USS Cyclops

This is the USS Jupiter, one of Cyclops' sister ships. Picture taken from the US National Archives and Records Administration audiovisual department. Note: Clicking on the image will get you a larger picture on the NARA gopher server. To get back, you'll have to use the Back button.

Lost: 1918

Captain Johann F. G. Wichmann a.k.a. George Worley commanding

The Story

The Cyclops was a US Naval Auxiliary collier (a ship that supplied coal to the coal-fired warships of the time) launched in May of 1910. A huge ship for that time at 10,000 tons and 542 feet long, she was built at Philadelphia along with seven sister ships of the same design. She had a tendency to roll badly.

Her captain was a German immigrant to the US who changed his name with the start of WWI. Despite the name change, until the entry of the US into the war he made no secrets of the fact that his loyalties tended toward the German side. When the US joined the war, however, he showed no evidence that he was anything but an American patriot.

In January 1918 the Navy Department ordered the Cyclops to Brazil to coal the fleet there, and to pick up a shipment of manganese for the return. On January 8, 1918, she set sail from Norfolk, VA, narrowly missing a collision with the USS Survey in the channel.

At about 8 p.m. that evening, Conrad A. Nervig, one of the watch officers, noticed an unusual sound. Upon investigation he determined that the ship was twisting and bending so much in the water that the steam pipes running the length of the ship were rubbing against the hull, bulkheads and other parts of the ship.

At Bahia, South America, the Cyclops supplied coal to the USS Raleigh. Upon getting away, the Cyclops fouled the warship twice with minimal damage.

On January 8 [sic. February 8?], the Cyclops reached Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. One of her steam cylinders had blown up the previous day and could not be repaired, forcing her to rely on a single engine. An inquiry did not turn up evidence of sabotage.

While anchored at Rio, a seaman was drowned in an accident, and one of the crewmembers killed a shipmate while ashore. Also while at Rio, a civilian passenger, Alfred L. M. Gottschalk became a passenger. Gottschalk was the US Consul in Rio and a suspected German sympathizer.

On February 16, Cyclops sailed from Rio to Bahia, reaching there on February 20. She took on 72 Navy and Marine Corps personnel from USS Raleigh, to be returned to the US for leave, discharge or duty rotation. Five of the men were being returned for disciplinary action, three of them involved in the murder of the crewman from the Cyclops. On February 21, Cyclops sailed for Baltimore, MD, and estimated her arrival time, due to the loss of the engine, as March 7, 1918.

On March 3, she reached Bridgetown, Barbados. She took on an additional 600 tons of coal to add to the 1500 tons she left Rio with, and 150 tons of provisions. The American Consul in Barbados asked that Worley postpone the order until Baltimore, since it seemed excessive, and rates were lower stateside. Worley refused. On March 4, the Cyclops sailed.

A passenger liner, Vestris, exchanged radio messages with Cyclops on March 5. Cyclops reported fair weather and mentioned no problems.

The Cyclops was never seen again.

Interesting notes

Before sailing from Norfolk, Worley was heard to remark to a friend, "This may be the last time you will see me. I may be buried at sea."

Nervig said that during the voyage to South America, Worley would meet him during the night watch to talk. He always dressed the same way, in long woolen underwear with a derby hat and walking stick.

A crewmember, William Wolf, wrote to his mother while at Bahia that they were "going across from Brazil" and that he expected to be gone for a year.

The man who had signed the papers in Rio for the cargo of manganese, Franze Hohenblatt, disappeared. He was a German who was applying to be an American citizen, but a fellow employee stated that Hohenblatt, while drunk, had told him that he hated America.

The American Consul in Barbados stated that he had heard rumors of conspiracies aboard Cyclops, for which several men had been imprisoned and one even executed.

What happened?

Several theories were proposed for the disappearance. One theory is that Worley had decided to defect to Germany, and had sailed across the Atlantic. Another, related, theory was that Gottschalk had managed to turn the ship over to the German war effort. After the war, no evidence was found that either of these actually happened.

There was always the possibility that the ship was torpedoed or sabotaged, though no records ever confirmed this, either.

Manganese dioxide is highly incendiary, and some have proposed that the cargo exploded.

Excessive rolling or a cargo shift may have caused the Cyclops to capsize.

Perhaps the best theory is that the ship broke in half during a storm. The Navy had dismissed a storm-caused sinking, because weather reports for the West Indies had shown no storms for the period when the Cyclops was in the area. However, in 1972, Lawrence Kusche, a reference librarian from Arizona State University, found that in early March of 1918, high winds blew off the coast of Cape Henry, VA. He estimated that the Cyclops would have been in this area at the time of the highest winds, which reached 60 miles per hour.

In fact, the USS Pargo had sighted a wreck that resembled the Cyclops in this area in 1968, while searching for the lost submarine Scorpion. When a diving team returned to examine the wreck in 1974, it appeared not to be Cyclops, since the wreck had radar and carried a cargo of scrap iron. However, the wreck may have shifted.

An additional clue to the mystery was uncovered in 1970. In 1941, two of Cyclops' sister ships also disappeared without a trace, assumed to have been torpedoed. Admiral George Van Deurs had served aboard the Jason, another of the sister ships, and had noticed that the ship flexed even in a calm sea. Until 1932, he didn't understand why. In that year, a worker was chipping rust from the hull of the Jason, when he lost his hammer through a hole he had knocked in her side.

These particular colliers were constructed without bulkheads to stiffen the cargo holds. Rigidity was supplied by I-beams that ran the length of the ship. At about the same time that the hole was knocked in the hull of the Jason, an officer entered one of the holds. He noticed that the I-beam was completely missing, with only a rusty line to mark where it had been. The coal which would normally have hidden the I-beams in the hold, had apparently corroded the I-beams completely away, leaving only the skin of the hull. It should be noted that the Jason managed to limp home across the Pacific in this condition, without meeting rough weather.

With rough weather, and the unbalanced engine thrust, the Cyclops could easily have broken in two, and might have gone down so quickly that an S.O.S. would not have been possible.

Even so, until the wreck is located, or re-located, the disappearance of the Cyclops remains a mystery.

Information in this article taken from the book Without a Trace, by John Harris.

Additional information is available from the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery -- Solved, by Lawrence D. Kusch.

See the reference list for complete bibliographic information.

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