Carroll A. Deering
Encyclopedia
Carroll A. Deering was a five-masted commercial schooner
Schooner
A schooner is a type of sailing vessel characterized by the use of fore-and-aft sails on two or more masts with the forward mast being no taller than the rear masts....

 that was found run aground off Cape Hatteras
Cape Hatteras
Cape Hatteras is a cape on the coast of North Carolina. It is the point that protrudes the farthest to the southeast along the northeast-to-southwest line of the Atlantic coast of North America...

, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...

, in 1921. Its crew was mysteriously missing. The Deering is one of the most written-about maritime mysteries in history, with claims that it was a victim of the Bermuda Triangle
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances....

, although the evidence points towards a mutiny or possibly piracy.

Overview

The Carroll A. Deering was built in Bath, Maine
Bath, Maine
Bath is a city in Sagadahoc County, Maine, in the United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 9,266. It is the county seat of Sagadahoc County. Located on the Kennebec River, Bath is a port of entry with a good harbor. The city is popular with tourists, many drawn by its...

, in 1919 by the G.G. Deering Company for commercial use. The owner of the company named the ship after his son. The vessel was designed to carry cargo and had been in service for a year when it began its mysterious final voyage. It was soon going to go to Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

.

The Deering’s last voyage

On August 19, 1920, the Deering prepared to sail from Norfolk, Virginia
Norfolk, Virginia
Norfolk is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. With a population of 242,803 as of the 2010 Census, it is Virginia's second-largest city behind neighboring Virginia Beach....

 to Rio De Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

 with a cargo of coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

. The ship was captained by William H. Merritt. Merritt's son, Sewall, was his first mate. He had a ten-man crew made up entirely of Scandinavians (mostly Danes). On August 22, 1920, the Deering left Newport News. In late August, Captain Merritt fell ill and had to be let off at the port of Lewes, Delaware
Lewes, Delaware
Lewes is an incorporated city in Sussex County, Delaware, USA, on the Delmarva Peninsula. According to the 2010 census, the population is 2,747, a decrease of 6.3% from 2000....

, along with his son. The "Deering Company" hastily recruited Captain W. B. Wormell, a retired, 66-year-old veteran captain, to replace him. Charles B. McLellan was hired on as first mate.

The vessel set sail again for Rio on September 8, 1920, and arrived there, delivering its cargo without incident. Wormell gave his crew leave and met with a Captain Goodwin, an old friend who captained another cargo vessel. Wormell spoke of his crew with disdain, though he claimed to trust the engineer, Herbert Bates. The Deering left Rio on December 2, 1920, and stopped for supplies in Barbados
Barbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...

. First Mate McLellan got drunk in town and complained to Captain Hugh Norton of the Snow that he could not discipline the crew without Wormell interfering, and that he had to do all the navigation owing to Wormell's poor eyesight. Later Captain Norton, his first mate and another captain were in the Continental Café and heard McLellan say, "I'll get the captain before we get to Norfolk, I will". McLellan was arrested, but on January 9 Wormell forgave him, bailed him out of jail, and set sail for Hampton Roads.

The ship was next sighted by the Cape Lookout Lightship in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...

 on January 28, 1921, when the vessel hailed the lightship
Lightship
Lightship may refer to:* Lightvessel, a permanently moored ship that has light beacons mounted as navigational aids* Light displacement, a displacement figure that measures a ship complete in all respects, but without consumables, stores, cargo, crew, and effects*Lightship, a type of blimp operated...

. The lightship's keeper, Captain Jacobson, reported that a thin man with reddish hair and a foreign accent told him the vessel had lost its anchors. Jacobson took note of this, but his radio was out, so he was unable to report it. He noticed that the crew seemed to be "milling around" on the fore deck of the ship, an area where they were usually not allowed.

The wreck

On January 31, 1921, the Deering was sighted run aground on Diamond Shoals, an area off the coast of Cape Hatteras
Cape Hatteras
Cape Hatteras is a cape on the coast of North Carolina. It is the point that protrudes the farthest to the southeast along the northeast-to-southwest line of the Atlantic coast of North America...

, North Carolina, that has long been notorious for its reputation as a common site of shipwrecks. Rescue ships were unable to approach the vessel owing to bad weather. The ship was not boarded until February 4, and it became clear that the ship had been completely abandoned. The ship's log and navigation equipment were gone, the crew's personal effects and the ship's two lifeboats
Lifeboat (shipboard)
A lifeboat is a small, rigid or inflatable watercraft carried for emergency evacuation in the event of a disaster aboard ship. In the military, a lifeboat may be referred to as a whaleboat, dinghy, or gig. The ship's tenders of cruise ships often double as lifeboats. Recreational sailors sometimes...

 were gone as well. In the vessel's galley it appeared that certain foodstuffs were being prepared for the next day's meal at the time of the abandonment. The Coast Guard
United States Coast Guard
The United States Coast Guard is a branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven U.S. uniformed services. The Coast Guard is a maritime, military, multi-mission service unique among the military branches for having a maritime law enforcement mission and a federal regulatory agency...

 vessel Manning attempted to salvage the Deering, but found this impossible. The vessel was scuttled, using dynamite, on March 4 to prevent her from becoming a danger to other vessels.

Investigation

The U.S. Government launched an extensive investigation into the disappearance of the crew of the Deering. Five departments of the government—Commerce, Treasury, Justice, Navy, and State—looked into the case. Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business...

, then Secretary of Commerce, was intrigued by the fact that several other vessels of various nationalities—most notably the sulfur freighter Hewitt—had also disappeared in roughly the same area. Though most of these vessels were later revealed to have been sailing in the vicinity of a series of particularly vicious hurricanes, the Hewitt and Deering were proven to have been sailing away from the area of the storm at the time. Hoover's assistant, Lawrence Ritchey, was placed in charge of the investigation. Ritchey tried to chart what happened to the vessel between its last sighting at Cape Lookout and its running aground at Diamond Shoals by reading the log books of the Coast Guard lightships stationed at those places.

Theories

There were a number of theories which became popular during the course of the investigation and after it. It seemed at first that an external force was responsible for the disappearance.

On April 11, 1921, a man named Christopher Columbus Gray claimed to have found a message in a bottle floating in the waters of Buxton Beach, North Carolina; he swiftly turned it over to the authorities. Gray later admitted the letter he had recovered had been forged. The text of the message went as follows:


DEERING CAPTURED BY OIL BURNING BOAT SOMETHING LIKE CHASER. TAKING OFF EVERYTHING HANDCUFFING CREW. CREW HIDING ALL OVER SHIP NO CHANCE TO MAKE ESCAPE. FINDER PLEASE NOTIFY HEADQUARTERS DEERING.


The handwriting in the letter was matched to that of the ship's engineer Bates by the widow of Captain Wormell, and the bottle was proven to have been manufactured in Brazil. This, along with the known sighting of the "mysterious" steamer that arrived at the Cape Lookout Lightship in the wake of the Deering, seemed to indicate that hostile people were responsible. Yet this also caused some controversy—if a crew member did manage to get hold of paper, pen, and bottle and write a letter, why would he request that the company be notified, as opposed to the police or Coast Guard?

The following theories were considered by the U.S. Government in its investigation:
  • Hurricanes: The US government, particularly the Weather Bureau, strongly advocated a series of vicious hurricanes raging in the Atlantic as the cause of the disappearances. As mentioned above, however, both the Deering and the Hewitt were steaming away from the path of these storms. In any case, several authors, including Larry Kusche
    Larry Kusche
    Lawrence David Kusche is an American author and pilot. He had been a commercial pilot, flight instructor, instrument-rated pilot, instrument instructor and librarian by the time he wrote The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved and The Disappearance of Flight 19 .Larry Kusche was born in Racine,...

     and Richard Winer
    Richard Winer
    Richard Winer is an American author of non-fiction books dealing mainly with the supernatural or the paranormal. His best known for his work on the Bermuda Triangle, The Devil's Triangle , The Devil's Triangle 2 , and From The Devil's Triangle to The Devil's Jaw...

    , have pointed out that the state of the ship indicates an orderly rather than panicked evacuation.

  • Piracy
    Piracy
    Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. The term can include acts committed on land, in the air, or in other major bodies of water or on a shore. It does not normally include crimes committed against persons traveling on the same vessel as the perpetrator...

    : Captain O.W. Parker of the United States Marine Shipping Board certainly believed piracy
    Piracy
    Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. The term can include acts committed on land, in the air, or in other major bodies of water or on a shore. It does not normally include crimes committed against persons traveling on the same vessel as the perpetrator...

     responsible; he stated that, in his opinion, "Piracy without a doubt still exists as it has since the days of the Phoenicians". Captain Wormell's widow was a particularly strong advocate of this theory. It was believed that a group of pirates were responsible for the various disappearances; however, no real evidence of this theory emerged, and no suspected pirates were ever caught.

  • Russian/Communist
    Communism
    Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

     Piracy: During a police raid on the headquarters of the United Russian Workers Party (a Communist front group) in New York City
    New York City
    New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

    , officers found papers that called on members of the organization to seize American ships and sail them to Russia. These papers showed that a Communist plot was afoot, and was circumstantially linked to several shipboard strikes the previous year. This was widely believed in regard to the Deering at the time, particularly by hardline anti-Communists in the government. Though an intriguing suggestion, no definitive proof that any of these activities were actually carried out has surfaced.

  • Rum Runners: A similar theory to the above speculates that a group of liquor smugglers working out of the Bahamas stole the ship to use as a rum-running vessel (this was during the Prohibition
    Prohibition
    Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is the practice of prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and consumption of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries during which the...

     era). The Deering was large enough, according to Richard Winer's Ghost Ships, to carry roughly a million dollars' worth of liquor in its hold.

  • Mutiny: Wormell's known conflict with his first mate and derisive comments towards his crew while in Rio De Janeiro suggested that something may have been amiss between the captain and his men on the voyage. Captain Jacobson at Cape Lookout certainly thought it odd; the man who hailed his vessel was definitely not Captain Wormell, and he was not an officer by all accounts. Senator Frederick Hale
    Frederick Hale
    Frederick Hale was a politician from the U.S. state of Maine, representing the state in the United States Senate from 1917 to 1941. He was the son of Eugene Hale, the grandson of Zachariah Chandler, both also U.S. Senators, brother of diplomat Chandler Hale, and the cousin of U.S...

     of Maine advocated this theory, stating it was "a plain case of mutiny". Discontent with the captain could certainly have caused a mutiny
    Mutiny
    Mutiny is a conspiracy among members of a group of similarly situated individuals to openly oppose, change or overthrow an authority to which they are subject...

     of the crew, but once again, nothing definitive has ever been proven.


Perhaps inevitably, a more outlandish type of explanation became popular within a few decades of the incident:
  • Paranormal Explanation: The disappearance of the ship's crew has been cited by innumerable authors dealing with anomalous phenomena and the supernatural
    Supernatural
    The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...

    . Charles Fort
    Charles Fort
    Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print today.-Biography:Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York, of Dutch...

    , in his book Lo!
    Lo!
    Lo! was the third published nonfiction work of the author Charles Fort . In it he details a wide range of unusual phenomena. In the final chapter of the book he proposes a new cosmology that the earth is stationary in space and surrounded by a solid shell which is "....

     (1931), first mentioned this vessel in a "mysterious" context, and many subsequent chroniclers of sea mysteries have followed suit. Since this vessel sailed in the area generally considered to be part of the so-called Bermuda Triangle
    Bermuda Triangle
    The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances....

    , the disappearance of the crew has often been tied to this fact.

Investigation ends

The investigation remained largely fruitless, but it did take an interesting turn when, according to Kusche, Christopher Columbus Gray admitted the letter he had recovered had been forged. When an Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 inquiry into the disappearance of the vessel Monte San Michele revealed that there indeed had been heavy hurricanes in the vicinity, most of the conspiracy theories were dropped and mutiny was generally accepted as the answer to the riddle. In July 1921, the consulate general in Portugal reported that a sailor named Augusto Frederico Martins was under suspicion as being a member of the missing crew, until it was later discovered that he was a cook for the vessel Portugal.

Another potential lead turned up when a member of the crew of the missing Hewitt, B.O. Rainey, was found serving on another vessel; however, when approached by State Department officials, he claimed that he had left the Hewitt before it left port at Sabine, Texas.

The investigation finally wound down in late 1922 without an official ruling on the fate of the Deering.

Conclusion

No explanation for the disappearance of the crew of the Carroll A. Deering was ever officially verified, though all of the genuine evidence seems to point to mutiny. Still, the case is a favorite of paranormalists and Bermuda Triangle
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances....

 proponents and has gained a reputation as a successor to the Mary Celeste
Mary Celeste
The Mary Celeste was an American brigantine merchant ship famous for having been discovered on 4 December 1872, in the Atlantic Ocean unmanned and apparently abandoned , despite the fact that the weather was fine and her crew had been experienced and able...

 as one of the truly great mysteries of the sea.

Further reading

Newspapers
  • "Piracy Suspected In Disappearance Of 3 American Ships," New York Times, June 21, 1921.
  • "Bath Owners Skeptical," New York Times, June 22, 1921.
  • "Deering Skipper's Wife Caused Investigation," New York Times, June 22, 1921.
  • "More Ships Added To Mystery List," New York Times, June 22, 1921.
  • "Hunt On For Pirates," Washington Post, June 21, 1921
  • "Comb Seas For Ships," Washington Post, June 22, 1921.
  • "Port Of Missing Ships Claims 3000 Yearly," Washington Post, July 10, 1921.


Books
  • Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals, The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering]] (2002), Bland Simpson
    Bland Simpson
    Bland Simpson is an American author and pianist from North Carolina. He grew up in Elizabeth City. He has written six books, two of which also feature photography by his wife, conservationist Ann Cary Simpson . Simpson has become an authority on Eastern North Carolina's mysteries, geography and...

  • Lo!
    Lo!
    Lo! was the third published nonfiction work of the author Charles Fort . In it he details a wide range of unusual phenomena. In the final chapter of the book he proposes a new cosmology that the earth is stationary in space and surrounded by a solid shell which is "....

     (1931), Charles Fort
    Charles Fort
    Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print today.-Biography:Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York, of Dutch...

     - ISBN 1-870870-89-1
  • Invisible Horizons (1965), Vincent Gaddis
    Vincent Gaddis
    Vincent Hayes Gaddis was an American author who coined the phrase "Bermuda Triangle" in a February 1964 Argosy cover piece. He popularized many stories about anomalous phenomena in a style similar to that of Charles Fort.Gaddis was born in Ohio to Tilden H. and Alice M. Gaddis. He married...

  • The Bermuda Triangle
    The Bermuda Triangle (book)
    The Bermuda Triangle is a best-selling 1974 book by Charles Berlitz which popularized the belief of the Bermuda Triangle as an area of ocean prone to disappearing ships and airplanes...

     (1974), Charles Berlitz
    Charles Berlitz
    Charles Frambach Berlitz was an American linguist and language teacher known for his books on anomalous phenomena, as well as his language-learning courses. He is listed in The People's Almanac as one of the fifteen most eminent linguists in the world.-Life:Berlitz was born in New York City...

  • The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (1975), Larry Kusche
    Larry Kusche
    Lawrence David Kusche is an American author and pilot. He had been a commercial pilot, flight instructor, instrument-rated pilot, instrument instructor and librarian by the time he wrote The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved and The Disappearance of Flight 19 .Larry Kusche was born in Racine,...

     - ISBN 0-87975-971-2
  • Ghost Ships (2000), Richard Winer
    Richard Winer
    Richard Winer is an American author of non-fiction books dealing mainly with the supernatural or the paranormal. His best known for his work on the Bermuda Triangle, The Devil's Triangle , The Devil's Triangle 2 , and From The Devil's Triangle to The Devil's Jaw...


External links

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