Transcription
Have you ever heard of the USS Cyclops and wondered why nobody has ever found it? I do not mean simply why it sank. The real question is, how does a 540-ft US Navy ship carrying 309 people simply vanish without leaving a single piece of wreckage, no distress signal, no debris, no bodies, nothing?
Over 100 years later, the US Navy still has no answer. So, why is the USS Cyclops still missing? It's not like nobody looked. Ships searched for the Cyclops immediately after it disappeared. The Navy launched a formal investigation. Clive Cussler, the adventure novelist who found dozens of famous wrecks, spent his own money searching for the Cyclops in 1983 and found nothing. Modern sonar expeditions have come up empty, and yet the Cyclops, one of the largest ships in the US Navy at the time, has simply never been found.
As it turns out, there are some very specific reasons why finding the USS Cyclops is so difficult. Some of the obvious explanations for why it sank fall apart when you look at them properly. The USS Cyclops was a Proteus-class collier, a large cargo ship built to carry coal and supplies for the United States Navy. The Cyclops was 540 ft long, and she was launched in Philadelphia in 1910. For her first 7 years, the Cyclops fueled warships across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, the Cyclops was commissioned into naval service.
In January 1918, the USS Cyclops left Norfolk, Virginia, carrying nearly 10,000 tons of coal bound for the US Navy squadron in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The USS Cyclops arrived in Rio on January 28th, unloaded the coal, and was given a new cargo for the return journey, 11,000 tons of manganese ore used in the production of steel and ammunition. This was important wartime material. The USS Cyclops was loaded up and sent home.
Before leaving Brazil, two problems were reported. The first was that the USS Cyclops was overloaded. Her waterline was sitting above the Plimsoll mark, the line painted on a ship's hull that indicates the maximum safe load. The second was that the starboard engine had a cracked cylinder and was completely inoperative. A survey board looked at the USS Cyclops and recommended she return to the United States for repairs rather than attempt an ocean crossing in that condition. The recommendation was noted. The USS Cyclops departed anyway.
The USS Cyclops made one stop, an unscheduled call at Barbados on March 3rd, where port officials again noted the ship was sitting dangerously low in the water. The USS Cyclops took on some supplies and left Barbados on March 4th, headed for Baltimore, Maryland. The expected arrival date was March 13th. The last message anyone ever received from the USS Cyclops was a routine weather report. It said, "Weather well, all fair." The USS Cyclops never arrived in Baltimore.
When the USS Cyclops failed to show up on March 13th, the Navy began making inquiries. Ships were sent to search the route between Barbados and Baltimore. The Navy searched for weeks. Other vessels in the area were contacted. No one had seen the Cyclops. No wreckage was found on the surface, no oil slick, no floating debris, no bodies, nothing at all. On June 1st, 1918, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would later become President of the United States, formally declared the USS Cyclops lost and all hands deceased.
So, what happened to the USS Cyclops? There are a few theories, and it is worth going through them because understanding why each one has a problem tells you a lot about why the Cyclops has never been found.
The first theory was a German U-boat attack. The USS Cyclops disappeared during the First World War. German submarines were active in the Atlantic, and the Cyclops was carrying strategic war material that would have made her a valuable target. But after the war ended and German naval records became available, there was no record of any U-boat encountering the USS Cyclops. Germany did claim other sinkings, but the Cyclops was not among them. Most historians now consider a U-boat attack unlikely.
The second theory is structural failure, and this is the one most naval historians consider most likely. The USS Cyclops was overloaded, running on one engine, and carrying 11,000 tons of dense manganese ore. One officer who had served on the USS Cyclops before her final voyage later argued that the manganese ore may have been stored incorrectly, loaded only in the central holds rather than distributed evenly throughout the ship. This would have put enormous stress on the middle of the hull. Combined with heavy seas, the USS Cyclops could have snapped in two. A ship that breaks apart that quickly would sink in minutes, too fast to send a distress signal, launch lifeboats, or leave anything floating on the surface. That would explain why nothing was ever found.
There is some evidence to support this. The USS Cyclops had two sister ships, the USS Proteus and the USS Nereus. Both were virtually identical vessels. Both were later sold for civilian use and converted to carry heavy metallic ore, exactly the same type of dense cargo as the Cyclops. The USS Proteus vanished in the Atlantic in November 1941. The USS Nereus vanished in the Atlantic in December 1941. Both disappeared without a trace. Three sister ships carrying heavy ore, all gone without explanation. I'll be honest, when I looked into that, I had to check it twice. Three ships of the same class, all carrying the same type of cargo, all simply gone.
The third theory involves the captain, Lieutenant Commander George Worley. In the months before the final voyage, crew members had filed complaints accusing Worley of erratic behavior and poor judgment. There were even reports of a minor mutiny on board the USS Cyclops. Worley was also German-born, which in the atmosphere of the First World War led to suggestions he may have handed the ship over to German forces. The Navy investigated and cleared Worley of wrongdoing, but the complaints about his decision to sail an overloaded ship with a broken engine across the Atlantic remain difficult to explain away.
Then there is the Bermuda Triangle angle. The USS Cyclops disappeared in the area roughly bounded by Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico, the region that would later become famous as the Bermuda Triangle. I want to be straightforward about this. The most credible explanation for the disappearance of the Cyclops is structural failure in heavy seas, not anything supernatural. But it is worth noting that records show a violent storm swept through the area between Cape Hatteras and Cape Charles on March 9th and 10th, 1918, right in the window when the USS Cyclops would have been passing through that area. A ship that was already overloaded, running on one engine, and possibly carrying incorrectly stored cargo would have been in serious danger in those conditions.
So, why is the USS Cyclops never been found? This is the part I find genuinely puzzling. Modern technology has found wrecks in far more challenging conditions. The USS Indianapolis sat undiscovered for 72 years before being located in 2017. The Bismarck was found in 1989, 48 years after it sank. So, why not the Cyclops?
The problem is that nobody knows exactly where to look. The USS Indianapolis was eventually found because a historian discovered a log entry from a passing ship that placed the Indianapolis 11 hours before it sank, which narrowed the search to a specific area. The USS Cyclops has no equivalent clue. The Cyclops sent no distress signal with coordinates. The USS Cyclops was somewhere on a vast stretch of open ocean between Barbados and Baltimore, a route covering hundreds of miles, and there is no reliable record of where on that route the Cyclops went down.
In 1968, a Navy diver named Dean Hawes descended on a large, unidentified wreck near the Virginia coast that matched the description of the USS Cyclops. The bridge sat on steel stilts above the deck, and large loading arms stretched along the main deck. Hawes was convinced he had found the Cyclops, but when the Navy returned to the same coordinates, they could not locate the same wreck. Hawes died shortly after the search. That lead has never been properly followed up.
The bottom line is that the USS Cyclops probably broke apart and sank quickly in heavy seas, taking everything down with her so fast that nothing reached the surface. The Cyclops is almost certainly lying somewhere on the ocean floor between the Virginia coast and Barbados, possibly broken into pieces, possibly buried under sediment, possibly in water deeper than any search has yet covered. The exact location has simply never been pinned down. Without knowing where to look, finding a wreck on the ocean floor is, as one researcher put it, like looking for something on the dark side of the moon.
The US Navy's official position on the USS Cyclops has not changed in over 100 years. The cause of the loss remains unknown. 309 people are still out there somewhere beneath the Atlantic, and nobody's ever been able to say exactly where.