Carroll A. Deering

Why it matters

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.

What it was like

The Carroll A. Deering was a five-masted schooner, and working one was a particular kind of sailing. The rig was designed to be handled by a small crew, using the mechanical advantage of gaff sails and multiple masts rather than the massive square-sail yards that required fifty men to manage.

Even so, a crew of twelve worked hard. Each mast carried a gaff-rigged fore-and-aft sail, and the boom on a five-master was heavy enough to kill a man if the wind shifted wrong. Setting and striking sail, especially in the winter Atlantic, meant climbing aloft in freezing spray, hauling on lines with numb hands, and trusting your shipmates to manage their end.

The Deering's final voyage was a coal run from Norfolk, Virginia, to Rio de Janeiro, then a return trip in ballast. The southbound leg was uneventful. Whatever went wrong happened on the way home. The crew dynamic was reportedly tense. First Mate McLellan had been drinking heavily in port and had threatened to kill Captain Wormell. Whether he followed through, or whether something else entirely happened on that cold January passage, remains the question.

The crew

Patina notes

The Carroll A. Deering didn't get a chance to age gracefully. She sat on Diamond Shoals for weeks while investigators picked through the wreck. The winter Atlantic did its work quickly on a stranded wooden hull.

By March 1921, the surf had opened her seams and she was breaking apart. Salvage was impossible. In March, the government dynamited the wreck to prevent it from becoming a navigation hazard. The remains scattered across the shoals and settled into the sand.

She was barely two years old when she died. Built in 1919, abandoned in January 1921, destroyed in March 1921. One of the shortest and strangest careers in American maritime history. The wood that the Deering Company had carefully selected and shaped in their Bath, Maine yard ended up as splinters on a sandbar off Hatteras.

Preservation reality

Very little survives. The ship was dynamited on the shoals, and what the explosives didn't destroy, the Atlantic finished. Some small artifacts were recovered during the investigation, but most are scattered across government archives or lost.

The most substantial surviving piece is one of the Deering's nameboard panels, held by a museum in Maine. The investigation files, partially recovered after being lost for decades, are in the National Archives.

Cape Hatteras itself is the memorial. Diamond Shoals has claimed hundreds of ships over the centuries, and the Deering is one more name on a long list. The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, North Carolina, covers the region's maritime disasters and includes information about the Deering. If you stand on Cape Point and look southeast toward the shoals, you're looking at where eleven men disappeared and left their dinner on the stove.