THE JOHN TRACY MYSTERY
On the 9th day of January, 1927, the big 2000 ton freighter John Tracy of the M. & J. Tracy Transportation Line, with some 2500 tons of coal for Boston, steamed out of the harbor of Philadelphia, but she never reached her destination, and from that day to this no word has come to land to tell what befell her. Every effort by search in every port on the coast, by telephone, by wireless, and the hunt through every possible avenue for information, failed to obtain the slightest clue to the missing boat. Another tragedy of the sea had been added to the long and ever increasing list of sea tragedies of lost ships that have dropped beneath the sea.
Knowing the usual speed with which these ships move along the coast and knowing the conditions which prevailed, it is estimated that this ship would have been in the immediate vicinity of Highland Light on the night of January 11th, when conditions on the sea were dark and stormy, with a gale-driven fog over all the sea.
In the early morning of the 10th, the three masted schooner Charles Whittemore, with a high deck load of piling (logs), bound from Portland to New York, encountered a strong gale and rough sea when a few miles east of Highland Light and her entire deck load of these big logs was swept from her decks. It has been quite generally believed that the Tracy, steaming up the coast in the darkness and storm, ran directly into this mass of floating logs, and the fury of the sea drove one of them through the steamer’s side and sent her to the bottom in a very few minutes.
On the ship were thirty-one officers and men. No man or message ever came back to tell how, why and where it happened. No wreckage came to the surface or the shore, but this is readily explained because of the fact that this was an iron ship, with very little material that could be washed from her decks, so the ship carried everything with her when she went to the bottom of the sea.