Into the path traversed by the lowly caravel steamed the towering Doraine, pointing her gleaming nose to the north and east.
She was never seen again.
Out from the lairs of the great American navy sped the swiftest hounds of the ocean. They swept the face of the waters with a thousand sleepless eyes; they called with the strange, mysterious voice that carries a thousand miles; they raked the sea as with a fine-tooth comb; they searched the coast of a continent; they penetrated its rivers, circled its islands, scanned its rocks and reefs,—and asked a single question that had but one reply from every ship that sailed the southern sea.
For months ships of all nations searched for the missing steamer. Not so much as the smallest piece of wreckage rewarded the ceaseless quest. The great vessel, with all its precious cargo, had slipped into its niche among the profoundest mysteries of the sea. Came the day, therefore, when the Secretary of the Navy wrote down against her name the ugly sentence: “Lost with all on board.”
Maritime courts issued their decrees; legatees parcelled estates, great and small; insurance companies paid in hard cash for the lives that were lost, and went blandly about their business; more than one widow reconsidered her thoughts of self-denial; and ships again sailed the course of Amerigo Vespucci without a thought of the Doraine.
For months the newspapers in many lands speculated on the fate of the missing liner. That a great ship could disappear from the face of the waters in these supreme days of navigation without leaving so much as a trace behind was inconceivable. At first there were tales of the dastardly U-boats; then came the sinister reports of treachery on board resulting in the ship being taken over by German plotters, with the prediction that she would emerge from oblivion as a well-armed “raider” cruising in the North Atlantic; then the generally accepted theory that she had been swiftly, suddenly rent asunder by a mighty explosion in her hold. All opinions, all theories, all conjectures, however, revolved about a single fear;—that she was the victim of a German plot. But in the course of events there came a day when the German Navy, ever boastful of its ignoble deeds, issued the positive and no doubt sincere declaration that it had no record of the sinking of the Doraine. The fate of the ship was as much of a mystery to the German admiralty as it was to the rest of the puzzled world.
And so it was that the Doraine, laden with nearly a thousand souls, sailed out into the broad Atlantic and was never heard from again.