we'll never really know what happened unless maybe you found the yawl and evidence of some kind on the yawl. Well, some kind of authentic note as to what happened or somebody's last message or they made it. And this is not impossible. Somebody did make it to shore and they have a story that they kept with them until their deathbed. Well, this would have been too long ago, but we find some evidence in a diary, something pops up or somebody comes forward. I do think there are several things going on here to make the waters even muddier and kind of obfuscate, I think the real reason here, but it was several things going on in a combination. Cause again, it also makes you just seem so weird. Like it's one of those, why would you do that kind of a thing? But obviously again, what we know from the evidence is that somebody didn't want that ship to be piloted back successfully and quickly. So it didn't totally ruin the ship. Like I said, they, uh, if they had any explosives or they didn't do anything to really damage the ship set on fire or anything, they just wanted to stall or make it impossible to be sailed immediately after the action. If they got off of it well before it hit the shoal that bought them time. Right. It was a decoy of normalcy for whoever bailed out. That's what I'm saying. It's truly a very intriguing mystery. And in a lot of ways, I would say it's right up there with the Mary Celeste, if not in some ways more complex. There's less viable solutions to this one than there are to the Mary Celeste, in my opinion. Yeah. A combination of things, possibly again, some foul play, but foul play is not the main thing for me. Well, this one is pretty hard to figure out. And I don't know if we're ever going to get the answer. It's just one more headstone in the graveyard of the Atlantic. That's going to wrap up episode 297 of Astonishing Legends. 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So I talked to my doctor about self-injecting with the Vivgard Hytrulo Pre-Filled Syringe, which contains F-Gartigamide Alpha and Hyaluronidase QVFC. It's injected under your skin subcutaneously. It means I can inject in my space on my time. It's my treatment, my way. Visit VivgardMyWay.com. That's V-Y-V-G-A-R-T MyWay.com. And talk to your doctor about Vivgard Hytrulo, brought to you by Argenics. All right, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse, being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, this is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or go a different way and get no traction. Seriously, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. It really is a no-brainer. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. Ever noticed that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9pm when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford Healthcare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care's always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 247.org. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We all get distracted when we drive, whether it's from our phones or kids in the backseat bickering. But how we handle these distractions can be a matter of life or death. Before you get on the road for your next road trip, please put your phones on silent and take a mental note to focus on driving. Paid for by NHTSA. Ever noticed that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places? Like sudden nausea at 9pm when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford Healthcare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care's always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 247.org. Hi, this is Danielle Robay, the host of Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, a podcast by Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts. I'm partnering with Simple Mills and I've just found my new go-to reading snack, Simple Mills Almond Flour Crackers. Think of this as a quick book style review because these crackers deserve it. The premise? A snack that feels light, not heavy. Made with almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Nutrient-dense ingredients your body can use, not empty carbs. And the taste? Crunchy classic flavors that leave you feeling energized. For a good plot twist, try Pop'em's. Cheesy, airy, poppable crackers packed with veggies. Final verdict? These are a shelf staple. Find Simple Mills at your grocery store. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at cvs.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location.