Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea Read online

  The helpless, abandoned ship drifted onto the rocks by Block Island. To their credit, local fishermen rescued as many of the passengers as they could see, helped themselves to anything of value that the crew had not already stolen, and then set fire to the sinking wreck as it drifted off the rocks, presumably floated off by the rising tide. As the blazing wreckage drifted out to sea again on its final voyage, a terrified woman passenger who had been hiding in the hold to escape the rapists ran up onto the blazing deck screaming desperately for help — but by then it was too late for the Block Island fishermen to reach her.

  In 1882, an accurate and factual report of the sighting of the blazing Block Island ghost ship was given by a Long Island fishing boat owner. It actually appeared in the magazine Scientific American. At that time, menhaden were plentiful. These fish were an unusually oily species of herring, and their excessive oiliness is an important feature of the explanation offered in this 1882 account. The mate was unwilling to sail off Montauk Point because he claimed that he had seen mysterious glowing ships moving very late at night, although there was no discernible wind and conditions were dead calm. The skipper and the owner both ignored the mate’s protests and they eventually anchored in Gardiner’s Bay. In the middle of the night, the terrified mate shook the owner awake and pointed to a big schooner bearing down on them at a speed of at least ten knots — although there was a dead calm. They tried desperately to take evasive action — impossible when there was no wind for their sails — and prepared to jump overboard. At that second, the schooner simply vanished, just as the Flying Dutchman had done in the Cape of Good Hope area fifty years earlier when it seemed a collision with the British ship there was inevitable. By the time the skipper joined them there was nothing to see.

  A week later, when they were fishing in the same area, the mysterious phantom light appeared again — like a strangely glowing sailing ship. The owner boldly ordered his skipper to set sail in pursuit of the ghost ship and to lower the seine net as they went. (A seine net, based on a French term, is used vertically with floats at the top and weights below. A fisherman, or a fishing boat, using such a net is referred to as a seiner.) They netted an amazing haul of menhaden as they pursued what seemed to be the glowing phantom ship.

  The hypothesis seeking to explain the “ghost ship” in rational and scientific terms put forward in the 1882 article suggested that it was the huge shoal of menhaden that was responsible for the weird glow that gave the impression of a luminous ghostly vessel. As the shoal moved, it was suggested, the excessive oil exuded from the fish produced the same kind of glow that is described as will-o’-the-wisp on land. It also seemed possible that the glow effect mirrored the fishing boat, or reflected and distorted the image of any other boat in the vicinity. The fact that the “ghost ship” was able to move when there was no wind could be explained as the swift movement of a gigantic shoal of oily fish swimming through the water. As theories go, it’s both interesting and ingenious — but it still leaves many unexplained phantom ships sailing the seven seas.

  One of the most famous ghost ships, reportedly seen near Britain at fifty-year intervals, is the Lady Lovibond, which was reputedly involved in one of the hundreds of marine tragedies associated with the hazardous Goodwin Sands.

  The Goodwin Sands are associated with the powerful Anglo-Saxon Earl Godwin, son of Wulfnoth, supporter of Danish King Cnut who became king of England in 1016. Cnut gave Wessex, one of the four great English earldoms, to Godwin, and in 1019, while accompanying Cnut on a visit to Denmark, Godwin married Gytha, sister of Ulf, the most powerful of the Danish earls. Their children included the future king Harold.

  Traditionally, Godwin’s vast estates once included a beautiful and fertile island named Lomea, off the coast of Kent, where the Goodwin Sands drift around so treacherously today. One of the several infamous “great storms” of the type recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle seems to have destroyed Lomea in the eleventh century — changing it into the Goodwins. Earl Godwin was blamed for failing to maintain Lomea’s sea defences, according to the legend, but geological drilling on the Goodwins seems to indicate that only decayed marine matter exists between the layers of shifting sand above the chalk base, and most professional geologists think it unlikely that there was ever an island there in the first place.

  The Lady Lovibond legend records that on February 13, 1748, the ship was on its way from London to Oporto in Portugal, carrying its newlywed skipper, Simon Peel, his lovely young bride, Annetta, and many of their wedding guests. This was in spite of the old sailors’ superstition that it was unlucky to have a woman on board. The mate, however, had also been in love with the beautiful Mrs. Peel. In a fit of insane jealousy (shades of van der Decken) because of her marriage to Simon, the mate murdered Captain Peel and steered the Lady Lovibond onto the fatal Goodwin Sands, where she was totally wrecked, leaving no survivors.

  Witnesses over the centuries have claimed not only to have seen the ship’s ghostly outline, but to have heard the happy voices of the celebrating guests immediately before the phantom vessel ran onto the Goodwins. On February 13, 1798, the skipper of the Edenbridge made a log entry to the effect that he had almost collided with a schooner, a three-master, which was sailing straight for the Goodwins. In 1848, the lifeboat crew from Deal went to the rescue of a schooner that seemed to be in distress on the notorious sands. When they reached the spot where they had last seen it, however, there was no trace of any vessel at all. In 1898 she was seen again, and there were also reports of sightings in 1948 and 1998.

  Another inexplicable spectre ship of the Goodwins was the SS Violet, an old, cross-channel paddle steamer that met its end on the treacherous sands during a heavy blizzard in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1939 witnesses saw an old paddle steamer run onto the Goodwins and called out the first available lifeboat, which came from Ramsgate. They searched for an hour but found nothing. If it was the ghost of the Violet it had vanished back into the mysterious limbo from which it had so strangely emerged.

  The legend of another ghost ship that re-enacts a centuries-old tragedy begins with the violent blood feud between the de Warrennes and the Pevenseys. In outline, the fourth Earl de Warrenne met Lord Pevensey in mortal combat at Lewes Castle and was about to be killed by him when Lady de Warrenne prayed to St. Nicholas (whose belt was a sacred relic in the care of the de Warrennes). Miraculously, her husband reversed the fortunes of the combat and killed Lord Pevensey. The triumphant de Warrennes then vowed that St. Nicholas’s belt would be taken to Byzantium and placed on Saint Mary the Virgin’s shrine there — before their infant son was old enough to marry. Years passed. The vow remained unfulfilled. Beautiful young Lady Edona was betrothed to the de Warrennes’s son, Manfred, now in his twentieth year. The de Warrennes recalled their vow and sent Manfred off to Byzantium with the precious belt. A year later, so the legend of the Lewes ghost ship runs, the family were watching and waiting eagerly as young Lord Manfred’s ship approached. Suddenly, she struck a rock, tilted on her side, and sank with all hands. Lady Edona collapsed and died on the spot where she had so eagerly awaited her lover. Every year, on the anniversary of her death, and Lord Manfred’s, the marine tragedy is re-enacted, and the ghostly ship collides with the rock once more, keels over, and vanishes.

  A very colourful ghost ship legend, which originates from the authors’ home county of Norfolk, concerns a traditional Norfolk wherry called Mayfly: a large, cargo sailing boat intended for use on the Norfolk Broads and rivers. The skipper’s name is variously rendered as Blood Stephenson, or Blood Richardson. He seems to have shared several of van der Decken’s character defects — and added a few of his own. The story begins with an apparently imbecilic banker named Dormey from Beccles entrusting the fearsome and amoral Blood with a huge amount of cash and his beautiful, young, virgin daughter, Millicent, who was to go along to enjoy the scenery. Instead of taking the girl and the banker’s cash safely to their destination in Yarmouth, Blood set out into the
North Sea, heading for Holland (another link with van der Decken?). Not welcoming his powerful, lecherous advances, the banker’s daughter screamed and struggled like the virtuous heroine of a three-volume Victorian romance.

  At this point, Bert, the plucky little cabin boy, emerged from below decks and did his best to rescue her. Quite how a tiny teenaged lad and the banker’s young daughter managed to fight off the gigantic, rock-hard Blood has never been realistically explained, but there was supposedly a terrific struggle in which the girl was killed and Blood himself was fatally injured. Bert managed to escape the scene of all this carnage on the blood-drenched wherry by launching the Mayfly’s dinghy. He floated about helplessly in the North Sea for hours, and then saw a vessel approaching. Thinking he was about to be rescued, he cheered loudly and waved — only to discover that it was the Mayfly with the ghosts of the screaming girl and the maniacal skipper running around the blood-soaked decks. Not surprisingly, Bert stayed cowering in his little dinghy until the Mayfly vanished. Every June 24, it is said, the ghostly Mayfly reappears, trying, like the Flying Dutchman, to find her way to port.

  The story in that highly colourful and not very historical form seems to have originated with an East Anglian raconteur named Bill Soloman, who has an irrepressible sense of humour and a vivid imagination. There is, however, much more to it than merely entertaining fiction, or vividly creative exaggeration. Bill himself is the first to acknowledge that he did not create the story from scratch: there was a much older, more sinister version of the Mayfly tragedy before Bill embellished it for the benefit of a broadcaster who was interviewing him in the 1950s.

  In sad, realistic contrast to the melodramatic tale of Blood and his wherry is the grimly factual account of the loss of the Pamir, a beautiful four-masted sailing ship capable of carrying over four thousand square metres of sail. In September 1957, a few hundred miles from the Azores, she was hit by Hurricane Carrie and sank. A fearless radio man, doing his vital duty to the last, gave out her position on the last distress call he was able to transmit. Ignoring the danger to their own ship, the gallant officers and men of the U.S. freighter Saxon raced to the Pamir’s last reported position and picked up six survivors: eighty of the Pamir’s ship’s company were lost. In 1961, the spectral Pamir was sighted by the Esmereld. She was reportedly seen again near the Virgin Islands. She was also seen on later occasions by Norwegian and German witnesses and by shrewd observers aboard the Eagle, a ship manned by the U.S. Coast Guard — highly trained professionals who are not easy men to deceive!

  When rational, reliable, objective witnesses provide convincing evidence for the existence of something — however unlikely that something seems to be — their reports deserve careful and thoughtful attention. Phenomena described as “ghost ships” — of which the Flying Dutchman is a prime example — come into this category. The heart of Fortean philosophy is the principle that nothing is so obvious and so apparently well-fortified by “common sense” that it should be exempt from interrogation; neither is anything so bizarre or improbable that it can be dismissed as ridiculous and never given serious examination.

  The phenomenon broadly categorized as phantom vessels or ghost ships can be examined from several perspectives. First is the scientific angle on mirages.

  A mirage can be defined as a refraction phenomenon. Refraction means that rays of light have been bent: turned through an angle from their original direction. When a ray of light enters a denser medium it turns towards the normal ray — the normal ray in optical science being defined as a ray that enters the surface at an angle of ninety degrees. When the ray of light leaves a dense medium for a less dense medium, it refracts away from the normal ray. For example, when light leaves air and enters water, it bends towards the normal ninety-degree ray. When it leaves water and enters air, it bends away from the normal ninety-degree ray. A long-handled spoon standing in a glass of water illustrates the basic principle of refraction due to light moving through transparent media with different densities.

  Mirages are seen when the image of some distant object (for example, a ship at sea, or a pool of water on land) appears a long way away from its real, spatial position. This apparent displacement happens because of atmospheric density variations close to the surface. Mirages frequently look as if they’re distorted, upside down, wavering, and shimmering. This has given them their association over many centuries with magic, faerie lore, divine intervention, and the malicious work of demons and evil spirits. Psychology plays a part here: observation is carried out with the mind as much as with the eyes, but mirages are not illusions — they can be photographed.

  There are two main categories of mirage. The variety that appears in arid deserts and is popular with novelists and adventure story writers is technically referred to as an inferior mirage, most frequently seen today as pools of water across a highway. Inferior mirages almost invariably appear over land. The superior mirage is seen over expanses of water, snow, or ice. The scientific, meteorological terms inferior and superior are not qualitative in this context. An inferior mirage appears in a position that is lower than the real position of the material object it represents, and a superior mirage appears at a site that is higher than the object it mimics.

  In a nutshell, mirages occur when rays of light generated by — or reflected from — some material, physical source are refracted (bent) as they pass through air layers that have different densities.

  So a real oasis — a pool of water surrounded by shady fruit trees — can appear many miles away and tantalize thirsty travellers in a sunbaked desert. A real, solid East Indiaman with all sails set, battling her way through a savage gale a hundred kilometres away, could appear to be speeding towards another tall ship — barely fifty metres away, on an apparently disastrous collision course — and then vanish like a phantom at sunrise.

  If mirages explain some of the famous and persistent ghost ship sightings, what of the others? Many modern physicists are far from skeptical about the possibilities of irregularities in time. The Norfolk Broads — especially Wroxham Broad — have curious data associated with them that might be explicable in terms of time slips. The two staid and respectable Victorian schoolteachers who had a strange experience in the gardens at Versailles over a century ago may have experienced a time slip. There are innumerable other reports of anomalous phenomena that might be accounted for by some sort of time malfunction. Do ghost ships like the Dutchman sail across centuries as well as seas and oceans?

  Another theory that experienced researchers into the paranormal would advance is that some strange sightings of ghost ships and other spectral phenomena are replays. If sound and vision can be recorded so easily and deliberately onto tapes and discs, perhaps nature has her own rather more spasmodic recording techniques. What if emotional energy is just as effective as electrical energy in creating such natural recordings? The terror of doomed passengers and crew would constitute a formidable barrage of emotional energy. Could that energy have etched its data onto the very rocks on which the ship was wrecked? Or onto other rocks far below the surface? Could that grim data of death be read — even centuries later — by observers with sufficiently intuitive and sensitive minds?

  Dimensional gateways and links with those strange quasi-real Worlds of If — the so-called probability tracks — present the open-minded researcher with other real and serious possibilities. If event A had happened instead of event B, if decision C had been made instead of decision D in the past, the present might now be very different. If other dimensions exist — if probability tracks exist — then things from those other dimensions and probability tracks — including what look like phantom ships — might well be able to glide from their realm into ours.

  It is, of course, undeniable that ghosts — even those with the theatricality of Hamlet’s murdered father or Scrooge’s old pal, Jacob Marley — might be surviving, intelligent entities who have travelled from the spirit world to ours with their own particular purposes to fulfil. Is van der D
ecken just such a psychic being — giving warnings, unloading his guilt, and trying to find peace?

  There are as many possible solutions to the riddle of the ghost ship reports as there are square kilometres of salt water over which those controversial phantom vessels may wend their enigmatic way.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mysterious Merpeople

  Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), son of the famous Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, and spent more than thirty years as a school inspector. During those decades he also wrote a great deal of excellent and memorable poetry and was at one time professor of poetry at Oxford.

  His poem “The Forsaken Merman” tells the poignant story of a merman who had married an earth girl, who subsequently — so it seems from Arnold’s version — left him and their children and returned to her human kind on land. Arnold’s poem begins:

  Come, dear children, let us away;

  Down and away below!

  Now my brothers call from the bay,

  Now the great winds shoreward blow,

  Now the salt tides seaward flow;

  Now the wild white horses play,

  Champ and chaff and toss in the spray.

  Children dear, let us away!

  This way, this way …

  … Call her once before you go —

  Call once yet!

  In a voice that she will know:

  “Margaret! Margaret!”

  In Arnold’s version of the story, however, the faithless Margaret never returns to her merman and their children. His version ends: