A rumor having no substance whatever was to the effect that the crew of the ship had revolted, overcome the officers and converted the ship into a German raider. A companion tale said the ship had sailed for Germany to deliver her cargo of manganese to the enemy, by whom this valuable metal was sorely needed. The only foundation for this rumor was the fact that the Cyclops was indeed carrying a load of manganese ore to the United States.
It was not until August 30, 1918, that Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels announced that the ship was officially recorded as lost. At that time he notified the relatives of the officers, crew and passengers. More than three months later, on December 9th, Mr. Daniels supplemented this official notice with the statement, given to the newspaper correspondents, that “no reasonable explanation” of the Cyclops case could be given. And here the official news ends. At this writing, inquiry at the official source in Washington brings the answer that nothing has since been learned to alter the then issued statement.
The Cyclops case naturally excited and disturbed the public mind, with the result of an unusual crop of fancies, lies, false alarms and hoaxes. On May 8, 1923, for instance, Miss Dorothy Walker of Pittsburgh reported that she had found a bottle at Atlantic City containing the message “Cyclops wrecked at Sea.—H.” This note was written on a piece of note paper torn from a memorandum book and was yellowed with age. The bottle was tightly corked and closed with sealing wax—a substance which shipwrecked sailors do not have in their pockets at the moment of peril.
Other such messages were found from time to time. One floated ashore at Velasco, Tex., also in a bottle. It read:
“U. S. S. Cyclops, torpedoed April 7, 1918, Lat. 46.25, Long. 35.11. All on board when German submarine fired on us. Lifeboats going to pieces. No one to be left to tell the tale.”
The position indicated is midway between Hatteras and the Azores, where the Cyclops had no business and probably never was. It was found after the war, as already suggested, that no German submarine had been in any so distant region at the time. We may accordingly look upon this bottle as another flagon of disordered fancy, another press from the old “spurlos versenkt” madness.
Finally, in their search for something that might explain this dark and baffling affair, the hunters came upon a suggestive fact. The commander of the Cyclops was Lieutenant-Commander George W. Worley. It now came to light—and it struck many persons like a revelation—that this man was really G. W. Wichtman, that he was born a German; ergo, that he was the man responsible for this disaster to our navy. It proved true that Wichtman-Worley was a German by birth, but he had been brought to the United States as a child and had spent twenty-six years in the American navy. No one in official position suspected him, but the professional Hun strafers insisted that this was the typical act of a German, no matter how long separated from his native land, how little acquainted with it or how long and faithfully attached to the service of his adopted country. It is only fair to the memory of a blameless officer to say that Lieutenant-Commander Worley could not have done such a complete job had he wished to and that his record is officially without the least blemish.
We are left then, to look for more satisfactory explanations of the fate of the big collier. One possibility is that the manganese developed dangerous gases in the hold and caused a terrific explosion, which blew the ship out of the water without warning, killed almost all on board and so wrecked the boats that none could reach land. The only trouble with this is that a nineteen thousand ton ship, when destroyed by an explosion, is certain to leave a great mass of surface wreckage, which will drift ashore sooner or later or be observed by passing vessels in any travelled lane. It happens that vessels sent out by the Navy Department visited every ness and cove and bay along the coast from Brazil to Hatteras, every island in the West Indies and every quarter of the circling seas without ever finding so much as a splinter belonging to the collier. Fishermen and boatmen in all the great region were questioned, encouraged with promises of reward and sent seeking, but they, too, found never a spar or scrap of all that great ship.
This also seems to dispose of the possibility of a disaster at the hands of a German raider or submarine. Besides, to emphasize the matter once more, the German records show that there is no possibility of anything of this sort. The suspicion has been officially and categorically denied and there is no reason for concealment now.
There remains one further possibility, which probably conceals the truth. The Cyclops, like her sister ships, the Neptune and Jupiter, was topheavy. She carried, like them, six big steel derricks on a superstructure fifty feet from her main deck. This great weight aloft made it dangerous for the ship to roll. Indeed she could not roll, like other heavy vessels, very far without capsizing. We have but to suppose that with her one crippled engine she ran into heavy weather or perhaps a tidal wave, that she heeled over suddenly, her cargo shifted and her heavy top turned her upside down, all in a few seconds. In that event there would have been no time for using the wireless, no chance to launch any boats. Also, with everything battened and tied down, ship-shape for a naval vessel travelling in time of war, especially if the weather was a little heavy, there is the strong possibility that nothing could have been loose to float free. In this manner the whole big ship with all her parts and all who rode upon her may have been dumped into the sea and carried to the depths. One of the floating mines dropped off our Southern Coast in the previous year by the U 121 may have done the fatal rocking, it is true.