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Mysterious Vanishings on the High Sea

USS Cyclops
Instead of going straight to Baltimore as scheduled, the USS Cyclops deviated from its course to end up in Barbados in March of 1918. This was not a scheduled stop, well off course in fact, and it was reported that the deviation had occurred because they were overloaded with cargo. However, an inspection of the vessel showed that it was in perfect order, that she was not overloaded as feared, and that all of the cargo was safely secured and nonthreatening. The USS Cyclops then departed for its final destination of Baltimore on March 4, 1918, to go on and apparently vanish from the face of the earth, with the last known sighting of the vessel allegedly made on March 9 off the coast of Virginia by the molasses tanker the Amolco, although this sighting has been disputed as this date and location does not match up with where the ship would be expected to be considering its scheduled arrival at its destination on March 13th.
Regardless, the fact of the matter is that the massive USS Cyclops never made it to its destination of Baltimore, and no trace of it, or even a scrap of debris or wreckage was ever found even after the area was thoroughly scoured by search ships and aircraft. The loss of the 306 crew members who had been aboard was, and is to this day, considered to be the largest noncombat loss of life in U.S. Naval history, and the vessel’s vanishing has become a great maritime mystery which has been pondered and speculated on ever since.
With no clues to really go on, this speculation has run all over the place. Perhaps the most rational explanation is that a series of unfortunate factors led to the ship’s doom. It was known that the USS Cyclops had been having engine difficulties at the time due to the fact that one of its cylinders had been reported as having a crack in it, which would have reduced its overall seaworthiness and speed. On top of this, although the inspection at Barbados had been all clear, the ship is suspected to have taken on even more cargo and left overloaded after all, a problem only exacerbated by the fact that the USS Cyclops had no prior experience shipping ore, which was denser and more volatile than its usual cargo. Additionally, it was suspected that the vessel had suffered extensive cumulative hull damage over the years due to a coal fire, shifting cargo, and the corrosive nature of its cargo.
It has been surmised that these factors could have all conspired with a bout of foul weather to bring the steel beast down. The problem with this theory was that the vessel had not once issued a distress call, and the only bad weather capable of potentially sinking the ship or causing it any problem at all along its scheduled route occurred with a typhoon off of Virginia a day after the Amolco sighting, but with a bad engine and overloaded state it is considered unlikely the USS Cyclops could have made it that far by that date. Another theory is that the ship was sunk by German forces, but again there was no distress call, and furthermore the German government at the time insisted that they had not attacked the vessel, and to this day has adamantly denied any involvement in the disappearance. Of course it has not been lost on many that the USS Cyclops happened to have disappeared in the notorious area known as the Bermuda Triangle, which opens up all sorts of less conventional explanations such as UFOs, inter-dimensional portals, and sea monsters. However, the disappearance has never been solved and no scrap of the ship ever found. For their part, the U.S. Navy has said of the matter of the vanished USS Cyclops: “Many theories have been advanced, but none that satisfactorily accounts for her disappearance.

The USS Cyclops is of course not the only vanished vessel that has been last seen in the Bermuda Triangle, and another mysterious disappearance in the region concerns the T2 tanker called the SS Marine Sulphur Queen. Originally built to haul oil, the gigantic, 504-foot, 7,240-ton tanker had been extensively converted for the purpose of carrying molten sulphur, and on February 2, 1963 it was carrying a super heated cargo of around 15,260 tons out of Beaumont, Texas, on its way to Norfolk, Virginia, along with 39 crew members. On February 4, the ship made a routine transmission giving their position, which was given as being around 200 miles off Key West, Florida, and this would be the last time anyone would hear from the doomed vessel ever again.
When February 6 came and there had been no further communication from the Marine Sulphur Queen, authorities and the family of those aboard became concerned. The vessel was declared missing and an air and sea search was launched involving the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Marines, that would go on for 19 days combing the entirety of the ship’s route and 30 miles to each side, covering a total of a staggering 348,400 square miles of open sea, but nothing at the times was found except for some life preservers and a small amount of debris about 12 miles southwest of Key West from the ship, consisting of two name boards, a shirt, a piece of oar, an oil can, a gasoline can, a cone buoy, and a fog horn. Searchers immediately converged on the area and searched a further 60,000 square miles all up and down the Florida coast, with Navy divers extensively searching for a wreck, but nothing more was discovered during this second search