The Vanishing of the U.S.S. Cyclops

In 1918, a U.S. Navy collier vanished without a trace after leaving Barbados. The ultimate fate of the Cyclops remains a mystery almost 100 years later, but there are certainly plenty of theories about what happened.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Tracy,
I'm I'm doing it not on purpose, but it's happening.
It's another history mystery. Okay, I know we just had one.

(00:23):
But often what happens when I'm doing research for history
mystery is that the kind of sites that I will
sometimes see in a search results, even though they may
not be the ones I go to, will be like, oh, look,
there are other history mysteries, and then I end up
down a rabbit hole like I'll go, I'm just gonna
click that. It's not for research, I'm just curious, and
then I find something else that I want to talk about. Well,
and we also we also had not had a history

(00:45):
mystery in a long time when we did that one, right,
So unlike the face Dose disc, which we did not
long ago, though this time it's a maritime history and
it's much more recent. And we're actually just a few
years shy of the hundredth anniversary of the vanishing of
the USS Cyclops, and this is one of those big
unexplained mysteries that has plenty of very real and sometimes

(01:06):
unbelievable information about it, but it also involves some things
that people like to talk about that aren't necessarily rooted
in reality. So today we're gonna be talking about this ship,
the Bermuda Triangle, and some truly unsettling leadership in the process.
So we're going to jump right in. As World War
One was starting, the United States Navy was in the

(01:27):
midst of transitioning all of the ships away from coal
burning and into oil. This was because it was becoming
increasingly apparent that coal was a problem for combat ships.
Having to find coal in other parts of the world
and ships to transport that call to to the Navy
vessels significantly compromise the naval fleet's strength. Eventually, oil would

(01:48):
just lead to the same problems. Yes, But from nine
and nineteen fifteen, uh this is leading up to the war,
the Navy commissioned about a dozen call years to carry
coal in an effort to sort of address the problem
of fueling their other vessels. They were going to develop
their own small fleet of coal carrying ships, and the

(02:09):
USS Cyclops was one of these coal years, and it
was similar in build to the USS Hector, the U
S S. Jupiter At, the U S. S. Mars, and
the USS Vulcan. And a quick note in case you
decide you want to learn about those in google them.
Those are ship names that have been used more than
one time, so be sure you are looking at the
correct one. This whole thing was authorized by Congress in

(02:31):
eight and it launched on May seventh, And this ship
was one of the largest fuel ships of its time.
It was five hundred and forty two ft long, that's
about a hundred and sixty five meters. It was sixty
five ft or twenty meters across and thirty six ft
nine inches or about eleven meters at depth of hold.

(02:51):
During trial runs, the vessel loaded with cargo made fourteen
point six one knots and it cost nine hundred and
tw me three thousand dollars to build, so almost a
million dollars. In the early nineteen hundreds, the US declared
war on Germany and the Central Powers in April nineteen seventeen.
The USS Cyclapse was commissioned as a military vessel on

(03:13):
May one, nineteen seventeen, and in early nineteen eighteen, Cyclaps
is being used to transport cargo from the United States
to Brazil. On January nine of nineteen eighteen, the Cyclops
left Norfolk, Virginia carrying nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty
tons of coal, and on January twenty eight the ship
landed at Rio de Janeiro, where it stayed for a

(03:35):
little more than two weeks. While in port and Rio,
the ship's lieutenant commander, George W. Whorley, reported a cracked
cylinder in the starboard engine. The damage was reviewed and confirmed,
and the recommendation was made. The Cyclaps returned to the
United States to be repaired. Warley was an officer in
the U. S. Naval Reserve, as were all of the

(03:57):
other officers on the ship. The only regular Navy officer
that was on board was the assistant surgeon, Burt j Asper.
Another regular Navy officer, junior grade Lieutenant Frank C. Nig,
was also on the ship, but he was traveling as
a passenger. He was not part of the crew. Cyclops
departed Rio de Jannaro on February fifteenth, carrying a full

(04:17):
cargo of manganese or weighing about eleven thousand tons. This
was considered really heavy for this particular ship. The ship
stopped in Bahia, Brazil, five days later. On they on
February twenty two, Cyclops left port at Bahia to return
to the United States, headed to Baltimore, Maryland, but the
Cyclaps wound up making an unscheduled stop in Barbados on

(04:41):
March three, and while stopped in Barbados, there was more
cargo added to the ship. So the USS Cyclops departed
Barbados on March fourth of nineteen and due to the
heavy cargo they were carrying, remember before they got to Barbados,
they were carrying more than was really a normal load
UH and their damaged engine, which they were still nursing along,

(05:03):
the ship was reduced to a speed of about ten knots,
so it was only traveling at about eleven point five
miles per hour. At this point. No one ever saw
or heard from the USS Cyclaps again. No distress call
ever came, no radio calls from other ships, garnered, any responses, nothing.
It just sailed away from Barbados and vanished, taking three

(05:24):
and nine men with it. And just a quick note
on that number, sometimes you'll see it reported lower, sometimes higher,
just depending on what UH sorcerer looking at the earliest
reports I think said two dred and ninety three men.
But as they did some more record keeping and noted
particularly the passengers they were sometimes transporting men back home

(05:46):
that had been that had finished a tour somewhere else.
It usually comes out in the more modern numbers two
about three O nine uh. And it was rumored at
one point that another ship, which was the a molasses
tanker called Amilco, had actually seen this Cyclops off the
coast of Virginia on March ninth, but that was denied
by the ship's master. And additionally, the spot where the

(06:07):
Cyclops was supposed to have been seen in this rumor,
all the way up by Virginia really would have been
impossible for the ship to have made, given a slow
pace that this collier was traveling. On April fourteenth, eighteen,
a little more than a month after the Cyclops vanished
the Navy, the Navy notified the next of ken of
the men who had been aboard. The military then went

(06:28):
public with the news that hope for those in the
ship had been abandoned. The Navy Department's statement read quote
the USS Cyclops Navy collier of nineteen thousand tons displacement,
loaded with a cargo of manganese and with a personnel
on board of fifteen officers and two hundred and twenty
men of the crew and fifty seven passengers is overdue

(06:49):
at an Atlantic ports since March thirteen. She last reported
at one of the West Indian Islands on March fourth,
and since her departure from that port, no trace of
her nor any information Asian concerning her has been obtained.
After going on to detail the engine problem and the
efforts made to reach the ship, the Navy's statement concluded
with the search for the Cyclops still continues, but the

(07:11):
Navy Department feels extremely anxious as to their safety. The
New York Times piece that ran the announcement said that
it quote pointed to the probability that a German reader
or submarine has been operating within the last month somewhere
between Cuba and the coast of Brazil. But that same article,
I feel compelled to point out, also says we don't

(07:33):
really have any evidence of this. We just think it's
a likely possibility. That same article from nineteen eighteen reported
that no weather situation and the path of the Cyclops
would have indicated any kind of likelihood of a natural
disaster being involved in the fate of the steamer. And
we're gonna talk a little bit about some more theories
and investigations, but first we're going to have a word

(07:54):
from one of the great sponsors that keeps our show
on the air. So in more modern time, himes around
the Cyclops. In nineteen sixty eight, there was a Navy
master diver named Dean Hawes who spotted a wreck of
massive size about forty nautical miles northeast of Cape Charles, Virginia,
while he was searching for another wreck. Weather cut Hawses

(08:16):
dive short that day. He had surfaced and had planned
to go back down with a full crew, but they
couldn't do it because the weather shifted and that other
wreck that they had been searching for, which was apparently
a submarine called the Scorpion, was found elsewhere, so additional
diving at Cape Charles was not sanctioned by the Navy
at that time. Hawes later read an article about the

(08:38):
Cyclops and its disappearance, and at that point he put
the pieces together and he believed that the wreckage that
he had seen that was not the one they were
looking for, had in fact been the Cyclops this missing ship.
Haws eventually convinced the Navy to return to his dive
site where he thought he had seen this other ship,
and they did find the wreckage, but it was not
the Cyclops. Haws was later backed finding actually by author

(09:00):
Clive Cussler, to continue his search, and right up until
his death, Ine has believed that he had been at
the site of the lost Cyclaps, and he continued to
seek it, but the Cyclops was not found. And there
have of course been some rather imaginative theories in some
cases and some based in reality about what actually happened

(09:22):
to the USS Cyclops. In some theories, Germany is implicated,
as we hinted from that New York Times article that
came out in the More common along these lines suggests
that German U boats torpedoed the Collier less common, but
it also comes up as the idea that the Lieutenant
Commander Worley was in fact a German sympathizer and sailed

(09:44):
that ship all the way to Europe. Even the possibility
of a giant octopus dragging the ship to the ocean
floor has been considered by some as a reasonable explanation
worthy of discussion. There are some more mundane explanations, like
an unexpected storm that simply hadn't been properly tracked uh
that are sometimes put forth, or that the ship, which

(10:05):
was already limping we already know it had a crack
cylinder in one of the engines, and it was carrying
a load both of a weight and type that the
crew was unaccustomed to handling. That it may have just
simply run into what would otherwise be a minor spot
of trouble or mechanical failure, and they just weren't able
to compensate because of these other problems. In addition to
the mechanical issue that had been reported in port at Rio,

(10:27):
the Cyclops had a bunch of other issues. Men who
had served aboard it but weren't actually aboard when it
vanished have described it as a rusted piece of junk
with an assortment of structural problems. So it's not as
though it was a perfectly pristine and strong ship that
just vanished without a trace. It's entirely possible that the
ship hit rough weather and simply came apart at the
seams due to all the heavy cargo and all of

(10:49):
its an ongoing problems before anybody could raise any sort
of alarm. And that New York Times article that we
mentioned earlier also reported the possibility that one of the
one or more of the boilers may have blown, which
would have just caused the entire ship to explode, or
that German agents placed a bomb in the cargo hold

(11:09):
to destroy the manganese because that was headed home to
the US to be used in steel manufacturer and thus
it would have been part of the war effort. And
of course there's the Bermuda Triangle. I like how I'm
saying all the ones that are ridiculous. Well, but that's
the great lead in because we have to talk about
the Bermuda Triangle because it is part of the Cyclops story.

(11:30):
But it's also a good opportunity to talk about the
nonsense of the Bermuda Triangle. Uh. It's estimated that as
many as one hundred airplanes and ships have gone missing
in the Bermuda Triangle over the last century or so.
This area of ocean off Florida southeastern Tip is alleged
to be a dangerous and mysterious place where things and

(11:51):
people vanish without a trace. Reports of unexplained phenomena in
the area date all the way back to Columbus's voyages.
He wrote a unreliable compass readings in the area and
a great flame smashing into the sea, along with strange
lights off in the distance. And in sort of the
big famous vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle, UH five Navy

(12:15):
Avenger bombers vanished after they experienced instrument problems and became
confused as to their location. Two hours into the flight,
which started at Fort Lauderdale, Florida and then had to
due east, the squadron leader became completely disoriented and land
facilities were unable to pinpoint the location of the five planes,
even though they were in pretty constant radio contact with them.

(12:39):
After flying in circles and running out of fuel, all
five planes had to ditch into the water. The Mariner
aircraft that was sent in to search for them also vanished,
and no evidence from either mission was found, but the
Navy has always maintained that stormy weather likely destroyed the wreckage.
So just like these couple of things we have mentioned,

(13:01):
there are all kinds of ghost stories that just could
go on and on and on about the famed Bermuda Triangle,
which was named by a writer named Vincent Gaddis in
a nineteen sixty four Argassy magazine article. And don't get
us wrong, it really is super fun to speculate on
all of the possible paranormal business that's whipping up in

(13:21):
the Atlantic Ocean, but it's not really grounded in reality.
The U. S. Coast Guard says that, in fact, there
is not any more mysterious activity or any more wreck
happening here than there is anywhere else on Earth. It's
just one of those things that we've been focusing on
more all of this time. Maritime insurance companies don't recognize
the Bermuda Triangle is particularly hazardous or dangerous, and sometimes

(13:44):
instruments just experienced failure. Magnetic fields often cited and sensationalist
writing about the triangle can indeed affect aircraft and seafaring
vessel instruments. But this happens in other places too. Yeah,
we'll point you to an article that talks about that
sum at the end of the episode, And there is

(14:04):
allegedly a little more of that magnetic tweakage that happens
in the Bermuda Triangle. But it's really a matter of
data manipulation. Just in reporting the numbers of lost aircraft
and vessels in the area. For one thing, there's no
actual physical defining line for the Bermuda Triangle and what's
considered inside it versus outside of it. So often that line,

(14:27):
those lines expand a little bit here or there to
include additional incidents. So the size of the triangle ranges
between five hundred thousand and one point five million square
miles depending on what you just what description you're reading.
So it's it's really all in the framing. Even famed
Flight nineteen, which was that mission where all those Navy
aircraft disappeared, as additional information that rarely gets mentioned even

(14:49):
though it's completely pertinent. It was a training mission and
ditching those planes and heavy seas was a scenario where
the odds were really against survival in the first place. Yeah,
it wasn't like these were they were good pilots, I mean,
they were part of a special detail, but they were training.
They weren't super experienced and not in that area. Uh.
And then that PBM mariner that was sent to look

(15:12):
for the lost squadron. This is one of those when
people like to tell the story and ghost story style,
they go and then the plane that was sent to
find them also vanished. But those Mariners were nicknamed flying
gas tanks as rescue planes. They had been designed to
stale aloft for up to twenty four hours at a time,
and that means twenty four hours worth of highly flammable fuel.

(15:34):
Crew Members were often inspected before they got on the
plane because they weren't supposed to even carry a match
or a lighter, because the fumes were so plentiful and
dangerous that they could go up in a second, and
argazy magazine where at the Triangle first got its famous name,
was a pulp magazine with the tagline quote a magazine
of master fiction, kind of like getting your news from

(15:54):
the onion. It really is. And one other thing I
wanted to point out is uh another sort of data
set and proportion issue, which is that when people I
was reading something just before we came in the studio
that was saying, I'm not going to get the numbers
exactly right. But this is as an example, you know,
off the coast of New England, say ten ships were

(16:15):
lost in the last fifty years, but in the Bermuda
Triangle fifty and it's like, okay, even if those numbers
are correct, they're not indicative of the proportion of of
ships that are going through there. Because there is much
greater traffic in the area that has been dubbed the
Bermuda Triangle than there is in many other areas. It's

(16:35):
a very busy place, so just proportionately, you're going to
have more. And if you just look at the numbers
of ten versus fifty, it looks like it's super dangerous.
But if you actually look at it in proportions, and
as I was telling my husband about this this morning,
the insurance companies don't even recognize the Bermuda Triangle is
a real thing. He said. If the money people don't care,
it's not real. If the actuarial tables do not factor

(16:58):
in passage through the Bermuda Triangle, probably don't need to
worry about it exactly. So we are going to talk
about one other possibility about what happened to the USS Cyclops,
but first we're going to have another quick break from
one of our fantastic sponsors. So it is also very
possible that the cyclops may have actually fallen into the

(17:18):
ocean due to timult above deck, that there may have
been a mutiny and play, and one that went poorly,
and it may tie back in some small part to
the rumors of a German sympathizer. According to reports, Lieutenant
Commander Whorley was an eccentric man. He would allegedly pace
the deck carrying a cane and wearing his hat and
his underpants and nothing else. I read that last night

(17:40):
and was just giggling with glee at the image of it.
As the Navy conducted their investigation into the missing vessel,
they queried all ports that the Cyclops had been in
along the way of its last journey, and there's an
account that was written by US Console Livingstone in Barbados
that indicated that there were some pretty serious problems aboard

(18:01):
the collier. The console wrote that the men referred to
Worley as quote the damned Dutchman. And then it seemed
as though there had perhaps been an attempted mutiny which
resulted in several men being shackled in the cargo hold
and one executed by the commander. Quote. I have to
suggest scrutiny here, wrote living Livingston. He hinted that the

(18:22):
more likely end of the voyage had been another problem
that was rooted in the crew's deep dislike of their commander,
and Warley had a checkered history. There were rumors that
he was in fact German born and remained a German sympathizer.
One book I read about it said that they did
indeed find that, but I wasn't able to corroborate that

(18:43):
with source documents. But he certainly was also no stranger
to controversy in his career leading up to this point.
In a prior command, Worley was brought before a Naval
Board of Inquiry after several dozen men of his crew
signed a petition accusing him of dereliction of duty in
addition to drunkenness and abuse, including chasing officers around with

(19:03):
a gun. Warley's defense before the board was almost entirely
based on the greenness of the men who had signed
that petition against him. He felt that they simply did
not understand the conditions on a ship, and they did
not understand how a ship was run. And he also
used this opportunity of his testimony to call his primary
accuser a sex maniac and explained that the reason that

(19:24):
he had been rough on this particular man, who was
ship surgeon for Asper, was because the man was constantly
making lud remarks about women, and then to go on
and defend the accusations of drunkenness, Warley explained that sometimes
he simply took sherry for medicinal purposes. Despite all of this,
Worley was found innocent. It's exceptionally odd when you consider

(19:46):
that this was not his the first time he had
been called to trial. While he was running a ship
called the Abarenda, the first mate had been found beheaded.
While Worley wasn't directly implicated in the murder, it was
believed that his brutal leaders ship tactics had led to
an atmosphere of complete chaos and violence. And it's very

(20:07):
very likely that the reason that Orley was actually found
innocent after the petition trial was that he was, while problematic,
difficult to replace in terms of his knowledge of the
cyclops and how to run a Collier ship. There weren't
a lot of ready people that they could just slide
right into that open position, and perhaps for that reason alone,

(20:27):
he was once again put in charge of the ship,
and that may very well have been what led to
its downfall. Even if there was a mutiny, which does
seem pretty possible agiven the circumstances. It doesn't explain what
may have happened to the ship itself. So will we
ever know what truly happened to the U S s
cyclops odds are Nope. In the words of President Woodrow

(20:48):
Wilson at the time, quote only God and the sea
know what happened to the Great Ship. So that is
one of many ships that has gone missing through the years.
We've talked about a few. This one is kind of
It reads a little bit like a telenovella, particularly once
you get to Warley's past and all of the craziness
he was involved in. So that's the scoop. I have

(21:12):
a bit of listener mail. It has nothing to do
with things vanishing, except sort of, but it also has
to do with peanut butter. And this is from our
listener Kirston, and she says, Tracy and Holly, thank you
for your recent episode on the history of peanut butter.
I listened to it on my way home from work
yesterday and you pretty much had me salivating on the
train the whole way. One of you mentioned that you
have noticed non stir natural peanut butter showing up on

(21:33):
grocery store shelves. I've seen it too, and I've noticed
that it usually contains an extra ingredient, palm oil. I'm
not sure what the palm oil does to stabilize the
peanut butter at a chemical level, but I am a
little bit disappointed to see it added to quote natural
or organic food. Palm oil is technically natural and it
can be produced organically, but growing demand for it in
the West has had big environmental and social impacts In

(21:56):
the developing countries where palm fruit is grown, cutting down
rainforest for palm plantations has resulted in deforestation, contributed to
climate change, and drawn many young, poor and migrant workers
into exploitative conditions. Conscious consumers might think they're getting the
best of both worlds when they buy no ster natural
peanut butter, but there may be other impacts to think about.

(22:17):
I would recommend always doing your research before you buy
to make sure you trust the brand to source their
palm oil ethically and sustainably. Palm Oil is also linked
to something else you mentioned at the top of the episode,
the FDA's ban on trans fats. Palm oil has no
trans fat and is already used in many processed foods
to make them trans fat free, and this trend is
likely to accelerate as that band goes into effect, which

(22:39):
in turn is likely to worsen the environmental and labor
impacts of the palm oil in the industry. This is
a great illustration of how messy and tangled our global
food system has become. Taking a step forward to protect
our health can have ripple effects that take environmental and
social concerns a step back. Banning trans fats may help
keep our arteries clear, but it will need to be
coupled with other initiatives in or or to ensure the

(23:01):
health of the planet and its people. For the peanut
butter lovers in your audience, this will probably mean sticking
with stirring for the time being. I don't mind sticking
with stirring, she says, thank you for sticking with me
through that. Mini rant I got involved with global food
issues through a research project I worked on as part
of my master's degree, and through some of the work
I did with Haitian farmers last summer. Patients, by the way,

(23:22):
make delicious peanut butter, including the kind with hot peppers
that you mentioned in the podcast. I think the food
system is super interesting and complex and very easy to
get fired up about. I would love to see more
food history topics on the podcast and the future. Uh,
I would love to see more food history topics as well.
That's a really important thing to point out that, Uh,
everything is kind of connected, and one thing that happens

(23:43):
in one place causes there's cause and effect on the
entire globe in terms of industry and how we source things. So,
as she said, you know, if you are conscientious consumer,
you should make sure to double check the sources on
where things are coming from and what you are come
trouble with. So thank you Kirston for that. That was
informative and cool. If you would like to write to us,

(24:06):
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(24:28):
like to learn a little bit more about what we
talked about today, you can go to our parents site,
how stuff Works. Do a search for Bermuda Triangle and
you will get the article how the Bermuda Triangle Works
and what I really like is itting. It includes a
more in depth discussion of magnetic declination, which is often
associated with the Bermuda Triangle and used as one of
the possible explanations for why things can go arry there.

(24:49):
If you would like to visit us online, you can
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(25:16):
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