The ocean, it makes up over 70% of the Earth’s surface. The Norwegian professor Steinar Ellefmo once declared, “We actually know more about the moon, than we do the seabed.”

People have been trying to control the seas for as long as we have been sailing it. We build ships the size of buildings in our attempt to conquer the waves, and yet, no matter the size, if the sea decides to take them, there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

The mysteries of the sea are never ending, it seems every time we solve one a new one presents itself.

In 1943, a small Higgins boat, used to transport troupes in the Second World War, sank with no apparent cause. Its hull was lost to the waters in European seas and it vanished from memory. In 2022 in the USA, California suffered a terrible drought, and the water levels of Lake Shashta began to drop. As they did the Lake revealed its long-kept secrets. Bodies were found, general debris, and a small boat. Locals dubbed it, The Ghost Boat of Lake Shashta.

Experts were brought in to examine the carcass of the vessel and they noticed the numbers written along the side of the hull. It was marked 31 – 17, and to everyone’s complete confusion, it was identified as the Higgins boat, assigned to the Attack Transport USS Monrovia and used during the invasion of Sicily. No one has been able to find an answer for how the vessel sunk thousands of miles away, only to appear in a land locked reservoir off the West Coast of America.

The depths may have revealed a long-lost shipwreck, but the oceans leave us with a mystery even more baffling than we could have guessed.

I’m Alannagh Cooke, and this is the Folklorist.

In July of 1909, the SS Waratah, a passenger and cargo steamship, set sail for its second voyage. The Waratah arrived at the port in Durban, South Africa on the 25th July. She had travelled across from Australia and was due to continue all the way to Europe. A passenger named Claude G. Sawyer joined the Waratah when it docked in Sydney. Sawyer was intending to take the ship to Cape Town, he was an experienced traveller and worked as an engineer.

As the Waratah journeyed across from Melbourne to Durban it encountered rough weather,  witnesses on a similar ship called the Wariloo, experienced far worse weather but were not alarmed. Sawyer however, was very unnerved by the Waratah’s response to waves. He noted that it would roll substantially to its side and then remain there for some time before correcting itself. When the deck finally become horizontal again it would jerk unexpectedly, which apparently caused many injuries to passengers as they suffered falls.

Sawyer was beginning to feel extremely uneasy about the Waratah’s erratic behaviour and he spoke to a fellow passenger named Mr Ebsworth. Ebsworth was a solicitor but had previously worked as a sailor for almost a decade. Both men agreed the ship was not responding to poor weather conditions in the way it should and decided to watch from the deck. There were several rolling waves coming towards them. The pair watched the ship take the first one as it should, before it nosedived down into the trough of the wave. The ship should have then risen again to take the following roller, but as the second wave hit the nose of the Waratah ploughed straight through it. Ebsworth declared in all his time he had never seen a ship do that.

Sawyer went to speak to a member of the crew and raised his concerns, but he was simply told the builders were onboard and believed the rolling was not a problem.

The next part of the story varies depending on the source. Sawyer experienced three dreams; some say they occurred on three consecutive nights whilst other state they all happened on one night. Regardless of the timeline, the details of the dreams remain consistent. Three of four days before reaching Durban, Sawyer dreamt that he saw a man who was holding a long sword in his left hand and a rag drenched in blood in his right. He then had the same dream twice again. Upon speaking to his new friend about the dream, Ebsworth told Sawyer he believed it was a warning.

It was enough for Sawyer to cut his journey short, and when the Waratah docked in Durban on the 25th July, Claude Sawyer left the ship and encouraged other passengers to do so as well. Whilst at Durban, on the 28th July, Sawyer had one last dream. He saw the Waratah in large waves. One particularly big wave went over her bow and pushed her down. The ship then rolled over onto her starboard side and disappeared.

After Claude Sawyer left the ship, what we know about its journey begins to dwindle.

The Waratah left the port of Durban at 8:15pm on the 26th July, she was carrying 211 passengers and crew and was set to dock next in Cape Town. The final confirmed sighting of the Waratah took place at 4am on the 27th July. She overtook a ship named the Clan MacIntyre. Travelling at around 13 knots, they drew level at roughly 6:30am. The two ships communicated through signal lamp, sharing their name and destination. The Waratah then pushed on, leaving the Clan MacIntyre behind. At 9:30am that morning, she disappeared from sight over the horizon.

Later that day a storm hit, winds began to increase drastically and by the following day it had developed into a hurricane. The sea was now a deadly place to be a steamer.

At approximately 5:30pm on the 27th July, a ship called Harlow saw smoke on the horizon, the Captain thought it was so much smoke he believed it to be a steamer on fire. As night fell the sight of the steamer’s running lights could be seen glowing but still 10-12 miles away. Suddenly there were two huge flashes of light and then everything was dark.
There has been much discussion over the years that these were explosions in a coal bunker on the Waratah, and the ultimate reason the ship went down. But at the time the crew of the Harlow assumed they were most likely brush fires on land and didn’t log the incident.

The SS Waratah was due to make port in Cape Town on the 29th July, but it never arrived. Since the 27th July 1909, not a soul has seen the SS Waratah. Many search attempts have been made over the last century. The most persistent searcher of the missing ship is a South African man named Emlyn Brown. Across the years he has launched a multitude of expeditions with an unwavering belief that the ship is able to be found. In 2001 Brown believed he had finally discovered the wreck of the vanished steamer. He made a public announcement stating his victory, but after a follow-up expedition it was discovered that the wreck was in fact a World War Two freighter. This was the final attempt for Brown who in 2004 stated, “I've exhausted all the options. I now have no idea where to look.”

Perhaps the sea will one day reveal the Waratah’s resting place, but until that point, the secret of her demise remains hidden beneath the waves.

The concept of Ghost Ships has existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Whether it’s tales of the Flying Dutchman, Davey Jones’ devilish ship, crewed by the damned. Or ships which appear out of the fog, sails torn to pieces, only to vanish back into the mist as if they’d never existed.

One such story belongs to a ship named The Octavius. Supposedly it set sail in the mid 1700’s, it’s aim was to become the first ship to ever sail through the, at the time, fabled Northwest Passage. The passage is a sea route from the Atlantic through to the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean. The passage weaves its way through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and a series of icy waterways. It’s believed the ship was missing for at least 13 years, until it was eventually stumbled upon.

On October 11, 1775 a ship called the Herald was sailing the North Atlantic Sea near Greenland when it saw the mysterious outline of another ship making its way towards them. Captain Warren was at the helm of the Herald and upon seeing the Octavius jumped into a boat with his crew and rowed across to her. He shouted out to the unseen crew but no answer was returned. As the boat approached the hull Captain Warren noticed the ship was brutally weather beaten. There was no sign of movement onboard and the deck was covered in deep snow. He peered through a porthole below deck and through the darkness could make out the outline of a person sat reclined in a large chair.

The crew of the Herald boarded and upon seeing no sign of life, pulled open the frozen hatchway. They descended into the cabin and made their way towards the porthole the Captain had spotted.

Horror gripped the men as they came face to face with the body, frozen solid in the chair. A damp mould covered his face and his eyes were veiled in an icy grey. A pen clutched in his hand, he had been writing in a log book before the cold took him.

Captain Warren carefully pulled the book from the corpse before making his way back to the boat. The final unfinished sentence read, “11th Nov. 1762; We have been enclosed in the ice seventy days. The fire went out yesterday, and our master has been trying ever since to kindle it again but without success. His wife died this morning. There is no relief-“

The shaken crew left the rest of the ship untouched, closing the hatch they climbed back into their boats and returned silently to the Herald. They watched as the Octavius continued on its frozen way, gliding crewless out of sight. It has never been seen again.

When the depths decide to take a ship, there’s little we can do to fight back, but occasionally we can hold it at bay just long enough.

Several years ago I was travelling on a boat around the Isle of Skye in the highlands of Scotland. The outer Hebrides in the Scottish Isles are no stranger to shipwrecks, and as our boat rounded a cliff corner I saw the hull of a ship, crashed against the rocks of the Isle of Rum. It’s metallic glint and skeletal remains completely out of place against the seagull covered cliff.

I’d never seen anything like it, on film of course, but to see this beaten down body in front of me, the angry waves still crashing over it as they had the day it was wrecked, was a true sight to behold. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Our captain swung the speed boat sideways across a wave, we bounced upwards, a shower of sea water stinging our eyes. I blinked it out and we were almost right up to it, from a distance it was dwarfed by the cliff, but up close you could see it was a ship built to cross large seas.

Our captain began the story of its demise.

The ship was the Jack Abry II, a French trawler. It had been heading south to deep water fish just above the Irish Sea in the early winter of 2011. As it made its way down from Lochinver the weather began to turn, and the early signs of a storm crept in.

Concerned by this the skipper opted to take a route closer to the isles in an attempt to shelter from the storm as they sailed south. It was a couple of the crew’s birthdays and many of the the men were celebrating, the Skipper joined them for two whiskeys before heading back to the wheelhouse. It has since been noted that before embarking on the journey he had travelled to the highlands from France, managing to only sleep 14 hours over a period of three days and was notably tired and anxious.

11pm crept up, this time was supposed to be the end of the Skippers duty, however he decided his mate required more rest before taking over and announced he wanted to navigate the Abry through the Sound of Canna before going off watch. He had slightly altered their route to pass by another vessel and wanted to ensure they moved through the gap of water between the isles safely.

Trawlers such as Jack Abry have alarms installed in their wheelhouses, these are designed to keep those on watch alert and in position, however it is often considered an annoyance by helmsman, and on this particular journey, the crew of the Abry had opted to turn it off.

As the trawler began to battle its way through the growing wind, the skipper noted the radar seemed to picking up extensive clutter from the storm. He continued his path forwards, not realising what the radar was actually showing, was the Isle of Rum. A small island which sits in the West Hebrides of Scotland, its cliffs towering above the crashing waves below.

The trawler ploughed on with the weary skipper at its helm. The next thing he recollected was an almighty crash as the Abry was driven upwards onto the jagged rocks. He attempted to drive the vessel away with no success and immediately activated the emergency stop sending out distress calls.

It was midnight and the storm winds were reaching 40 miles an hour. The ship, battered by the wind and waves was now at a 50 degree angle on the rocks and the crew were beginning to fear for their safety. They prepared the lifeboats and donned their immersion suits.

The coast guard arrived soon after and noted two things. The first was that the trawler had been leaking a substantial amount of fuel, the second was that their lifeboats couldn’t reach anywhere near the vessel. The wind was increasing at a colossal rate, and 50mph winds were now hammering into the hull of the Abry.

A helicopter was deployed as the only clear means to rescue the stranded crew. The pilot was a man named John Bentley. He was warned that the weather had reached extremely dangerous levels and he shouldn’t continue but he refused to turn back. He was the only survival option for the men stranded on the side of the cliffs.

At 1am in the morning, Bentley manoeuvred the helicopter directly above the tipped bow of the trawler, whose nose was now facing up towards the sky. The winchman was able to attach his winch lines to the machinery at the bow and one by one, they hoisted the 14 fishermen up. The wind and rain pummelling them as they rose out of the shattered ship, but the pilot never shifted his position, knowing precision was key to saving lives.

All 14 crew were saved that night with not a single injury reported, due to the coastguard’s determination to brave the storm. But the Jack Abry II remains there to this day. It’s decimated hull rotting on the rocks in the angry waves, a reminder to all, that although the seas allow us to enter them, they won’t always let us leave.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Folklorist which was researched, written and recorded by Alannagh Cooke. You can find us on Instagram @thefolkloristpodcast and on Twitter @folkloristpod.

And if you know of any weird and wonderful stories from around the globe, please send us a message either on twitter or Instagram!

Thank you for listening.