The apparent intention of the renegade archduke at this time was to follow the sea. He had caused the Santa Margarita to be elaborately refitted inside, had insured her for two hundred and thirty thousand marks with the Hamburg Marine Insurance Company, and he had written his aged mother at Lake Gmünden of his determination to make his living as a mariner and an honest man, instead of existing like an idler on his comfortable private means. There is nothing in the record to indicate that he intended to go into hiding.
~~ ARCHDUKE JOHANN SALVATOR ~~
The Santa Margarita accordingly sailed on the thirteenth of July. With good fortune she should have been in the Straits of Magellan the first week in August, and her arrival at Valparaiso was to be expected not later than the first of September. But the ship did not reach port. The middle of September passed without word of her. When she had still not been reported by the first week in October the alarm was given.
As the result of diplomatic representations from the Austrian minister, the Argentine government soon made elaborate arrangements for a search. On December the second the gunboat Bermejo, Captain Don Mensilla, put out from Buenos Aires and made a four months’ cruise of the Argentine coast, visiting every conceivable anchorage where a vessel of the Santa Margarita’s size might possibly have found refuge. Don Mensilla found that, beginning the night of July 20, and continuing intermittently for nearly a month, there had been storms of the greatest violence in the region of Cape Blanco and the southern extremity of Tierra del Fuego. More than forty vessels which had been in the vicinity in this period reported that the disturbances had been of unusual character and duration, more than sufficient to overwhelm a sailing bark in the tortuous and treacherous Magellan Straits.
Continuing his search, Don Mensilla found that a vessel answering to the general description of the Santa Margarita had been wrecked off the little island of Nuevo Ano, in the Beagle Canal, in the course of a hurricane which lasted from August 3 to August 5, at which dates the Santa Margarita was very likely in this vicinity. The Argentine commander could find no trace of the wreck and no clew to any survivors. He continued his search for more than two months longer and then returned to base with his melancholy report.
At the same time the Chilean government had sent out the small steamer Toro to search the Pacific coast from Cape Sunday to Cape Penas. Her captain returned after several months with no word of the archduke or any member of his crew.
These investigations, plus the study of logs and reports at the Hamburg maritime observatory, soon convinced most authorities that John Orth and his vessel were at the bottom of the Straits. But in this case, as in that of Roger Tichborne,[4] an old mother’s fond devotion refused to accept the bitter arbitrament of chance. The Grand Duchess Maria Antonia could not bring herself to believe that winds and waves had swallowed up her beloved son. She stormed the court at Vienna with her entreaties, with the result that Franz Josef finally sent out the corvette Saida, with instructions to make a fresh search, including the islands of the South Seas, whither, according to a fanciful report, John Orth had made his way.
At the same time the grand duchess appealed to Pope Leo, and the pontiff requested Catholic missionaries in South America and all over the world to search for John Orth and send immediate news of his presence to the Holy See.