The Carroll A. Deering

On the morning of January 31, 1921, a Coast Guard lookout at the Cape Hatteras station on North Carolina’s Outer Banks spotted a large sailing ship stuck fast on the Diamond Shoals.

The Diamond Shoals are some of the most dangerous waters on the Atlantic coast — a shifting maze of underwater sandbars stretching miles out to sea from Cape Hatteras, where the warm Gulf Stream collides with cold currents from the north. Over the centuries, so many ships have wrecked there that the area is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

The ship was a five-masted schooner, all her sails set, being battered by heavy seas. She was the Carroll A. Deering, a cargo vessel less than two years old.

When rescuers finally reached her, four days later, they found that there was no one aboard.

The Ship

The Carroll A. Deering was built in 1919 in Bath, Maine, by the G.G. Deering Company, and named for the owner’s son. She was a big, handsome working ship, more than 250 feet long, one of the last generation of great wooden sailing cargo ships, built to carry coal and other bulk goods up and down the coast and across the oceans.

In August 1920, she set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, with a load of coal bound for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her original captain, William Merritt, fell ill early in the voyage and was put ashore in Delaware. The Deering company hired a replacement: Willis B. Wormell, a sixty-six-year-old retired captain from Maine with decades of experience at sea.

The ship reached Rio, unloaded her coal, and started back north toward Norfolk.

Trouble Aboard

The voyage home seems to have been troubled.

In Barbados, where the ship stopped in December 1920, the first mate, a man named Charles McLellan, reportedly got drunk ashore and complained to another ship’s captain about Captain Wormell. He said the captain was too old and that the crew was incompetent, and was overheard saying he’d get the captain before they reached Norfolk. He was arrested. Captain Wormell reportedly paid to bail him out, and the Deering sailed on.

The Red-Haired Man

On January 29, 1921, the Deering passed the Cape Lookout lightship, a floating lighthouse anchored off the North Carolina coast.

The lightship’s keeper, Captain Thomas Jacobson, later said that a thin man with red hair and a foreign accent hailed him from the schooner’s deck. The man shouted that the ship had lost her anchors in a storm and asked that the Deering company be notified. Jacobson thought it was strange: the man didn’t seem to be an officer, and the crew seemed to be milling around on the forward deck, where crew members were not usually allowed. The lightship’s radio was out of order, so Jacobson couldn’t relay the message. He tried to signal a passing steamship, but it ignored him.

Two days later, the Deering was aground on the Diamond Shoals.

Empty

High seas kept rescuers from reaching the wreck for four days. When a salvage crew finally climbed aboard on February 4, they found a ship that seemed to have been abandoned in a hurry — or emptied in some other way.

The ship’s two lifeboats were gone. So was every member of the crew. The captain’s navigational equipment, his logbook, the ship’s papers and the crew’s personal belongings were missing. In the galley, according to reports, food appeared to have been set out for the next day’s meal. The steering gear was damaged. Red lanterns had been hoisted, a signal that the ship was in distress. And in the captain’s cabin, there were signs that someone else had been sleeping in his bed, and three different sets of boots.

The ship was stuck too firmly to be saved. A few weeks later, it was blown up with dynamite to keep it from becoming a hazard to other ships.

The Investigation

The captain’s daughter, Lula Wormell, refused to believe her father had simply been lost at sea. She pushed the government to investigate. And because the case came at a time of great national anxiety — the Red Scare, fears of Bolsheviks and pirates — it drew the attention of the highest levels of government. Five federal departments looked into it, including the Commerce Department under Herbert Hoover.

Investigators learned that several other ships had disappeared off the Atlantic coast around the same time, without a trace. That fueled speculation that something sinister was going on.

The Message in a Bottle

In April 1921, a fisherman on the Outer Banks named Christopher Columbus Gray reported that he had found a bottle washed up on the beach with a message inside. It claimed to have been written by someone aboard the Deering and said that the ship had been taken by pirates, and that the crew had been captured.

The note caused a sensation. But handwriting experts later concluded that Gray had written it himself. He confessed it was a hoax.

The Theories

Several theories have been proposed to explain the fate of the Carroll A. Deering.

Mutiny. The tensions between the captain and the first mate, the strange behavior of the crew at the lightship, and the red-haired man who seemed to be speaking for the ship all suggest that the crew may have rebelled, killed the captain and mate, and abandoned the ship in the lifeboats near shore. If so, they would have been in great danger in the rough waters off Hatteras, and might have drowned.

Pirates or rumrunners. It was the beginning of Prohibition, and smugglers were active along the coast. Some believed the ship was seized by pirates or rum smugglers.

Storm. The simplest theory is that the ship ran aground on the shoals in bad weather, and the crew took to the lifeboats in panic and were lost at sea.

The Bermuda Triangle. Much later, writers would include the Deering among the “victims” of the Bermuda Triangle, although Cape Hatteras is well outside the area usually defined as the triangle.