The digital triangle

ULRICH MAGIN trawls the depths of the Internet for ships supposedly lost in the Bermuda Triangle

Recently, I tried my hand at digital detective work, using online resources to tackle several Bermuda Triangle mysteries that remain unsolved. My first foray was an attempt to solve the enigma of whether three ships mentioned in each and every book on the Triangle had actually existed and whether they really vanished without trace. I had the idea while rereading David Kusche’s The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved!, the first and probably best of the debunking books on the subject. 1 As Kusche could find no original 19th century accounts for these cases, I thought an online search was woerthwhile.

From Sanderson and Berlitz onwards, each listing of triangle victims has included the vessels Lotta (vanished 1866 near Haiti), Viego (1868), and Miramon (1884, en route to New Orleans). Kusche drew a blank on all three, and concluded that the incidents were wholly imaginary. 2 If you search for the names with Google books you get several dozen Triangle and mystery books which namedrop them, but I encountered not a single reference in any contemporary newspaper or in any book that did not deal with the Triangle. Another 19th century case for which Kusche found no solution was the strange incident of the Ellen Austin in 1881. According to the traditional story, she encountered an abandoned schooner in the mid-Atlantic and put a salvage crew aboard to investigate; they, too, vanished without trace.

The first source for this tale appears to be our fortean ancestor Rupert T Gould, in his The Stargazer Talks of 1944, but he provided no references. Kusche could not find any contemporary news accounts, although research in the Nautical Research Journal of 1956 at least managed to confirm that the ship had existed. 3

I this case, I found a real incident, but from 1855 not 1881:

“Disasters. […] Brig Florence, at this port from Boston, for Darien, Geo., was fallen in with 2nd April, 10 p.m., having been dismasted and otherwise injured the day previous, in a severe gale from S. S. E. to W. Captain and crew taken off and carried to Savannah, by ship Ellen Austin, Tucker.” 4

However, this real-life event did not seem to be the one on which Gould’s report was based, so I searched deeper and found the original – but in a work of fiction.

In his story Bull’s Yarn ,the English novelist and short story writer Morley Roberts (18571942) has his heroes discover an old French newspaper clipping on marine mysteries:

“I read in English as much of it as I could make out and what I translated is here to look at […] This is all that was legible:

‘Science seeks … of these terrifying disappearances … of the Marie Celeste …. that amongst the fatalistic impressions … by this vanishings of thirteen people after thirteen days navigation.

‘The episode of the Duke of Portland is still more striking as one discerns in it something of an obstinate purpose, looking like a slaughter willed by fate. In the winter of 1889 the three masted American barque the Ellen Austin met in the Atlantic the big sailing ship the Duke of Portland bound from New York for London with a cargo of furniture. The crew had vanished ... mysterious ... of the Marie Celeste … The boats (on board) and the most … in all parts of the ship. The vessel was so favourably situated for navigation that the captain of the Ellen Austin scrupled to abandon her on the open sea (au large) and undertook …riskof…sentonboard( fit passer )the Duke (of Portland )men to work her and relieve each other at the wheel.

‘In the following night there was … swell and much fog … and the captain of (the Ellen Austin) waited for sunrise … search of the sailing ship of which they had lost sight (literally ‘the escaped ship’). He (found) her easily but they never saw again the able seamen sent on board her. They had disappeared inexplicably, just as the crew of the Duke of Portland had disappeared. They had not even touched the provisions they took with them … but she …’ ” 5

The lacunae are in the original and are explained by the poor condition of the newspaper clipping, of which Roberts even reproduced a “facsimile”. Interestingly, one of Roberts’s editors adds: “It is worth noting that Roberts’s inspiration for this story was a real ship called the Ellen Austin and similar events to those described which actually occurred in 1881 rather than 1889.”

This hardly helps, as the oldest variant of the alleged 1881 source is Gould, in 1944. Roberts predates him and may well have been his source. Gould was a careful worker, but in this case he appears to have mistaken a fiction presented as a genuine account for the real thing.

The Internet can be used to get to the bottom of a fortean story in various ways, and even absence can be evidence. The fact that not a single reference to the Lotta, Viego ,and Miramon can be found in Google books nor in any of the English language newspapers online – and that the only references to these vanishing ships are in books on the Bermuda Triangle – does not prove the episodes are invented, but it makes this explanation, first proposed by Kusche, more likely. That several search engine trawls with variants of the names and dates could not detect any contemporary trace of these three incidents in the vast data bank that is the Internet certainly indicates (though does not prove) that none exist. Unless the alleged original French source turns up, we can safely assume that the Ellen Austin story, as related by Gould, was a fabrication created for a piece of fiction. Perhaps we can use online search engines that go deep into our printed past as a gauge to the reliability of other stories presented as historical forteana by seeing whether they were actually reported in times past.

NOTES

1 Lawrence David Kusche, Die Rätsel des Bermuda-Dreiecks sind gelöst!, Rowohlt, 1980 (original: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved!, Harper & Row 1975).

2 Kusche, p51.

3 Nautical Research Journal 1956, p55.

4 The Sailor’s Magazine, American Seamen’s Friend Society, June 1855, p312.

5 Morley Roberts, Followers of the Sea: A Set of Sea-Comedies, E Nash and Grayson Ltd, 1923; reprinted in Markus Neacey (ed.), Selected Stories of Morley Roberts, Victorian Secrets Ltd, 2015.

2 ULRICH MAGIN is a longtime contributor to FT and the author of Investigating the Impossible (2011). He lives in Germany.