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Mysterious Vanishings on the High Sea

USS Porpoise
In 1854, the USS Porpoise was engaged the North Pacific Exploring and Surveying Expedition, under Commander Cadwalader Ringgold, with the aim of charting and surveying the South Pacific islands. They had already managed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and they had made good progress in exploring and charting an array of Polynesian islands, after which they had moved on to port at Hong Kong. From there, the expedition set out once again to chart and survey the Bonins, the Ladrones, and the Marianas islands.
At some point between China and Taiwan, then called Formosa, the USS Porpoise was separated from the rest of the group when it entered a thick fog. It would never be heard from again. It is thought that perhaps the vessel had been the victim of a typhoon that hit several days after its separation from the others, but it seems odd that this ship, which had an experienced crew and was battle tested and had been all over the world to far flung, often hostile lands, should become so hopelessly lost in the intervening time. To this day no one knows what happened to this seasoned crew and its respected, world travelling ship after they entered that mysterious, dense fog.
Americans were certainly not the only ones to have ships mysteriously vanish on them during this era. Over a career spanning two decades starting from 1837, the British Royal Navy brig called HMS Sappho was tasked with the suppression of slavery in North America, the West Indies, and Africa, tracking down and neutralizing the numerous slave ships that passed through these regions. In 1857, the heavily armed vessel was engaged in operations off the West African coast when it would become embroiled with an incident that it would become most famous for at the time; the chasing down and detainment of an American vessel called the Panchita in the Congo River, which had been suspected of being a slave ship. The ship was brought to New York under arrest, but the crew of the HMS Sappo was accused of unlawful seizure and were themselves arrested.

HMS Sappho engaging another vessel
The whole affair became somewhat of a diplomatic incident that strained relations between the two countries, and HMS Sappo was subsequently later ordered to set sail for Australia in order to try and give the ship a low profile, sweep the whole incident away, and put it out of the public eye in a place where it would not be able to do as much damage. The ship departed from the Cape of Good Hope for Sydney under the command of Commander Fairfax Moresby, and it is known that the ship successfully made it around the cape and managed to make it to Victoria, in southeast Australia, as it was spotted by the brig the Yarra entering the Bass Strait, which passes between Tasmania and the mainland. However, this would be the last time anyone would ever see HMS Sappho again. The ship never arrived in Sydney, and searches were unable to find any sign of it or its 147 crew, making it one of Australia’s more notable maritime mysteries.
Although it was mostly thought that the vessel must have sunk due to high winds or hitting rocks or an islet, the lack of any wreckage or sign of it make this uncertain. Additionally, in the years after the disappearance of HMS Sappo, a few odd reports would turn up claiming that the ship had actually wrecked off a deserted island off Australia, that the crew had managed to make it to its shore, and that Captain Moresby had gone stark raving mad there by the time they were rescued. It is all a very dramatic story, but there is no evidence of these unsubstantiated reports, and it has been suspected that these were perhaps even complete fictions conjured up by a sensationalist media still trying to milk some mileage out of the diplomatic scandal that HMS Sappho had been tangled up in. Nevertheless, residents of the townships at Wye River and Kennett River, in Victoria state to this day claim that they are descended from the survivors of a wrecked ship thought to possibly have been HMS Sappho. It is unlikely we will ever know for sure what happened to this ship, and it remains a persistent mystery.
The 1900s brought another rather well-known case, that of the hulking steel-hulled American Naval warship the USS Cyclops. The massive behemoth of a ship was primarily tasked with shipping bulk cargo of various supplies and raw materials for the Navy in the early 1900s, such as coal to be used as fuel. On 9 January 1918, the USS Cyclops lumbered into port at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after delivering 9,960 tons of coal to allied British ships in the South Atlantic, after which it was loaded up with 11,000 tons of manganese ore to be used for the production of munitions and destined for Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, with a stop off at Salvador along the way. After this the ship was supposed to head directly to Baltimore, and this is where things began to get strange.