6 Haunting, Unsolved Maritime Mysteries

The seas can be unforgiving—the water has claimed the lives of countless sailors and their vessels. Some of the more famous shipwrecks, like theTitanic, are well-documented and leave no (or few) questions unanswered. But other maritime disasters remain as mysterious today as they were centuries ago.

1. The Demise of Henry Hudson
2. The Lost Men of the Whaleship Essex
3. The Ghost Ship Mary Celeste
4. The Disappearance of the SS Waratah
5. The Demise of the MV Joyita
6. The Journey of the Sarah Joe

The Demise of Henry Hudson

In 1609, the explorer Henry Hudson was hired by the Dutch East India Company to discover a sea route to East Asia. He sailed across the North Atlantic to Nova Scotia, down the coast to the Chesapeake Bay, and up the river that now bears his name, but he didn’t find the route. In 1610, the British East India Company hired him to try again. And thus begins one of the most disturbing—and unsolved—mysteries in maritime lore.

This time, Hudson aimed for uncharted Canada and sailed into an opening in the coastline, now called Hudson Strait, that trended northwest. It led to an enormous body of water—Hudson Bay—and he eagerly traced the shoreline to its southern extremity. But it was a dead end.

It was now November 1610. He and his increasingly disgruntled crew hunkered down for a brutally cold winter. By the following summer, the men had had enough and demanded they return home. Hudson refused—he hadn’t yet found the northwest passage. The crew was not having it and mutinied. According to one of the mutineers, the rebels forced Hudson, his teenage son, and any men loyal to Hudson into a small boat. Then the men remaining on the ship hoisted the sail and abandoned their captain. No one really knows what happened to the castaways.

But a tantalizing clue comes from Inuit testimony. In 1938, an Inuit elder told a Hudson’s Bay Company manager that a very long time ago, a small wooden boat came ashore carrying an old man with a long white beard and a young boy. The man died, but the elder’s ancestors took the boy to their village and tethered him to a house so he wouldn’t escape. And that’s where that story ended—but the mystery of Hudson’s demise continues.

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The Lost Men of the Whaleship Essex

We do know what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex … well, most of them. In November 1820, the Nantucket-based ship was sailing the just south of the equator when it was rammed by a huge sperm whale not once, but twice. As the Essex began to sink, first mate Owen Chase directed the crew to jump into three smaller whaleboats with whatever food, water, and navigational tools they could grab. They found themselves alone on the open ocean, 1200 miles from the Marquesas Islands. But Captain George Pollard and others feared cannibals lived there—so the castaways steered toward South America, 2000 miles away, instead.

For weeks, they drifted on light winds, scorched by the sun, starving and dying of thirst. An intense storm separated the boats. Some of the men in two of the boats survived their ordeal by eating their dead comrades, and were finally picked up by passing ships in late February 1821. The men in the third boat—Obed Hendricks, Joseph West, and William Bond—were never seen alive again. 

But several months after the other crew were rescued, a merchant ship stopped at the tiny speck of Ducie Island in the Pacific. Its sailors found a whaleboat washed up on the beach and containing four—not three—skeletons. British naval captain Frederick William Beechey speculated in 1831 that the bones were the remains of Hendricks, West, and Bond. But the fourth? Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea, speculates it was Isaiah Sheppard, the last man to die before the boats were separated by the storm. It’s possible that Sheppard’s body was taken on to Hendricks’s boat as a food source for the starving men. But we will likely never know the truth.

The Ghost Ship Mary Celeste

In December 1872, Captain David Morehouse of the ship Dei Gratia chanced upon another vessel about 400 miles east of the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean. He recognized it as the brig Mary Celeste, because he had dined with its captain, Benjamin Briggs, a week earlier in New York—but something had clearly gone wrong in that time. The Mary Celeste was drifting far off course and its sails were furled.

Morehouse’s sailors boarded the Mary Celeste to investigate and found no one aboard: Briggs, his wife and young daughter, and crew of seven had vanished. The lifeboat was missing. Everything else was undisturbed, including the cargo of alcohol, an ample supply of food and water, and the crew’s belongings. There were no clues in the ship’s log or among the objects to explain what had happened.

That has not stopped people from forming theories. Some have suggested that fumes from the alcohol overwhelmed the crew, and they fell overboard; that coal dust disrupted the ship’s navigational equipment, sending it off course; that the crew of the Dei Gratia actually did away with the Mary Celeste’s people to steal the ship; and even that a mutiny or pirates were involved. More credible theories hint that the ship may have been abandoned after encountering a waterspout or because the captain believed they were closer to land than they really were. One thing we do know: Briggs, his family, and the crew were never seen again.

The Disappearance of the SS Waratah

The SS Waratah isn’t Titanic-level famous, but its strange demise does bear some similarities to the White Star liner’s story. The Waratah was launched in 1908 as a passenger and cargo steamer sailing between Australia, South Africa, and Europe for the Blue Anchor Line. On the evening of  July 26, 1909, it left Durban, South Africa, for Cape Town on only its second voyage. More than 200 passengers and crew were aboard. 

At 4 a.m. the next day, another vessel named the Clan MacIntyre sighted the Waratah, which signaled that all was well [PDF]. Later that day, however, the Clan MacIntyre reported severe weather; two other ships may have sighted the Waratah as it battled the heavy seas. A lookout on shore also saw a ship matching the Waratah’s description struggling against a huge wave, which rolled over the ship. Then it disappeared.

The Waratah never made it to Cape Town. But search efforts were not launched until August 1, because it wasn’t unusual for ships to be delayed by bad weather in those days—and because some thought the newly built Waratah was practically unsinkable. 

Despite numerous search missions, including some as recently as the 2000s, no trace of the Waratah has ever been found. Two leading theories suggest what may have happened: a rogue wave overtook and sank the ship, or the severe storm had caused its cargo to shift and unbalance the vessel, causing it to sink. We likely won’t know until someone finds the wreck.

The Demise of the MV Joyita

The MV Joyita has been dubbed “the Mary Celeste of the Pacific.” This 70-foot motorized vessel played several roles—as a luxury yacht, a World War II patrol boat, a refrigerated cargo vessel, and finally, a passenger ship operating in the South Pacific.

On October 3, 1955, it left Samoa and headed to the Tokelau Islands, over 300 miles away, with a crew of 16 and nine passengers. The voyage was supposed to take 48 hours, but the Joyita did not arrive on schedule, and search-and-rescue flights failed to locate it. Another boat finally came across it weeks later, near Fiji, over 600 miles from its original destination. Then the real mystery unfolded.

The Joyita was in terrible shape: It listed to one side, its windows were shattered, water sloshed from a corroded pipe, and mattresses had been piled up against its engine. The radio was tuned to the international distress frequency and all of the clocks had stopped at 10:25 p.m. A medical kit contained bloody bandages. And the lifeboats, navigational equipment, and guns were missing, along with all 25 people who had been on board. 

The perplexing clues have led many to speculate, occasionally wildly, about the events leading to the boat’s abandonment. The captain likely knew the Joyita was especially buoyant thanks to its cork insulation, left over from its days as a refrigerated vessel, and wouldn’t sink even if it was filled with water. Was the captain or crew injured, as suggested by the bloodstained bandages, and then did the rest of the people panic when the corroded pipe began flooding the hold, and abandon ship? Did the captain scuttle the Joyita for the insurance payout? Did rogue Japanese forces left over from World War II or a Soviet submarine intercept it? Was it … pirates?

The Journey of the Sarah Joe

This case is so strange that it was actually featured on Unsolved Mysteries. In February 1979, five young men from the town of Hana on Maui’s eastern shore went out fishing in a small motorboat named the Sarah Joe. The weather was clear and calm in the morning, but by the afternoon, a gale was blowing offshore. John Hanchett, the father of one of the fishermen, went down to the beach to signal the boat to come back, but it had disappeared behind immense waves. As rain lashed the coast, Hanchett teamed up with other locals and John Naughton, a marine biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, to scour the beach for signs of the Sarah Joe, while the Coast Guard searched 73,000 square miles of ocean. After five days the search was called off. The Sarah Joe had simply vanished.

Almost 10 years later in 1988, Naughton was leading a research expedition to the Marshall Islands, more than 2000 miles west of Hawaii, when he and some colleagues spotted what looked like a boat moored at uninhabited Taongi Atoll. As he drove his own vessel closer, Naughton realized the weatherbeaten boat was actually sitting on the beach, and he went to inspect it. He could just make out a few digits of its registration number. But it wasn’t the most startling thing at the scene: There was also a grave, and a human jawbone protruding from the pile of stones.

Later analysis of the clues revealed that the boat was the Sarah Joe, and dental and medical records matched the bone to Scott Moorman, one of the five missing fishermen. But the information just presented more questions. The boat could have drifted on currents from Hana to Taongi Atoll in about three months, but a 1980s government survey had recorded no boats or graves on the island—though there are anecdotal reports that people had seen the grave in the years prior and just never mentioned it. So how and when did the Sarah Joe arrive there, and were any of the men still alive when it did? When did Moorman die, and what happened to the others? 

And who buried Moorman’s bones? One clue may lie in a stack of what’s thought to be joss paper, a type of offering made during mourning rituals in Chinese cultures, found in the grave. The paper has led some to theorize that Chinese fishermen had happened upon the Sarah Joe, found the human remains, and respectfully buried them, but told no one because they had been fishing in the area illegally. 

As is the case with most maritime mysteries, we may never know the full story.