by John Pinkney
Outwardly, the first leg of the voyage was uneventful. Despite strong winds the vessel made good time, cresting generally easy seas under clear skies. But Sawyer was becoming increasingly apprehensive. As he would later testify to the inquiry, he was at one with many crew-members in believing something was ‘very wrong’ with the Waratah. The engineer’s fears took a darkly decisive form when – asleep in his first-class cabin – his nightmare recurred and he felt again the wrenching drag of the ship spiralling into cold ocean below him. The too-familiar dream convinced Sawyer at last that the Waratah was fated to sink.
He decided to quit the ship when she arrived in Durban and to book a berth to London with a rival line. Sawyer, a man of conscience, did not keep this decision to himself. He urged Miss Lascelles, and several other passengers with whom he was friendly, to disembark with him. All declined. In their view a nightmare was a nightmare and no more. It was no reason to waste a perfectly good ticket aboard the most opulent liner of its day.
In port at Durban Captain Ilbery gave Sawyer a sympathetic hearing. He discounted the dream, but promised the engineer he would do everything in his power to ensure the safety of the passengers and crew. The captain was considerably more worried than he was letting on. Behind the scenes, as newspapers subsequently reported, he was desperately trying to persuade his employers to return the ship to drydock for a second, even more critical assessment.
Captain Was ‘Forced to Sail’
The Blue Anchor Line refused Captain Ilbery’s request, ordering him to leave Durban as soon as the vessel was ready. In Ilbery’s view she wasn’t. He delayed for two days until he was able to add 15 tonnes of coal to the cargo already in the hold. Perhaps the problem lay in the ship’s tendency to list to starboard. Possibly the coal, serving as additional ballast, would redress the balance. These were the suppositions of a man long-imbued in the idiosyncrasies of ships: a master who knew that something was amiss, but was unsure of what, precisely, it might be.
Captain Joshua llbery sensed from the start that his ship, the Waratah was doomed.
Claude Sawyer was relieved to be ashore in the teeming streets of Durban. His first action was to send his wife a cable:
CONSIDER WARATAH TOP-HEAVY. HAVE DISEMBARKED AND WILL BOARD NEW VESSEL.
Next he called at the local office of the Union Castle Line, where he bought a passage to London, then asked to see the person in charge. He leaned forward in the deep leathered visitors’ chair and described to the manager the ugly dreams that had troubled his sleep for the past three months. ‘I would like to think I am wrong,’ he said, ‘but I believe something unfortunate will happen if that ship is allowed to leave Durban. I beg you to do anything within your power to keep it here.’ Impassively the manager took notes. His dated diary entry would within months be shipped to England, to be tabled as an exhibit at the Waratah inquiry.
The efforts of Captain Ilbery and his defecting passenger were of no avail. On the evening of 26 July 1909 Waratah set sail from Durban.
The following morning she passed the considerably slower British steamer Clan Macintyre, also London-bound. The vessels, neither of which was equipped with wireless, exchanged friendly signals in Morse code. Clan Macintyre’s signaller asked what the weather had been like on the way out from Australia. ‘Strong southwesterly to southerly winds across,’ came the reply. ‘Thanks. Goodbye. Pleasant voyage,’ signalled the smaller steamer. To which the speeding liner replied, ‘Same to you. Goodbye.’
It was the Waratah’s final message.
When the luxury vessel failed to arrive on time at Cape Town, port authorities raised no alarm, other than to send alerts to lookout stations. It was generally assumed that Waratah had been delayed by increasingly poor weather along the coast and would appear imminently.
But when ships which had left Durban after Waratah began to arrive, the alarm was seriously raised. The ports of Durban and Cape Town sent out tugs to search, unsuccessfully, for the missing ship. Conflicting reports began to pour in:
The captain of a Scottish steamer, the Harlow, said that on the night of 27 July he and an officer had spotted smoke on the horizon where Waratah might have been. Two hours later they noticed masthead lights nearby, followed by two quick flashes in succession – one shooting high into the air. The consensus was that the men had witnessed a lightning-sparked bushfire on the coast.
The Insizwa’s captain said he had seen the corpses of adults and children floating amid wreckage near the Bashee River mouth, 350 miles southwest of Durban. He explained that he had not stopped to retrieve the dead because he was loath to upset his female passengers. The Tottenham’s captain did stop, however – and was able to report that the bodies were of fish, not people. But in an atmosphere wrought with ineptitude and confusion, the Tottenham’s report was also proved wrong. Officials aboard a tug from East London found neither bodies, fish, nor wreckage, but floating masses of whale blubber – a common sight in that era, when whalers discarded ‘useless’ portions of their victims. Divers subsequently confirmed that no ship had sunk at the spot.
The captain of the Union Castle liner Guelph added to the clamour by reporting that he had passed a Durban-bound liner at 9.30 on the night of 27 July. In a courteous exchange of lamp signals, blurred by driving rain, the vessels had identified themselves. Guelph’s signals officer was able to decipher only three letters, T-A-H. The clue seemed promising. Authorities immediately sent investigators to the stretch of coastal water on which the lantern-chatter had occurred. They found nothing.
The result was the same when British naval cruisers HMS Forte, Hermes and Pandora checked waters along the entire eastern coast of southern Africa.
Because the increasingly extensive searches were detecting no wreckage or debris of any kind, optimism grew. Newspapers surmised that Waratah’s engines had failed and that she might still be afloat, steered by strong ocean currents. Historians recalled the search for the New Zealand ship Waikato, a decade earlier. After drifting for three months she had been found on the remote Indian Ocean island of St Paul, halfway to Australia.
Buoyed by this half-forgotten event the Lascelles family organised a public meeting in Melbourne, which unanimously voted to send a search vessel, the Sabine, to follow in Waikato’s wake. Most people in the hall were relatives or friends of the Australians who had travelled aboard Waratah. Possibly, they speculated, the liner had been gripped by currents identical to those that had flowed 10 years before – and she might even have beached on the same isle. This theory so impressed the British and Australian governments that they donated £20,000 toward the expedition’s cost.
But St Paul’s beaches lay silent and undisturbed. No wreckage rested, scattered on her rocks. The Sabine pushed on, covering more than 22,000 kilometres in 91 days. She even travelled as far as the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Ocean. But not so much as a lifebelt was found. The following year, relatives of the passengers and crew chartered a second ship, the Wakefield, which searched for 11 weeks. Again, nothing.
Then came an apparent breakthrough. A cargo ship’s captain reported that he had watched a Blue Anchor vessel – almost certainly the Waratah – limping slowly back toward Durban. In Melbourne, then the seat of Federal Parliament, the Speaker halted debate and read the cable to the assembled MPs. They sprang, cheering, from their seats. Similar scenes occurred in theatres across Australia, when managers stopped performances to announce the news.
The following day the ship berthed at Durban. It was not the Waratah. It didn’t even belong to the Blue Anchor Line.
Documented Dreams – and Other Uncanny Evidence
The British government’s official inquiry (conducted after Lloyds had paid £250,000 insurance) ran for 15 days, during which counsel questioned several hundred witnesses. The bizarre nature of much of the testimony prompted even sober newspapers to publish sensation-spiced headlines.
To journalists the measured and conservative star of the proceedings was Claude Sawyer, whose dre
ams had saved him from death. When the panel-members published their findings they characterised him as a stable and unshakable deponent who, in giving evidence, never changed or elaborated upon his story. The court also noted that there was proof he had described his flashes of precognition to reliable witnesses months – then days – before the disappearance of Waratah. Diary notes taken by the Union Castle Line’s Durban manager during his conversation with Sawyer were entered as evidence. At one point the troubled traveller writes: ‘...[In the dreams] I have seen the Waratah in large waves. One goes over her bow and presses her down. She rolls over on her starboard side and disappears...’
In his own statement to the court Sawyer insisted that his decision to quit the ship had not been based solely on his nightmares. As an engineer, he testified, he had also been alarmed by his bathwater. When the ship rolled one evening, the water had slid to a 45-degree angle, remaining in that position for a ‘disturbing period of time’ before moving back to the horizontal. Neither did he like the way the liner tended to pitch in high seas, ploughing through waves instead of riding across them.
Restaurant steward William Devey, who had worked his passage from England, recalled similar experiences: ‘No one was comfortable when the ship rolled and jerked at times. The movements made the passengers quite nervy...1 heard (but didn’t see it for myself) that some were injured by it...
‘Certainly in the galleys and storerooms it was obvious something wasn’t right. All the stewards were used to seeing glasses and plates tumbling about and breaking.
‘...I worked out my own system for serving soup at dinner. I waited for the ship to roll, then I ran with the soup when the chance came.’
During the inquiry newspaper readers learned for the first time that Claude Sawyer had not been the only man to ‘desert’ the Waratah at Durban. Steward Albert Little said that although he had experienced no nightmares, his thoughts, throughout the voyage from Australia, had been filled with ‘a terrible feeling that something very bad was going to happen’. He told the court, ‘I could not force myself to go back aboard.’
Several days later the presiding magistrate heard evidence from shipyard workers, who described the chain of accidents and injuries that had slowed the building of Waratah. Some men, mostly those without families to support, had refused to work on her. The judge tartly responded that while he was prepared to entertain all ‘sensible’ – and even ‘unusual’ – evidence, he would allow no talk of jinxes in his courtroom.
According to an ex-crewman who fortuitously had missed the Durban run, the promenade deck was notorious for its habit of moving about on its beams whenever the ship rolled. ‘The bolts supposed to hold the deck planks down were broken – and one of them fell on the head of the ship’s baker,’ he said.
To expert witnesses called by the court, such testimonies had little value. Sir William White, the Royal Navy’s former chief constructor, pronounced Waratah to be ‘as sound as any ship afloat’. A Royal Navy architect, Robert Steele, insisted, ‘Nothing, and certainly no gale or severe seas, could possibly have capsized the ship. Her owners announced her to be unsinkable and in my professional opinion she was precisely that.’
Toward the end of the hearing one newspaper reported a ‘startling development’. A fisherman had retrieved a bottle from an African beach. Inside was a crumpled sheet of writing paper on which someone had scrawled that Waratah was sinking, after a violent attack by a gigantic octopus. The hoaxer got his headlines – then, prompted either by pride or conscience, admitted the deception.
The court delivered its verdict. It rejected the numerous allegations that Waratah was top-heavy or generally jerrybuilt and ruled that she had been ‘stable and seaworthy’. Nowhere in the finding was there any mention of the fact that when most vessels of her size and complexity foundered, they tended to leave at least some tiny clue – in the form of floating wreckage, or failing that, a spar, a hatch cover or even a small fragment of wood. The liner had been fitted with 16 lifeboats. None were found – suggesting that whatever fate had befallen the ship had struck swiftly, giving nobody aboard the time to escape.
But the most troubling question for maritime experts and the court was how a purportedly unsinkable luxury liner 465 feet long had vanished without trace in bleak weather, when every other ship in the vicinity – all smaller and frailer – had survived.
The ‘White Children of the Transkei’
The British court’s finding did nothing to put the Waratah puzzle to rest. Throughout the 20th century persistent reports suggested that the ship – and even a few survivors of the wreck – had been found. In 1911 two young Canadian adventurers claimed that they had spoken to white children who had swum away from the sinking vessel and were now living with friendly tribespeople on the Transkei coast. The Canadians wanted money for their story, but were unable to produce the children.
Additional rumours, also false, suggested that a Waratah lifebelt had been washed up on a Western Australian beach – and that the ship had been engulfed by a mid-ocean whirlpool caused by an underwater earthquake. The man who described the latter event in a letter to the editor was never at home when journalists knocked.
On 7 October 1925, 16 years after Waratah’s disappearance, an eerily similar tragedy occurred. The Greek cargo steamer Margarita, heading southwest from the African port of East London, radioed that she was struggling in heavy seas with a 20-degree list. The radio officer said she was south of the Fish River mouth.
A search party hastened to the spot, but Margarita had vanished without trace.
In December 1925 Lieutenant D.J. Roos of the South African Air Force told his superiors that while flying over the Xora River mouth he had seen, lying under ‘calm, clear ocean’, a single-funnelled liner which closely resembled the Waratah. He drew a detailed map and next day flew back to the area with two colleagues. But storm clouds and whipping winds had darkened the ocean, and the reported wreck was no longer visible. Several months later Lieutenant Roos died in a car smash. His map went missing for 30 years.
In 1929 Edward Conqueror, a signaller in South Africa’s Mounted Rifles Corps, created a small stir when he claimed he had actually seen Waratah sink. While stationed at the Xora River mouth in the Transkei, he had been alone, practising live-shell shooting when he saw a single-funnelled liner matching Waratah’s description roll over and go down. Conqueror was unable satisfactorily to explain why he had waited 20 years before reporting this alleged incident. (However, one man believed him
– and, more than 70 years later, would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to prove his story true.)
In 1954 a vague account that maritime authorities considered possibly credible was offered – on his deathbed – by Jan Pretorius, a South African diamond miner. Dictated to a local policeman his story read in part: ‘I cannot remember the exact places or dates...[but] on a night in 1909 I was trapped in terrible weather while exploring a cove along the coast. I looked out to sea and saw a ship with one large funnel...wallowing about inshore like a pig. There was no sign of life...and within a few seconds of me noticing her she heeled over and disappeared.’
And why had Pretorius remained silent for 45 years?
At that time I was illegally prospecting for diamonds. I knew that if I revealed I had broken the law...1 would face a long term in prison.’
The Hi-tech Solution
As the 20th century waned, experts began to predict that Waratah’s wreckage would inevitably be found. It wasn’t surprising that earlier searchers had failed: they had simply lacked the sophisticated tools the task demanded.
An apparent hi-tech breakthrough came in 1977 when a South African government vessel, conducting a routine sidescan sonar survey, located a wreck which ‘looked like’ the Waratah. It lay on the seabed under 120 metres of water several miles from the Xora River mouth. But historians immediately objected. Their calculations, based on the Clan Macintyre sighting, together with the combined speeds of the current
and the Waratah, showed she could not possibly have sunk at that spot. The Australian and British governments joined the investigation – and announced that the wreck, almost certainly, was one of dozens of ships sunk in the area by German U-boats during World War II.
However, Emlyn Brown, a South African filmmaker, was unconvinced. Brown had long been determined to become the explorer who found the Waratah – and to resolve in a TV documentary the reasons for her disappearance. He was sure that the sonar scan near the Xora River had indeed located the missing ship. Adding strength to his belief were two other pieces of evidence:
The long-forgotten statement by Edward Conqueror that he had watched, from the Xora River mouth, as the liner sank.
The lost map, drawn by pilot D.J. Roos showing the location, near the Xora’s mouth, at which he had seen the wreck of a single-funnelled liner. This map had recently been rediscovered in a family album.
Financed by international sponsors and his friend, the millionaire author Dr Clive Cussler, Brown led a series of expeditions to the seabed. In 1989, operating from the survey ship Merring Naude, he tried to lower cameras next to the tantalising wreckage. But a powerful current swept the equipment off-target – leaving Brown with film of the seafloor.
Several months later he returned with the vessel Deep Salvage 1, from which Captain Peter Wilmot descended to take video footage. The images of the rusting hull, captured at enormous expense, proved nothing. According to historian Peter Humphries, who had researched the Waratah enigma for 50 years, the expedition was a fiasco. Conqueror, he suggested, had been a fantasist – and the Xora River wreck, into which Emlyn Brown had poured so much treasure, was in fact the German ship Khedive, which had sunk there in 1910.
Brown disputed this and continued undaunted. In 1991 he returned to the Xora wreck with Professor Hans Fricke, the first scientist to have filmed living coelacanths, a fish species thought to be extinct. The professor shone no light on the identity of the wreckage.
