On 5th September 1913, the Daily Standard of Queensland broke news of a ‘startling discovery’ reported from Antarctica by the renowned Australian explorer Douglas Mawson. In a garbled telegraph message, the then leader of the Australian Antarctic Expedition reported having seen the masts and top funnel of a large steamer ‘projecting’ from snow near a narrow inlet to a bay of the southern continent. Although unable to reach the stricken vessel, Mawson’s party had, the message indicated, discovered a lifebuoy ‘encrusted’ in ice bearing the word ‘Waratah’.
From these tantalising scraps of communication, the newspaper conjectured that Mawson may have solved one of the most baffling sea mysteries of the early 20th century, the fate of a passenger liner that had gone missing off the South African coast towards the end of July 1909 during a voyage from Sydney to London. ‘Indication tracks’, the message continued cryptically, suggesting that not only had the Waratah been found intact but also that some of her 211 passengers and crew might still incredibly be alive. The ship’s discovery thousands of miles south of its last known location was entirely plausible according to ‘port-master’ Captain John Mackay:
‘The currents on the coast where the Waratah went to her doom travelled in a south easterly direction into Antartica [sic] and a lifebuoy from the Waratah off the Cape of Good Hope was just as likely to find its way to Antartica as one from the Australian coast.’
Nothing further was heard from Mawson about this reputed discovery. In fact, the message turned out to be a journalistic hoax, perpetrated by disgruntled editors at The Daily Mail to test the theory that its Brisbane rival was plagiarising its news stories. However, this incident, which occurred four years after the event, does serve to illustrate the level of public interest that was generated by a ship disappearance that to this day remains unsolved. These pages examine the reasons why the Waratah’s loss was so widely publicised, and discusses what her real fate may have been.
SS Waratah was medium-sized passenger and cargo steamship constructed in 1908 by Clyde shipbuilders Barclay Curle & Co. for the Danish shipping line Blue Anchor. Weighing 9,300GRT and measuring 465ft in length, the Waratah was an enlarged version of the company’s other modern steamship, the Geelong, built at the same yard in Whiteinch. Like her half-sister, Waratah was given an Australian aboriginal name reflecting the antipodean route she was destined to serve for her owners; ‘Waratah’ is the name of the state flower of New South Wales. Although designed to carry a sizable cargo, primarily frozen meat, dairy products, and metal ores, the ship was equipped with eight staterooms and accommodation for up to 128 first class passengers on her upper decks. She was also designed to accommodate a large number of steerage passengers on her poop deck.
The Waratah carried 689 steerage and 67 first class passengers on her maiden voyage, departing London in November 1908 and reaching Sydney in January 1909. Apart from a small but troublesome fire in a coal bunker, the outward voyage was unremarkable, as was the return.
She was on the return leg of her second voyage when she was lost. She had left Sydney on 26th June 1909 with intended stops at Melbourne, Adelaide, Durban and Cape Town before reaching Europe. Among her cargo was an alleged 7,800 bars of bullion. By the time she departed from Durban in the evening of 26th July, she was carrying a total of only 211 passengers and crew. As she made her way south along the Eastern Cape early the next day, the Waratah was seen by a small steamer of the Clan Line, the 2,500GRT Clan McIntyre, and recognition signals were exchanged between the two vessels. By 9.30 that morning, the bigger ship had overtaken the slower Clan steamer and disappeared over the horizon. The last ship to positively identify the Waratah, the Clan McIntyre’s progress towards Cape Town was greatly slowed by a powerful gale that blew up the following day. The Waratah, which was due to arrive reach port on 29th July, never did. Extensive searches of the surrounding ocean by Royal Navy vessels, the Geelong, other commercial steamers, and even a ship chartered by relatives of those missing, failed to find any definitive trace of the vessel.
Waratah’s disappearance was all the more baffling for her modern design. Indeed, she was one of several passenger vessels of the era regarded as more or less ‘unsinkable’ owing to their advanced hull design. The term is most closely associated with the Titanic, but was in use by journalists, advertisers, and even shipbuilders at the turn of the century and possibly much earlier.[1] The Cunard sisters Lusitania and Mauretania, for example, were both thus described. Noting the former’s 34 watertight compartments, The New York Times concluded she was ‘as unsinkable as ships can be’, a claim repeated in the Cunard publicity. The Mauretania was deemed ‘practically unsinkable – owing to the watertight bulkhead doors’; this, the claim of Stone and Lloyd, the Deptford-based engineering firm that had patented ‘automatic bulkhead doors’ for ships in 1903. The troopship HMS Dufferin carried the same technology. She could, according to an article in the January 1905 edition of Popular Mechanics, be ‘made practically unsinkable in a few seconds by closing the watertight compartments’ via a system ‘controlled from the bridge’. Waratah’s claim to unsinkability rested not only on its automatic bulkhead doors, but also its double-hull. As reported in The Albany Advertiser on 20th January 1909:
‘The steamer is divided into eight watertight compartments, and has a cellular double bottom extending the full length of the vessel, thus rendering her practically immune from any danger of sinking.’
There was increasing empirical evidence that large ships were, if not unsinkable, at least increasingly hard to sink, owing to their compartmentalised hulls. A striking example was offered by the Cunard liner Suevic, another cargo-passenger steamer working the England-Cape-Australia route. The 550ft long vessel ran aground off the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall in rough weather on 17th March 1907.
Not only did the 12,500-ton vessel stay afloat long enough for her 500 passengers and crew to be safely rescued, her sophisticated compartmentalisation meant that salvage engineers were able to cut off the forward part of the ship in situ and tow the rest of the hull to Southampton, where a replacement bow and bridge section could be fitted. Covered in the newspapers, the salvage of the Suevic was a very public demonstration of the ‘unsinkability’ of modern passenger ships.
The other striking aspect of Waratah’s loss was the fact that there were no reliable witnesses to it. The early 20th century sea lanes were the skies of today, crisscrossed constantly by multitudes of commercial vessels. By 1899, there were an estimated 30,000 merchant steamers in commission, over a third of them British-registered. The waters between Durban and Cape Town, intermediate ports of Empire, were among the most heavily trafficked. In fact, several other vessels did report sighting a ship roughly fitting Waratah’s description after Clan McIntyre’s positive identification of her on 27th July. None of these sightings were however conclusive, and most critically no ship witnessed her final moments.
Neither was Waratah’s final moments observed electronically. Wireless telegraphy had been introduced on ships only a few years earlier. In fact, the technology had already proved critical in saving the passengers and crew of a liner. On the 23rd January 1909, the 15,000t White Star liner Republic had collided with the Italian-registered steamship Florida in fog off Nantucket. The incident marked the first use of radio to send a distress signal at sea. Although 6 people were killed in the initial collision, the transmitting of a CQD message; the forerunner of the SOS call made by the Titanic; enabled all the remaining passengers and crew of both ships to be rescued before the grievously damaged Republic foundered. The Waratah was one of the last big passenger ships to eschew this technology, a surprising oversight by the ship’s owners that would have severe ramifications for the company.
The Waratah was also exceptional in being a commercial vessel lost ‘with all hands’. Although lifeboat provision remained scandalously inadequate in the years preceding the Titanic disaster, it was highly unusual for a large commercial ship to founder without time for at least some of the lifeboats to be deployed, and at least a handful of passengers and crew to be rescued. A mid-ocean disaster where none ‘lived to tell the tale’ seemed to belong to a much earlier era, a prime example being the loss of the transatlantic paddle-steamer Pacific somewhere between Liverpool and New York in 1856.[2]
[1] The term was used to describe the giant passenger liner in Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, a ship whose design and fate bore several prescient parallels with the infamous White Star Liner.
[2] The only clue to the ship’s disappearance was a ‘message in a bottle’ from one of the passengers that washed up on the Outer Hebrides several years later, which claimed she had struck an iceberg.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 