The conclusion must be that the ship did break up somewhere in the deepest ocean, as the result of an explosion, while she was altogether unattended. She must have gone down with all her men, for not even the reports of finding bits of her wreckage have ever been verified. The mystery of her end is still much discussed among seafaring men and William McFee, in one of his tales, suggests that she lay hid up one of the South American rivers and came to grief there.
Even more fantastic than this, however, is the story of the great United States collier Cyclops. This vessel, of nineteen thousand tons displacement, five hundred and eighteen feet long, of sixty-five foot beam and twenty-seven foot draught, with a cargo capacity of twelve thousand five hundred tons, was built by the Cramps in Philadelphia in 1910. She was designed to coal the first-line fighting ships of our fleet while at sea and under way, by means of traveling cables from her arm-like booms. She had frequently accompanied our battleships abroad, had transported the marines to Cuba and the refugees from Vera Cruz to Galveston in April 1914. On a trip to Kiel in 1911, she was wonderingly examined by the German naval critics and builders, who declared her to be a marvel of design and structure.
Wide World.
~~ U. S. S. CYCLOPS ~~
On March 4, 1918, the Cyclops sailed from Barbados for an unnamed Atlantic port (Norfolk, as it proved), with a crew of 221 and 57 passengers, including Alfred L. Moreau Gottschalk, United States Consul General at Rio de Janeiro. She was due to arrive on March 13. When that date had come and nothing had been heard from her, it was announced that one of her two engines had been injured and she was proceeding slowly with the other engine compounded. But on April 14 the news came out in the press that the great ship was a month overdue and totally unaccounted for.
For a whole month the story had been veiled under the censorship while the Navy Department had been making every conceivable effort to find the ship or some evidence of her fate. There had been no news through her radio equipment since her departure from Barbados. There had been no heavy weather in that vicinity. She had been steaming in the well-traveled lane of ships passing between North and South America, yet not a vessel had spoken her, heard her radio call or seen her at any distance. Destroyers had been searching the whole Gulf, Caribbean, North and South Atlantic regions for three frantic weeks. They had not found so much as a life preserver belonging to the missing ship.
The public mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that a German submarine had done this dirty piece of business, if an attack on an enemy naval vessel in time of war may be so listed. Alas, there were no German submarines so far from their home bases at that time or any proximate period. None had been reported by other vessels and the German admiralty has long since confirmed the understood fact that there was none abroad. A floating mine was next suspected, but the lower West Indies are a long distance from any mine field then in existence and a ship of the size of the Cyclops, even if mined, probably would have had time to use her radio, lower some boats and put some of her people afloat. At the very least, she must have left some flotsam to reach the beaches of the archipelago with its tragic meanings.
The mystery was soon complicated. On May 6 a British steamer from Brazil brought news that two weeks after the due date of the Cyclops but still two weeks before her disappearance was announced, an advertisement had been published in a Portuguese newspaper at Rio announcing requiem mass for the repose of the soul of A. L. M. Gottschalk “lost when the Cyclops was sunk at sea.” Efforts were made by the secret agents of the American and Brazilian governments to discover the identity of the persons responsible for the advertisement, but nothing of worth was ever discovered. The notice was signed with the names of several prominent Brazilians, all of whom denied that they had the least knowledge of the matter. The rector of the church denied that any arrangement had been made for the mass and said he had not known Gottschalk. Some chose to believe that the advertisement had been inserted by German secret agents for the purpose of notifying the large number of Germans in Brazil that the Fatherland was still active in American waters.