Carroll A. Deering
On January 31, 1921, the Carroll A. Deering ran aground on Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, with all sails set. The Coast Guard reached her four days later. The lifeboats were gone. The crew's personal belongings were gone. But dinner was being prepared in the galley, the tables were set, and the ship's cats were still aboard.
Eleven men had vanished from a brand-new, well-found schooner in one of the most heavily trafficked shipping lanes on the East Coast. No bodies were ever recovered. No lifeboat was ever found.
The investigation pulled in five government agencies, and the deeper they dug, the stranger it got. The ship's logs were missing. The steering gear had been deliberately smashed. Navigation equipment was gone. Two anchors had been dropped, with their chains hanging over the bow in a way that suggested the ship had been anchored and then cut loose. Someone had wrecked the ship's ability to navigate and steer, then left.
On January 29, two days before the grounding, a lightship keeper at Cape Lookout reported that a crewman on the Deering had hailed him through a megaphone, saying the ship had lost her anchors. The man on the megaphone was not an officer. That detail haunted investigators.
Theories ranged from mutiny to rum-running pirates to Soviet agents. The Deering's first mate, Charles McLellan, had openly clashed with the original captain (who fell ill and was replaced before the final voyage). The replacement captain, W.B. Wormell, was 66 years old and may not have had full control of his crew. At least nine other vessels disappeared in the same area around the same time, leading some to call it an early "Bermuda Triangle" cluster.
The FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Commerce all investigated. None of them solved it. The case files were sealed, then lost, then partially recovered decades later. Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, personally oversaw the investigation and came away frustrated. Whatever happened aboard the Carroll A. Deering, eleven men took the answer with them.
1919-1921 · cargo-transport