According to UNESCO, there are approximately three million shipwrecks scattered across the Earth’s surface.^[1] The ocean is a vast place, and sea travel can be a hugely isolated and dangerous endeavor. Some ships are destroyed by storms, others run out of supplies or hit land, and some just outright vanish, never to be seen again.

For every shipwreck we understand, there are at least ten which are still shrouded in mystery. They are uniquely haunting places, catastrophes frozen in time and preserved hundreds or even thousands of feet below the surface. Here, we delve into some of the strangest shipwrecks that are still unexplained today.

10 The World Trade Center Ship

One of the greatest tragedies of the modern world happened on September, 11, 2001: Four commercial aircraft were hijacked by terrorists and flown toward key landmarks in the US. Two of these planes hit the 110-story World Trade Center towers, which collapsed later that day.

The disaster resulted in the total destruction of the World Trade Center, which had to be cleared of debris ahead of reconstruction plans. The ground was broken as part of a scheme to build an underground security and parking complex. But excavation had to be halted in 2010 when diggers encountered something very unusual 6.7 meters (22 ft) below ground level, slightly south of where the two towers had once stood: a shipwreck.^[2]

Later analysis discovered that the trees used to build the ship were cut down in 1773, a few years before the Declaration of Independence. It was built from the same white oaks that also supplied builders with the materials they needed to construct Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Archaeologists later found that the ship had almost certainly been built in Philadelphia, which was the center of the American shipbuilding industry at the time. As a result, the vessel was probably sailing during those key few years when America broke away from Britain.

Archaeologists still aren’t sure how the ship ended up there, but it is commonly understood that the area was still sea at the time of the American Revolution. The ship may have been scrapped and buried on purpose as part of a conscious attempt to extend the Manhattan coastline, or it could have just been another unfortunate victim of the fickle ocean.

9 The Mary Rose

The Mary Rose was undisputedly the pride of the English navy for over 30 years. When it was first launched in 1511, the Age of Sail was only just beginning. It was the largest ship in the English fleet and one of the most advanced in the world: It took full advantage of the recent invention of the gunport and was one of the first ships in history capable of firing a broadside. It fought in numerous battles against England’s primary enemy at the time, France, before sinking in the midst of battle in 1545.

The circumstances of the Mary Rose’s demise still aren’t understood.^[3] On the day of the battle, the English fleet was docked at Portsmouth harbor, making it especially vulnerable. The French galleys launched a surprise attack, and the Mary Rose and another warship sailed out to drive them off. According to a contemporary report, the Mary Rose suddenly leaned right, causing water to flood in through the open gunports. The ship sank quickly after that, taking over 90 percent of her 400-man crew down with it. It sank within full view of Southsea Castle: Today, a buoy marks the site, which can easily be seen from the castle walls.

A number of theories have been put forward to explain the tragedy, none of which are entirely satisfactory. One theory suggests the ship had been made too heavy by the most recent refit, which added more men and guns, but the refit was nine years before the sinking. A French captain present at the battle said it was sunk by a cannonball, but no evidence found at the wreck conclusively supports this. Another contemporary said that it was hit by a gust of wind while it was turning, and it had just fired its guns, which, added together, tipped the ship too far to the right. The Mary Rose has since been recovered from the seabed and is preserved in a museum in Portsmouth, but even now, analysts disagree over exactly what caused the sinking.

8 The Jenny Lind

In 1850, the Jenny Lind was more than 480 kilometers (300 mi) from the Australian mainland when it suddenly struck land. The ship had hit a small ridge which lay just below the water. The crew then survived for 37 days on a small, sandy quay while they built a new ship, before sailing over 600 kilometers (370 mi) to Moreton Bay on the Australian mainland. All 28 crew members survived.^[4]

The feat was widely recorded in the newspapers at the time, and shortly after that, the surprise bit of land, known as Kenn Reefs, started appearing on navigation maps. After that, travel past the ridge—which lay right in the middle of a busy trade route—was much safer. But even today, we don’t know quite how many ships the ridge has actually claimed. The Bona Vista crashed into it in 1828, and a record made in 1857 states that the southern end of the reef was already “strewn with wrecks” even then. Modern estimates assume that at least eight ships have met their end on this deadly atoll.

The main problem is the incessant strength of the sea which batters the atoll. A trip to Kenn Reefs in the 1980s found that both the Jenny Lind and the Bona Vista were still half-visible above the water, but another trip in January 2017 found that they had since been destroyed. The tropical weather and powerful currents quickly reduce any ships that wreck there to their metallic parts, making it impossible to tell just how many have been claimed. The investigators are persistent, though: They’re currently in the process of cataloguing all the material still visible and checking contemporary shipping records in an effort to come up with an estimate.

7 The Waratah

The SS Waratah was an advanced passenger liner that was built in Glasgow. Intended to ferry people between the UK and Australia, it was expected to be a hardy and durable oceangoing vessel. However, it first raised concerns during its test voyages, when the captain complained that it sometimes felt top-heavy and struggled to maneuver.^[5]

The ship remained in use. It departed Durban in July 1909, expected to take three days to reach Cape Town. The ship was sighted at sea over the course of the first day but then disappeared without a trace. One sailor who saw the ship go by thought it might have been giving off a lot of smoke, while another later reported seeing two bright flashes in the night. He was used to seeing them, however, since they were often caused by bushfires along the South African coast, and didn’t even think to record them in his log until he heard of the ship’s loss.

Since then, multiple efforts have been made to try to locate the ship. After nearly a century of searching, the South African National Underwater and Maritime Agency reported that they’d found it in July 1999, even performing a deep-sea dive to confirm it. Months later, however, they discovered that it was the wreck of a different ship—the military transport vessel Nailsea Meadow, which had a similar profile. To this day, no trace of the Waratah has ever been found. Its sinking led to the complete collapse of the Blue Anchor Line, which owned the ship, and they sold off their fleet the following year.

6 The Andrea Doria

The waters of the world emptied over the course of the World War II, as fewer and fewer people were willing to take the risk of traveling or vacationing in wartime. The end of the war brought with it a new golden age of cruise liners and luxury passenger ships. Bright and expensive, they crisscrossed the Atlantic in their droves, taking many people further than they’d ever traveled before. One of these vessels was the SS Andrea Doria. Its hull was split into 11 watertight compartments to prevent sinking, and it had completed 100 transatlantic journeys by the time it sank in 1956. Many people had considered it unsinkable, until it crashed straight into another ship, the Swedish vessel Stockholm.^[6]

The circumstances of the crash are still unclear. Both vessels were failing to follow the conventional rules of sea travel: The Andrea Doria was sailing faster than normal through heavy fog in order to make it to New York by morning, while the Stockholm was traveling north of the usual eastbound route in order to shave time off its journey. Both captains saw the other ship on their radar but somehow failed to avoid a collision. Either one or both of them must have misread the data, and by the time they could see each other through the fog, it was too late.

Despite a desperate last-ditch effort to prevent a crash, the Stockholm plowed straight into the Andrea Doria’s flank with its icebreaker prow, penetrating 9 meters (30 ft) into the hull and killing dozens on impact. The Stockholm weathered the crash and remained seaworthy despite its mangled prow, but the Doria quickly began to sink. The collision threw it so far off balance that it couldn’t use its own lifeboats. What followed was one of the greatest maritime rescues in history, and most of the passengers were eventually saved. The Doria remains on the seabed today, and we’ll probably never know which of the two captains put her there.

5 The Zebrina

The loss of the Zebrina’s crew remains one of the strangest unexplained naval disasters of the 20th century. It was a three-masted sailing barge which was first put to sea in 1873. It sailed for decades without incident until September 1917, when it departed Falmouth in the UK with a shipment of coal, bound for the town of Saint-Brieuc in France.

Just two days after its departure, it was seen drifting just outside the port of Cherbourg, France. It was later found washed up on the coast south of the city. When the French coast guard boarded the vessel, they found it completely deserted despite it being in otherwise perfect condition: Even the table was neatly laid. The captain’s log had last been updated when the ship left Falmouth. Beyond that, there were no records.^[7]

After an initial investigation, it was decided that a German U-boat attack was most likely. At the time, it was standard U-boat practice to board ships and take their crews captive or force them onto lifeboats before sinking the ship in order to prevent casualties. However, the crew never appeared on any German prisoner of war lists, and it was also standard practice for U-boats to sink their targets and to take their logbooks as proof of the sinking, both of which didn’t happen in this case. Because of the ongoing war, the French government didn’t pursue the investigation any further, and the ship was eventually broken up. The fate of the crew still remains a mystery.

4 The San Jose

The San Jose was a 64-gun galleon of the Spanish navy. First launched in 1698, it was used as a part of the annual Spanish treasure fleet. On its final voyage, it was serving as the flagship of the southern portion of the fleet, and its goal was to collect treasure along the coast between Colombia and Panama.

The fleet ran into trouble when it encountered a British naval squadron on June 8, 1708. The British fleet was victorious but failed to seize any meaningful treasure: Of the three ships they defeated, one was burned onshore by its crew, and another, the San Jose, exploded in the midst of battle. What caused the explosion is unclear, but it resulted in the deaths of all but 11 of its 600-man crew and the immediate loss of the ship. The rest of the Spanish fleet retreated to the safety of nearby Cartagena. The San Jose sank carrying more than $17 billion worth of treasure (in modern terms), a failure for which the British captains were eventually court-martialed when they returned home.

Any number of things could have caused the explosion, from a stray cannonball to a spark from a musket. We know for sure, however, that the San Jose is one of the most valuable wrecks in history, and it has long been referred to as the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks.” The site of the San Jose was a mystery until 2015, when it was discovered.^[8] Colombia has stated its intention to recover the wreck and display the treasure in a museum: The ship’s exact location remains a state secret to ward off looters.

3 The Baychimo

The SS Baychimo had a very conventional history: Originally built in Sweden in 1914, it was owned by the German navy and sailed between Hamburg and Sweden until it was transferred to Britain as part of Germany’s war reparations. In 1921, it was acquired by the Hudson’s Bay Company and was frequently used to travel the northern reaches of Canada, collecting fur pelts to be transported back to Europe.

Ship crews operating so far north were used to dealing with ice, so when the Baychimo became stuck on October 1, 1931, they thought little of it. They abandoned the ship and took shelter in the town of Barrow and returned to their vessel when the ice had cleared.^[9] The ship continued to get caught, however, and eventually, the company flew half the crew home. The other half, who were ready to wait out the winter if necessary, built a wooden shelter nearby. They were hit by a powerful blizzard on November 24, and when it cleared, there was no sign of their ship. The crew were ready to leave, but a week later, a local Inuit from Barrow told them he’d seen the ship drifting. They eventually located it, but it was so heavily damaged that they abandoned all hope of sailing it. They salvaged what cargo they could and left, expecting the ship to sink soon after.

But it didn’t. Instead, the ship continued to drift in the northern waters for years, eventually becoming a local legend. A whole host of stories have appeared over the years, some claiming that it became stuck in a glacier. The last credible sighting, however, dates to 1962, more than three decades after it was abandoned. It was allegedly seen drifting along the Alaskan coast by a group of Inupiat, who were traveling in kayaks. Despite several searches, not a single trace of the ship has ever been discovered.

2 The Patriot

The Patriot was a nimble schooner which saw action in the War of 1812. Before it was drafted for naval service, the Patriot had been a pilot boat, so it was very fast. This made it a good privateer, and it was employed to successfully raid and harass British shipping. By December 30, however, it had been repurposed and was refitted as a civilian ship. It departed Charleston after months of successful operations, intending to dock in New York. On board was Theodosia Burr Alston (pictured above), daughter of Aaron Burr and wife of the governor of South Carolina.

Despite painting over the ship’s name and carrying an authoritative letter, the crew were met by a British patrol, who stopped the ship on January 2, 1813. The ship’s guns were stowed just below the deck, and the hold was full of booty gleaned from months of privateering, but the patrol eventually allowed it to continue.^[10]

Soon after that, however, it must have disappeared, because the ship never arrived in New York. There were immediate speculations about its fate. Many believed the ship must have been captured by pirates, since dozens of them prowled the North Carolina coastline. Several newspapers reported “deathbed confessions” from pirates and others over the next few decades, each of whom claimed to have been involved in capturing the ship. One man even claimed he’d helped to lure the ship ashore, where he and his companions looted it and killed the crew.

The most likely scenario, though, is that it sank during a storm: According to the log of a blockading British fleet, a severe storm struck on the night of January 2, which continued into the next day. Experts predict that the area where the storm was most fierce was where the Patriot likely was at the time. The case, however, remains uncertain.

1 Le Griffon

Thousands of ships have sunk in the Great Lakes over the centuries, but the very first one of note, Le Griffon, still eludes explorers even today. It has become the target of many famous searches, each one fruitless. Many today joke that it is the most found ship in North America, but its fate remains a mystery even today.

It was built in 1679 by Rene Robert Cavalier (better known as La Salle) at Cayuga Creek, as part of his expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. At the time, the French suspected that the Great Lakes fed into the Pacific. La Salle and his crew of 32 departed on the ship’s maiden voyage on August 7, planning to map the Great Lakes. He and many of his crew disembarked on an island on September 18. The ship was sent with six crew back to Niagara, but it disappeared along the way.^[11]

There have been many theories to explain the ship’s disappearance, from a Native American attack to a vicious storm. Over time, dark rumors surfaced among the native tribes that La Salle met: sightings of men who looked a lot like the missing crew members, wearing pelts which sounded like the ones that had gone missing. La Salle himself was convinced that the crew sank the boat on purpose and seized the cargo for themselves, but he was never able to prove it.

Today, finding the ship is a lifelong quest: Several explorers have dedicated decades of their lives to finding Le Griffon and have investigated dozens of potential claims, all achieving nothing. The rabid, sustained public interest has led to a torrent of myths, legends, and half-truths that have only gotten in the way of uncovering Le Griffon’s real fate.

We all know about the Titanic. Most of us remember the Lusitania. Some of us sang about the Edmund Fitzgerald. But those are just a few of the thousands of similar shipwrecks and sinkings throughout maritime history that litter the seafloor, and every shipwreck is the end of a story. But even when Davy Jones claims a vessel for his locker, its story still makes it to port. Here are 10 of those stories.

Here are ten notable ships from history that were tragically wrecked, sank, or otherwise lost.

10 The Vergulde Draeck

The Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) was a trading ship owned by the Dutch East India Company, constructed in 1653. She had been in operation for only three years when tragedy struck off the coast of Western Australia. During a freight haul from the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia, Indonesia (now known as Jakarta), a submerged coral reef split the hull and forced the crew to abandon her. An estimated 185,000 guilders (silver coins) and other cargo—the equivalent of €2,412,500 today – were lost in the wreckage.

Only 75 of the crew of 193 survived and made it to shore. The ship’s lifeboat and some provisions were also salvaged, so seven of the 75 survivors returned to sea to sail to Batavia for aid. They made it to their destination after 41 days. Rescue ships were then sent to recover the remaining survivors and cargo, but they all failed to find any trace of the wreck or the survivors’ camp. As a result, the Dutch East India Company ceased sending rescue expeditions after three years of failure, and the wreckage would not be discovered until 1963.

The Fremantle Maritime Museum in Australia now houses some of the artifacts pulled from the wreckage, but not all of the silver has been found.^[1]

9 The SS Vaitarna

The SS Vaitarna was a British steamship that operated in coastal India in the 1880s, transporting passengers between the coastal cities of Mandvi and Mumbai (then Bombay). She was known informally as the Vijli or the Haji Kasam ni Vijli, after the ship’s owner and captain Haji Kasam. “Vijli” was the Indian word for electricity, after the then-novel electric lights that lit the deck.

During a routine passenger voyage, the Vaitarna left the port of Dwarka with approximately 700 passengers on board. The ship’s normal route would take her to the port of Porbandar next, but rough seas and a warning from the port authority left her unable to reach port. She instead sailed on to its next stop in Mumbai but never made it. No trace of the ship—debris, survivor, or casualty—was ever discovered.

The disaster became a cultural flashpoint in the region, being retold and mythologized in stories and folk songs, and is today known as the “Titanic of Gujarat” despite predating the sinking of the Titanic.^[2]

8 The Boyd

The Boyd was a British brigantine that operated during the late 18th century, sailing between London and the West Indies. Most of the ships on this list are better-known today for the circumstances of their sinking than for their active service hauling freight, but the Boyd holds the dubious honor of having her name better remembered as a disaster than as a ship.

The Boyd met her final, gruesome fate in New Zealand in an incident now remembered as the Boyd Massacre. While anchored at a harbor in Whangaroa, she was waylaid by Māori warriors. The attackers killed and cannibalized nearly the entire crew and looted the cargo of the Boyd. During the altercation, the ship’s supply of gunpowder was accidentally ignited, killing ten of the assailants in the initial explosion and setting fire to the ship.^[3]

7 The Tryall

The Tryall was another British cargo ship that departed on her maiden voyage from Plymouth to Bantam in 1621. She stopped at the Cape of Good Hope for supplies. This is where the captain learned that all East India Company ships had recently been ordered to sail south of 35° when traversing the East Indies. This route had been proven safer and would cut up to six months of travel time off the previously established route/ However, the Tryall’s captain was unfamiliar with this route. He attempted to recruit a mate at the Cape of Good Hope who knew the route better but failed to find anyone.

The Tryall attempted the route but ended up too far east and struck rocks. The crew was forced to abandon the ship, and a longboat of 36 survivors made it to the Montebello Islands. They stayed there for a week before setting back out to sea, eventually making it their original destination in Bantam. That boat of survivors is now recognized as the first Europeans to make landfall in Australia.^[41]

6 The HMS Sickle

The HMS Sickle was a World War II Royal Navy submarine, active primarily in the Gulf of Genoa and the Aegean Sea. After launching into active service in 1942, the Sickle was engaged in a number of military movements and was confirmed to have sunk a total of ten Axis ships, including three minesweepers and a German submarine.

The Sickle left the harbor at Malta on May 31, 1944. On June 4, she was engaged in combat at the surface, and one crew member was washed overboard by a wave and captured by Axis forces. The Sickle survived the encounter, but the captured sailor would ultimately become the Sickle’s sole survivor, as the skirmish was the last confirmed sighting of the Sickle. The Sickle’s last signal, on June 12, 1944, stated that she had spotted an enemy convoy near Steno Pass. The convoy is recorded as having dropped two depth charges but is not believed to have sunk the Sickle with them.

Over the next few weeks, a few Greek fishing boats were sunk by or sighted a submarine matching the Sickle’s description, but the Sickle never returned to harbor. Today the Sickle is believed to have hit an undersea mine and sunk with no survivors, but no evidence of the wreck was ever found.^[5]

5 The Santo Antonio

The Santo Antonio was a Portuguese ship personally owned by King John III of Portugal. She sank in a storm off the coast of Cornwall in 1527, killing 41 of its crew of 86. The wreck of the Santo Antonio was remembered chiefly due to the value of her lost cargo—primarily a load of copper and silver ingots worth about £18,000 at the time (approximately £100 million in early 21st-century values).

The salvage of the cargo quickly became the subject of an international dispute between Portugal and England. While King John III and King Henry VIII of England both agreed that the cargo should be returned to Portugal, this ran contrary to established English manorial rights at the time. Three prominent Cornwall landowners improved their status significantly in the years that followed the wreck and are assumed to have profited from salvaged treasure. Still, because of the difficulties of salvaging a sunken ship’s cargo, it could never be proven how much of the original treasure remained on the seafloor.^[6]

4 The Nancy

The Nancy was built in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1775, originally as a British cargo transport. When America declared independence, the Nancy was newly chartered as an American ship to transport gunpowder and weapons for the American Revolution. As a result, the Nancy holds the distinction of being the first ship to raise an American flag in a foreign port, a claim supported by the fact that she was recorded as destroyed on June 29, 1776—after the Second Continental Congress resolved to declare independence but before the official declaration on July 4 of that year.

The Nancy ran aground in fog while fleeing a pair of British warships in the summer of 1776. Its crew salvaged as much of the cargo as they could, then set a fuse to ignite the ship’s gunpowder in order to scuttle the ship and keep it out of British hands. The crew removed the American flag and brought it with them as they abandoned the ship. The British mistook this as a gesture of surrender and were in the process of boarding the Nancy at the time of its explosion.^[7]

3 The HMS Harrier

The HMS Harrier was a British Cruizer-class sloop that served in the British Navy in the early 1800s. She launched in 1804 and was lost in 1809, having participated in numerous naval battles at the time.

The Harrier is the only ship on this list whose final fate is still unknown to this day. Its last known position was about 1,000 nautical miles from the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. It had been traveling in the company of the HMS Racehorse but lagged behind and eventually fell out of the Racehorse’s view. She was presumed sunk with no survivors, but no wreckage has ever been recovered, and no explanation for what could have sunk her has been uncovered.^[8]

2 The U-3514

The U-3514 was a Type XXI German U-boat and a part of Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine, built to serve in World War II. Like all U-boats, the U-3514 had no name beyond her serial number. But, unlike most U-boats, the U-3514 also saw no active duty.

The U-3514 was launched in October of 1944 and commissioned that December, but by this point, the war was nearly over. She was harbored at Bergen, Norway, in reserve to await a call to action that never came. Only five months later, in May 1945, the Axis surrendered the U-3514 to the Allies, who harbored her in Lisahally, Ireland.

She was eventually scuttled in 1946 by the Soviet Navy as part of Operation Deadlight. Because the U-3514 had been mothballed for effectively her entire existence, she was nearly overlooked by Operation Deadlight. U-3514 was the last U-boat to be scuttled in the operation and thus holds the distinction of being the last Nazi U-boat.^[9]

1 The Whydah Gally

The Whydah Gally was originally commissioned in 1715 as a heavily armed passenger/cargo ship to transport goods in the African slave trade. However, she had yet to complete the triangle of her maiden voyage when she was pursued and captured by the pirate Black Sam Bellamy, thus beginning the Whydah’s far better-known career as a pirate ship.

Bellamy tormented the Atlantic coast of America, capturing smaller vessels and assembling a pirate fleet before ultimately running aground and capsizing off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts. Only nine of the crew were recovered alive—six of whom were tried and convicted of piracy.

The Whydah’s wreckage was discovered in 1984 and has been in a state of perpetual recovery ever since. The recovery of the ship’s bell, stamped with “THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716,” positively identified the wreck and made it the only fully authenticated sunken pirate ship ever to be rediscovered. Today, artifacts from the wreck site, including the bell and a chest of silver coins, form the cornerstone of the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.^[10]

While less well known than the sinking of the Titanic, the ten nautical disasters on this list often eclipse the Titanic story in terms of sheer horror, scandal, and loss of life. With human nature itself proving either the salvation or doom of the castaways, here are tales of heroism, cannibalism, endurance, murder, and disappearance without a trace.

10 SS Arctic, 1854

If you are familiar with the sinking of the Titanic, then you are aware of the principle of “women and children first.” But what if that principle was ignored? On September 27th, 1854, the SS Arctic, a passenger paddle steamship of the Collins Line, entered a dense fog off the Newfoundland coast and collided with the French fishing vessel the Vesta. Attempts to patch the hole in the hull with sailcloth and mattresses failed, and over the course of four agonizing hours, the sea crept in, finally extinguishing the ship’s boilers and, with them, the pumps.

With 250 passengers and 150 crew on board, the Arctic’s six lifeboats were woefully inadequate to carry more than 180. At first, the process of loading the women and children went as planned—until panic began to spread amongst the ship’s crew. As discipline broke down, a wild melee ensued, and one boat after another was swarmed by mobs of men. One tipped over, sending most of its dozen occupants (mostly women) into the sea to drown. Desperate to restore discipline, the captain attempted to launch another boat on the opposite side of the ship, only to see it too filled with male crew rather than women and children.

The two remaining boats (and a makeshift raft built by loyal officers) were likewise taken by the ship’s crew, one boat stolen by the engineering staff who, brandishing firearms, told the crowd that they needed the boat to patch the hole in the ship. No sooner had the boat launched (only half full) when it rowed away, leaving the waiting women and children to their fate. Of the 400 aboard, only 85 survived (61 crew and 24 male passengers). All the women and children drowned.^[1]

9 SS Pacific, 1856

As if things could not get worse for Collins Line founder Edward Collins, who had lost his wife and two children in the sinking of the SS Arctic, her sister ship, the SS Pacific, disappeared into the Atlantic without a trace in January of 1856. Leaving Liverpool for New York City with 45 passengers and 141 crew, no word of the ship’s fate was ever heard again, save for a message in a bottle washed up on the coast of the Hebrides islands in 1861. Whether authentic or a hoax, the message within offers us one possible explanation for the Pacific’s destruction:

“On board the Pacific, from L’pool to N. York. Ship going down. Great confusion on board—icebergs all around us on every side. I know I cannot escape. I write the cause of our loss that friends may not live in suspense. The finder of this will please get it published.”^[2]

8 Empress of Ireland, 1914

Among the beneficiaries of updated lifeboat regulations in the wake of the Titanic disaster was the ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. Equipped with watertight doors and enough lifeboats to accommodate 280 more people than the ship was built to carry, the fact remains that when she collided with the Norwegian ship Storstad in a fog at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River on the night of May 29th, 1914, she sank in scarcely 15 minutes, taking 1012 of the 1477 people aboard to their deaths.

The water poured into her side so quickly that there was no time to shut the watertight doors, and the list to starboard increased so quickly that it nullified the port side lifeboats, which could not be lowered. Many passengers sleeping on the starboard side drowned in their cabins, but some who made it to the boat deck were able to successfully launch five of the lifeboats.

Some five minutes after the collision, the power failed, plunging the ship into total darkness. Five minutes after that, with the useable lifeboats gone, the Empress of Ireland rolled onto her starboard side, allowing hundreds of the doomed to take refuge on the exposed port side hull, where they sat for a few agonizing minutes watching the frigid water slowly creep up the hull to claim them “like sitting on a beach watching the tide come in,” as one survivor put it.^[3]

7 Essex, 1820

While falling far short of the death toll of the Titanicor any other entry in this list, the tale of the whaling ship Essex eclipses all the rest in terms of sheer horror. The real-world inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the Essex, was twice rammed by a sperm whale in November 1820, some 2,000 miles west of the South American coast. The twenty-man crew was forced to take to three whaleboats with what food and water they could carry and set off to reach South America.

In two weeks, the food was gone, and water so scarce that they were forced to drink their urine. They were temporarily saved by water and food foraged on barren Henderson Island, but after eating the island dry, they set off once more in the boats, less three men who decided to stay. By January, the men in the boats began to die. The first two corpses were consigned to the sea, but when a third died, the men were so hungry they decided to resort to cannibalism. When more men died, they did likewise. Soon, even this dire infusion of food became insufficient, and the surviving men drew lots to see who was to be killed and eaten next.

A young 18-year-old named Owen Coffin drew the black spot and was soon shot and butchered by the others, one of whom died ten days later and was likewise consumed. It would not be until late February 1821 that the five dazed survivors were rescued off the coast of Chile, having eaten no less than seven of their comrades.^[4]

6 Sultana, 1865

Imagine this. You have just spent years in Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison where starvation, disease, and ill-treatment have killed some 13,000 of your comrades (a staggering death rate of 29%). You have just learned the Civil War is over after four brutal years, and you have just been told that you are finally going home. And so some 1,953 released Union prisoners of war were crowded onto the groaning decks of the Sultana, a northbound Mississippi river steamboat designed to carry only 376 passengers. With some 177 additional passengers and crew aboard as well, the Sultana crept slowly up a Mississippi swollen by one of the worst floods in living memory.

All went well until 2 am on the 27th of April, 1865, when both of its faulty boilers suddenly exploded under the strain. The jet of scalding hot steam blew out the center of the boat, destroying the pilothouse and knocking down the smokestacks, trapping hundreds in the wreckage that soon caught fire. Those trapped under the collapsing decks were scalded or burned to death, while the hundreds of ex-prisoners who jumped overboard quickly drowned, unable to keep afloat in their weakened state. When the hulk of the Sultana finally sank by the Arkansas shore around 7 am, some 1,169 men had died, making this the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history.^[5]

5 SS Central America, 1857

On September 9, 1857, the SS Central America, carrying 477 passengers, 101 crew, and over nine tons of newly mined gold from the California Gold Rush, found itself trapped in a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas. For two days, she rode out the storm, her steam-powered paddle wheels keeping her pointed into the 100 mph (62 km/h) winds. But by September 11, the boilers were failing, the sails were torn to ribbons, and leaks had developed, which threatened to overwhelm the pumps.

When the boilers finally failed, the engines and pumps fell silent, and the ship was adrift at the mercy of the storm. Red-eyed passengers spent the long night passing buckets of water up through the dark ship, but they were fighting a losing battle with the sea. The eye of the hurricane brought momentary calm, allowing the doomed to contemplate their fate, but when the storm returned, the ship continued to sink by the stern.

In the morning light, another ship was sighted, and women and children were loaded into the lifeboats and set off through the perilous sea. In this way, some 153 people were saved, but when the Central America finally sank after its three-day struggle, it took some 425 souls with it.^[6]

4 SS Princess Alice, 1878

There could be nothing more pleasant than taking an evening excursion by paddle steamer up the river Thames, which is what some 700 Londoners were doing on the evening of September 3, 1878. Then the SS Princess Alice was cut in two by the oncoming collier SS Bywell Castle in Galleon’s Reach, just east of London. Those who had been below decks at the time of the collision had no chance of survival, as it took a mere four minutes for the broken ship to slip beneath the river.

Despite launching boats from both the Bywell Castle and riverfront residences and factories, hundreds of people, weighed down by Victorian clothing, were washed under and away by the currents. Terrible as this was, what happened next transformed the scene into an unfathomable horror. The pumping stations for the London sewer system output their raw sewage into the Thames at the very spot where the Princess Alice sank, and a mere hour before the disaster, over 90 million gallons of raw sewage had been dumped into waters already polluted by local gas works and chemical factories.

The Times cited a local chemist who reported the outflow as “two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda-water with baneful gases, so black that the water is stained for miles and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour.” The toxic slime proved fatal even to those who did not drown in it. Of the 130 survivors of the disaster, some 16 died later from ingesting the putrid waters.^[7]

3 SS Atlantic, 1873

Prior to the 1912 loss of the Titanic, the White Star Line’s greatest catastrophe was the loss of the SS Atlantic on a different April night some 39 years earlier. En route to New York from Liverpool with 952 passengers and crew, the Atlantic was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to load more coal. Approaching what they believed to be the harbor entrance in a howling storm, the ship was, in fact, over 12 miles (19 kilometers) off-course, heading straight for underwater rocks.

Failing to spot a familiar lighthouse west of the harbor, the helmsman relayed his concerns to the officer of the bridge, only to be told to stay the course. When the ship struck the rocks and the hull was smashed inward, the passengers clung to the listing vessel and watched as one after another of the 10 lifeboats were launched, only to be crushed against the hull or swept away by the raging sea. With no other way off the swiftly capsizing ship, crewman John Speakman swam to nearby rocks with a line of rope, creating a lifeline by which the strongest were able to pull themselves to shore.

In this way, some 429 passengers and crew survived to watch the remaining 535 people drown, including all 156 women and 188 of the 189 children aboard the ship. Commemorated in artwork by Winslow Homer and Currier & Ives, the loss of the Atlantic was the deadliest civilian maritime disaster of its day, only eclipsed 25 years later by our next entry.^[8]

2 SS La Bourgogne, 1898

Speeding through a fog bank southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the pre-dawn hours of July 4, 1898, the SS La Bourgogne, a French ocean liner bound from Le Havre to New York, was struck midship by the iron-hulled sailing vessel Cromartyshire. Those passengers sleeping on the starboard side either had no chance of escape from their berths or woke to find their compartments rapidly filling with water.

With the starboard side lifeboats damaged or destroyed by the collision, the crew attempted to launch the port side boats, only to find the task imperiled as the list to starboard increased and the port side rolled up into the air. As discipline collapsed, passengers and crew fought to gain space in the undamaged lifeboats, and within 30 minutes, the ship had settled and slipped stern first under the waves.

It was only when the sun rose, and the fog lifted that the crew of the Cromartyshire (still afloat) realized that the La Bourgogne had been far more damaged than herself and began to render assistance to the survivors. But it was too late. Of the 726 souls aboard, only 173 survived, and of those, all but 70 were male crew members. Of the 300 women aboard, all but one would perish, along with each and every one of the children.^[9]

1 Batavia, 1629

In June 1629, the Dutch East India Company’s ship Batavia struck a reef off Beacon Island, a remote coral island 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) west of Western Australia. While her fate was a common enough occurrence in the age of sail, it is what happened next that earned the Batavia a spot on this list. Though 40 people drowned, the rest of the 322 passengers and crew got ashore on a desert island only to find no fresh water and nothing to eat but birds.

When the captain, senior officers, and some crew embarked in the longboat on a 33-day journey to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta, Indonesia) to seek help, the hundreds of survivors elected one Jeronimus Cornelisz, a senior company merchant, to leadership. They could not have made a worse choice.

He ordered 20 of the soldiers to explore a nearby island, ostensibly to search for food, but then abandoned them to die. Then, confiscating all weapons and then all the food, he began a two-month reign of terror, marooning more of his rivals on nearby islands and forcing seven of the surviving women into sexual slavery. Then, with food becoming scarce, he began to openly murder the survivors. Around 110 men, women, and children were drowned, hacked, strangled, or beaten to death before the 20 soldiers, having refused to die on their desert island, set up a fort and refuge from the mutineers.

Cornelisz declared war on the soldiers, and a battle ensued. It was in the midst of this inter-island war that the Batavia’s captain returned in the rescue ship, arrested the mutineers, and tortured them into a confession. Cornelisz and his followers were executed, and the nightmare was finally over for the 122 souls that remained.^[10]