There’s something ghoulishly fascinating about a mysterious disappearance, and our vast oceans offer seemingly endless space in which to vanish. The true fate of many of these ships will never be known, but speculation suggests that storms, piracy, mutiny, accidental bombing, and even the attack of a giant squid could be responsible for their disappearances. Below are seven ships that have vanished without leaving a trace.
1. The Patriot
Theodosia Burr Alston (1783–1813) was the daughter of American politician and third vice president of the United States Aaron Burr. Theodosia had a privileged upbringing and a good education, and in 1801, she married wealthy landowner Joseph Alston, who went on to become governor of South Carolina.
Sadly, in 1812, Theodosia lost her only son to a fever and she became sick with grief. Desperate for a change of scene, she boarded the schooner Patriot in South Carolina to visit her father in New York on New Year’s Eve 1812. The ship left dock and sailed north—but what happened after that is a mystery. It never arrived in New York, and no trace of the ship or crew was ever found.
A number of theories and legends have sprung up around the fate of Theodosia—some claim the ship was attacked by pirates and that she was forced to walk the plank, while others suggest that the Patriot got caught up in the War of 1812 and was sunk accidentally by an enemy ship. Perhaps most fanciful of all is the story put forward by a Karankawa chief, who claimed that he rescued a woman who had washed up on shore after a shipwreck, and that before she died she gifted him her locket—with the name Theodosia inscribed upon it. Whatever the story, it’s likely that after more than 200 years we shall never know the real fate of the Patriot and Theodosia Burr Alston.
2. The Merchant Royal
The Merchant Royal was tasked with taking treasures from the New World to Spain under the command of Captain John Limbrey. In 1641, the ship was loaded with 100,000 pounds of gold, 400 bars of Mexican silver, and a huge amount of precious jewels. As the ship entered English waters, the weather turned bad; unfortunately the pumps on board the ship broke and it began to take on water. The Merchant Royal had been sailing in tandem with its sister ship the Dover Merchant, which came to the rescue of the captain and crew. The cargo, however, could not be saved, and the ship disappeared beneath the waves, somewhere off the coast of Land’s End.
Of course, with such valuable cargo, countless people have attempted to find the wreck, which has become known as the “Eldorado of the seas.” In 2007, it was thought that Odyssey Marine Exploration may have found the Merchant Royal wreck after it salvaged 500,000 pieces of gold and silver from a site off the southwestern tip of Great Britain, but it was later identified as treasure from a Spanish vessel. In 2019, fisherman pulled up what may be the ship’s anchor, but so far, the unimagined riches of the Merchant Royal still await discovery.
3. USS Cyclops
The USS Cyclops was a huge steel-hulled fuel ship, tasked with carrying coal and other useful supplies for the U.S. Navy in the 1910s. On its final journey, the Cyclops set sail from Rio de Janeiro with a full load of 10,800 tons of manganese ore and over 300 people on board.
On March 4, 1918 the ship was spotted for the last time as it left Barbados and sailed into what we now sometimes call the Bermuda Triangle. The ship seemingly disappeared without a trace, and the case has been seen as especially mysterious since no distress call was made and no bad weather was reported in the region. Theories began to surface (some more imaginative than others) that the ship had been sunk by the Germans, attacked by a giant squid or octopus, or been victim of a violent mutiny. A huge search for the Cyclops was launched with a number of boats and planes scouring the area for debris or survivors, but nothing of the enormous ship was ever seen again.
4. The Witchcraft
On December 22, 1967, experienced yachtsman Dan Burack and his friend, Father Patrick Horgan, set sail in the 23-foot luxury yacht Witchcraft to see the holiday lights off the coast of Miami. Unfortunately, after just one mile, the pair experienced difficulty when it seemed as if the yacht had hit something.
Burack calmly called the Miami Coast Guard to report the trouble and request assistance. The official who took the call later commented that Burack seemed unconcerned—perhaps because the yacht was fitted with a special flotation device that was supposed to make the vessel unsinkable. The Coast Guard arrived at the scene just 19 minutes after the call, and were surprised to find no trace of the large yacht, no debris, and no sign of Burack or Horgan. Over the next six days, hundreds of square miles of ocean were searched, but nothing was ever found, and the Witchcraft has been chalked up as another vessel mysteriously lost to the Bermuda Triangle.
5. Andrea Gail
The Andrea Gail was a 72-foot-long-liner boat that fished in the North Atlantic for swordfish. In September 1991, the ship, along with several other fishing vessels, set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, for the last fishing session of the season. By October, the Andrea Gail and its six-man crew was out off the coast of Newfoundland when the confluence of terrible weather fronts conspired to create what has been dubbed “the perfect storm.” Powerful winds whipped up waves as high as 100 feet, and any ship caught in their path faced being sucked into the wave and flipped over repeatedly.
The devastating storm battered the coast of New England and Canada, and after the worst of it had passed and the Andrea Gail had failed to return to port, a number of rescue missions set out to find the ship—but nothing was ever found. The story of the storm and the imagined fate of the Andrea Gail and her crew was later told in the book The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, as well as a Hollywood movie of the same name.
6. The USS Porpoise
USS Porpoise was a brig involved in 19th century exploration and surveying missions, taking part in a voyage in 1838 that confirmed the existence of Antarctica and later circumnavigating the globe. In 1854 the ship set sail from Hong Kong carrying 69 men in order to carry out a survey of the South Sea Islands. Somewhere between China and Taiwan, the ship sailed into dense fog and was separated from its partner ship, the USS Vincennes, and never seen again. Many ships searched for the ill-fated brig for over a year, but no sign of it was ever found. It’s thought to have been wrecked in a typhoon with all hands lost.
7. HMS Sappho
Over the course of its 20-year career, the British Navy ship HMS Sappho was used to suppress the slave trade off the coast of West Africa. It intercepted a number of ships loaded with slaves and freed hundreds of people.
In 1857, after wrongly chasing down and boarding an American ship—an event that caused something of a diplomatic crisis between America and Great Britain—the ship was ordered to set sail to Australia. The Sappho reached Cape Town without incident, and from there headed toward the Bass Strait, where it was last spotted by a passing brig on February 18, 1878. Bad weather was reported in the area, and it has been assumed that high winds caused the ship to founder and sink. No sign of the 147 crewmembers was ever found, but rumors abounded that the captain, Fairfax Moresby, had somehow escaped the wreck and made it to an island off Australia, where he was said to have lost his mind.
Bonus: Baychimo
The SS Baychimo somewhere in Canada. / Mysterious Disappearances, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
The SS Baychimo started life as a German trading vessel before being given to Great Britain after World War I as part of reparations. The Baychimo came under the ownership of the Hudson Bay Company, and made many voyages across the Atlantic from Scotland to Canada to trade with local Inuit tribes. In 1931, while journeying to Vancouver with a cargo of furs, the Baychimo fell victim ice floes, which surrounded the ship and locked it in an icy embrace. The crew escaped the stricken vessel and fled across the ice floes to safety, but some returned a few days later to try to rescue the ship and its valuable cargo.
After over a month of braving the treacherous weather in a flimsy camp, a huge blizzard hit and the remaining crew lost sight of the ship—and by the time the storm cleared, the Baychimo had disappeared. The crew assumed it had sunk without trace.
But then, a week later, the ship was spotted by an Inuit hunter and the crew raced back on board to gather as much of the cargo as possible. The captain decided the ship was too badly damaged to be seaworthy and so abandoned it, thinking it would soon break apart.
How wrong he was: Over the years, the Baychimo was sighted a number of times, sometimes caught fast in ice, other times floating ghost-like through the Arctic waters. The last confirmed sighting was in 1969—an astonishing 37 years after it had been abandoned to its fate.
