It’s arguably the most mysterious place
in the world, where great hunks of ships have plunged into the abyss, where pilots and their
planes have vanished into thin air. Batten down the hatches and join us on our journey
into the deltoid of death. 50.
Before we regale you with stories of tragedy and downright dumbfoundedness, for our viewers
not exactly educated on the basics of the Bermuda Triangle, here is some practical information.
It’s an area in the North Atlantic Ocean that has one point touching Miami in the US,
going all the way down to Puerto Rico and up to Bermuda. Nonetheless, the exact area
is not defined. All you need to know is it’s in that vicinity. Since it’s not exactly exact, its area is
said to be anything from 500,000 to 1,510,000 square miles (1,300,000 to 3,900,000 km2).
That’s a lot of space, somewhere between the size of South Africa and a bigger India.
It’s a lot of room to get lost in, and as you’ll now see, that has happened time and
time again. 49.
A man named E. V. W. Jones wrote an article in the Miami Herald in 1950 titled “Sea's
Puzzles Still Baffle Men In Pushbutton Age.” It was one of the stories that inspired the
mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. While the article didn’t mention a triangle
per se, the rather poetic piece did talk about ships and planes just disappearing, and we
mean, completely disappearing. The article described one such ship called the Sandra.
This 350-foot freighter with 12 men on board was taking 300 tons of insecticide from the
US to Venezuela. It didn’t get there. Searches were made in vain. Not even a remnant of the
ship or its crew was found. It was written down as an official mystery.
48. At 4 a. m. on December 27, 1948, a plane carrying
32 people including two babies radioed control and said it had almost completed its journey
from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Miami. It was just 50 miles (80km) from its destination.
Nothing untoward was reported. The plane was fine. The weather was ok. So why did that
plane and all those people never get to Miami? How come after extensive searches nothing
was ever found? It wasn’t a one-off.
Just a year later, another plane went missing. This is what was written about the disappearance,
“Aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers combed the waters with thousands of pairs
of sharp eyes on watch. They found no hint of the plane’s fate.”
As you’ll now see, many stranger things have happened.
47. It was a guy named George Sand that really
cemented the mystery with an article he wrote back then.
In his story, he talked about the 1945 disappearance of Flight 19. This is one messed up tale if
ever there was one. On December 5 that year, five Grumman TBM
Avengers set off on a training exercise from the Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in Florida.
Not one of those five planes or their 14 occupants was ever seen again.
The flight leader, Charles Carroll Taylor had 2,500 hours of flying experience. The
other pilots might have been trainees, but they at least had something like 300 hours
of flight time under their belts. The training operation should have had three
legs, with the first being bombing practice. The base and other planes heard through the
radio that this had been completed since one pilot said he’d dropped the last bomb. Part
two of the exercise it seems didn’t go so well.
Sometime during the second part of the exercise, something went wrong, rains and winds came
as well as thick clouds. One of the trainee pilots radioed in and said, “I don’t know
where we are. We must have gotten lost after that last turn.”
Taylor also said at one point, “Both of my compasses are out. I am trying to find
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it's broken. I am sure I'm in the Keys but
I don't know how far down and I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.”
The last message that came wasn’t good news. He said, “All planes close up tight ... we'll
have to ditch unless landfall ... when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all
go down together.” After that, a haunting static buzz could be heard.
That was it, gone, everyone was just gone. Flying boats went to the areas where they
might have gone down. One of them was manned by 13 crew. It too vanished. Nothing of the
planes or the flying boats was ever found. A Navy Lieutenant said about that, “We had
hundreds of planes out looking, and we searched over land and water for days, and nobody ever
found the bodies or any debris.” Ok, so what had happened? What went down in
the sky to make those pilots so disoriented? Again, no one knew. It was listed as an “unknown
cause.” This inspired countless theories back then just as it does today. People talked
about aliens taking out the planes, which in this current era of alien fascination would
perhaps not sound so inconceivable. Others talked about parallel dimensions where the
pilots had been taken. 46.
Actually, in 1991 a bunch of treasure hunters shocked the world when they announced they’d
solved the mystery of Flight 19. They’d found remnants of WW2 Avenger planes off the
coast of Florida. People thought that “The Lost Patrol” mystery was over, but no, the
serial numbers didn’t match up and so to this day no one knows what happened to those
planes. 45.
From 1942 to 1945, 95 pilots out of NAS Fort Lauderdale lost their lives, but what’s
so strange is people and planes often remained missing after extensive searches.
Ok, some hard facts now. 44.
Did you know that no official map that exists actually has the Bermuda Triangle on it? In
fact, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names doesn’t even acknowledge it exists.
43. Even though a few people had talked about
this deadly area for some time, it wasn’t until 1964 that the Bermuda Triangle really
got its name. That was after a guy named Vincent Gaddis wrote a story about the mystery in
a pulp magazine. 42.
Maybe you believe people-snatching aliens are to be blamed for the vanishings or you
might think pilots headed off to a parallel world. If that sounds outlandish, some writers
have tried to convince us that the lost city of Atlantis is behind it all. One 1974 book
that posits this is “The Bermuda Triangle” by Charles Berlitz. Just to show you how much
people love reading about the mystery, that book sold 20 million copies in 30 different
languages. 41.
The area is one of the busiest places in the entire world regarding shipping lanes.
40. The Bermuda Triangle is home to the deepest
part of the entire Atlantic Ocean, the Milwaukee Depth, and at a point called The Puerto Rico
Trench it has a depth of 27,493 feet (8,380 meters). Still, that’s not quite as deep
as the Challenger Deep in the Pacific ocean that is 36,200 feet (11,033 meters) deep.
39. It’s not known exactly just how many ships
and planes have gone down over this area, although a rough estimate would be 50 ships
and 20 planes. In terms of planes, that number is likely low. Most of the time none of the
wreckage is ever found and oftentimes there’s no explanation as to why the accidents happened.
As you’ll see later, what’s really disturbing is there have been disappearances that involved
large vessels carrying many, many people. 38.
There have of course been practical theories as to why things vanish out of sight. It’s
not a theory but a fact that over this area the weather can change so fast you would hardly
even see it coming. That’s one reason why some people might not send a distress call.
It’s the naval or aviation equivalent of being sucker-punched.
37. There’s another less obvious thing that
can happen over this wide area. Researchers have found that deep below decomposing sea
organisms create methane gas. When lots of it accumulates it forms methane ice and when
that breaks up gas shoots up through the ocean. No vessel would ever know it’s coming, so
there’s another sucker punch for you. But what’s really interesting is scientists
say this eruption of gas would make the water less dense and a ship could go down. Since
the water is so deep, that ship could disappear as quickly as fun did in 2020.
Let’s stick with the practical but with a guy that actually experienced a weather
phenomenon himself when flying over the triangle. 36.
His name was Bruce Gernon and on December 4, 1970, at the age of just 23, he was flying
in his small plane when things got really weird. He and his pop had taken off from Andros
Island in the Bahamas with the intention of getting to Palm Beach, Florida. Both men were
pilots with lots of flying time, especially the father who was the pilot that day.
They’d been informed that the weather was clement and while flying everything was fine,
except at some point during the flight they said they seemed to enter what they described
as a strange tunnel that was in the middle of a cloud.
For about 10 seconds, they said the aircraft became weightless. But even stranger, all
the instruments in the plane started to go crazy. There was no blue sky to be seen, just
some peculiar grey and that seemed to go on for about two miles. Panicked now, they radioed
to Miami and said things had taken a turn for the worse and they were inside some really
sketchy weather. Miami responded, saying, nope, we can see nothing on our screens.
Later the controller said he spotted their aircraft not far from Miami Beach, to which
the guys said that’s not possible, we haven’t been flying long enough. But it was correct,
they soon saw the beach. They were way ahead of schedule and had saved 10 gallons of fuel.
So, what had happened? Well, it’s not exactly science-based, but Gernon believes that the
tunnel they were in was some kind of electric fog and something had happened in there that
had propelled their plane faster. Obviously, they couldn’t read the speed because the
instruments weren’t working. Gernon has since appeared in more than 50 television
documentaries talking about his theory. This is an excerpt from one of the books written
about him: “Bruce Gernon is the only person to have
witnessed its birth stage through the mature stage, to enter the heart of the Timestorm,
escaping through a Tunnel Vortex and resulting in a time warp of 30 minutes forward in time,
and 100 miles forward in space.” Ok, so some of you are calling cow dung on
this one, but keep watching, things will get freakier.
35. There have also been a bunch of UFO sightings
over this particular area. 34.
One of them was in 1978 when a Greek Merchant Marine radio operator named Polycarp Spentzas
had the fright of his life. These are his own words:
“We started from Porto Matanzas, Cuba, bound for Algiers, with an average speed of 11 miles.
Shortly before 12 noon local time, the officers of the ship’s bridge began to notice that
it appeared to them that the ship was sailing at unusually high speed — but the instruments
showed a constant speed of 10 to 11 nautical miles an hour.”
He said the ship went through the water as it had never done before. He and the crew
had no idea what was going on. Then things got weird when a guy came up from the engine
room and said all the clocks for some reason had gone forward two hours.
A bit later, Spentzas’ mind pretty much went to pieces. This is what he said happened:
“The cook and I were playing backgammon in the smoking room, when suddenly we looked
back and saw, to the left of the ship, i.e., the northwest side, just a few miles away,
a large, white unidentified flying object in the sky.”
He said two smaller objects were next to it. He didn’t immediately want to think aliens,
so tried to calm himself down by telling himself it was the Americans doing some kind of secret
aircraft operation. Still, why were the clocks wrong, and he couldn’t really explain the
movement of the things in the sky since no aircraft could do that.
In interviews that followed, he said all of the crew experienced a slow heartbeat at the
time, as well as bradycardia and hypothermia. He believed this was down to something he
called, “gravitational time dilation”. He said this caused biochemical changes in
the crews’ bodies. It sounds crazy, but this guy doesn’t look
like he’s joking. 33.
Still, for most people, they don’t get treated to a strange phenomenon like that. One sailor
who’s been through the triangle more times than he can count said, “I've raced through
the Bermuda Triangle, never has anything strange happened.”
32. The triangle gets the blame for many things
it likely wasn’t involved in, including the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight
MH370 - even though it went missing on the other side of the globe.
31. It didn’t help matters when a politician
from Malaysia tweeted a few years back, “New Bermuda Triangle detected in Vietnam waters,
well-equipped sophisticated devices are of no use!” Part of the theory goes that there’s
another triangle like itself directly opposite. Maybe there’s a wormhole thing going on…
30. As to why ships go down so fast, there’s
another theory that posits it could be something called rogue waves. These can reach 100 feet
high. We actually prefer the name monster waves or killer waves. Basically, certain
weather patterns can all occur at the same time and great big waves can occur, something
big enough to sink a very sturdy ship. They are scary, too, as you’ll now see.
29. It took some time for science to actually
record a rogue wave, but when it did, there certainly was another thing to fear for sailors.
When the master of the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 was hit by one in 1995, you could say he
got a shock. His exact words were, “It came out of the darkness” and “looked like
the White Cliffs of Dover.” It had to kind of surf the almost-100 foot wave to avoid
sinking. 28.
There are also liars when it comes to the Bermuda Triangle. That writer we mentioned
earlier named Charles Berlitz wrote about ships and planes that went missing that actually
never existed. This next one counts, though.
27. In 1969, two lighthouse keepers were busy
at their jobs at the Great Isaac Lighthouse in the Bahamas. Ok, so there was bad weather,
but the guys one day just went missing and were never found.
26. In 1963, the SS Marine Sulphur Queen went
missing and all 39 people on board were never seen again, although in this case there were
ample reports stating that the vessel was not fit to sail. Still, the families of the
sailors wanted to know where their loved ones had gone and a huge investigation ensued.
But like many ships and many men, all the searches came up with nothing.
This next one is very sad, indeed. 25.
It’s the story of two 14-year old boys who went fishing off the coast of Florida. They
never returned home and a search of 15,000 square nautical miles found nothing. One of
the guys prior to their disappearance wrote a message on Instagram to another friend.
It read, “Me and Austin are crossing to the Bahamas tomorrow. Come with us.”
Later, via Snapchat, one of them wrote, “Peace Out Jup.” That was said to be their last
message, although a friend of the guys said they posted a video with a huge dark storm
moving towards their boat. The words next to the video were, “We’re...”… The
next word is a well-known expletive. Their boat was recovered about one year later
around 100 miles from Bermuda. There was no sign of them, although an iPhone was found.
People said there may have been foul play since the ignition and battery were turned
to the off position, although storm damage is the most likely scenario. Unfortunately,
Apple couldn’t open the phone. Let’s now go way, way back.
24. In the year 1800 the topsail schooner, USS
Pickering, met its match in the Bermuda Triangle. It left from the US on its way to the West
Indies and somewhere in between just vanished, along with its 90 crew. Nothing of it was
ever seen again. It’s believed a storm was to blame, but that’s only a hunch. You can
put that one in the mystery folder. 23.
The same thing happened the very same year and also in the West Indies to the USS Insurgent.
It just vanished without a trace, as did its 70-something crew. People have put two and
two together, saying that maybe one particularly nasty storm wrecked both ships. Other than
that, the crews of those ships could right now be laying back in Atlantis or hanging
out on the planet Okeanon. In both cases, you don’t age.
Ok, so let’s now talk about ghosts. 22.
Has a ghost ship ever been found in the triangle? The answer is yes, although we can’t find
much information about it. The ship was called the Roselie and it was found empty in 1840
somewhere in the area. She was bound for Havana and the crew vanished somewhere on the way.
We found one article that said when she was found, “Her sails were set, everything shipshape.
The only living thing aboard was a half-starved, caged canary.”
21. Then there was the story of the ship Ellen
Austin. The legend had it that she left Liverpool
in the UK to head to New York in December 1880. She sailed for many weeks and at some
point, the captain thought it would be a good idea to sail through the Sargasso Sea. That’s
located in the Bermuda Triangle On the way, they found a schooner and no crew
was on it. Ok, spooky, but the captain wasn’t scared and told his men to sail it back to
the US. There was a huge storm, but after it cleared the captain got close to the schooner
and called to his crew. No answer. Where had they gone?
US newspapers started writing about the story, with one asking, “Why she was derelict no
man could say since she was apparently in a good condition.”
The thing is, it was later discovered that Lloyd’s of London had recorded the journey
and no missing people were talked about. Many people think the story is a case of the game
of telephone and myth, although some people think it happened.
20. This one is definitely real. In 1880, the
British ship, the HMS Atalanta, set sail from Bermuda back to the UK. It went missing somewhere
on the way. This was no small deal. 281 people were on that ship and they vanished.
A long investigation and search ensued. Nothing came up. One sailor who’d not gone on that
journey but should have, said he feared the ship wasn’t in the best of shape and there
wasn’t much experience on board. In fact, The Times of London wrote, “There
can be no question of the criminal folly of sending some 300 lads who have never been
to sea before in a training ship without a sufficient number of trained and experienced
seamen to take charge of her in exceptional circumstances.”
This next one is also exceptional. 19.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus and his crew on the Santa Maria were approaching the
Bahamas, they saw something they couldn’t explain. It was a strange light like nothing
they’d seen before. 18.
Staying with the past, the American warship called the USS Wasp met its end in the Bermuda
Triangle. This had been a strong ship and it had been very useful when fighting the
British. She took down three British ships, in fact.
She may have been good at trouncing limeys, but she was no match for the wretched Bermuda
Triangle. On October 9, 1814, she was heading to the Caribbean and she vanished. No one
knows what happened, but the 140 odd men that were lost did.
Ok, but what about these days, like really recent goings-on?
17. In 2017, a private jet was in the area and
it just suddenly went off the radar. It remained a mystery until a few days later when the
wreckage was found. All four crew had perished. What was to blame?
This was noted as the cause, “The pilot's intentional flight into an area of known icing
and convective thunderstorm activity, which resulted in a loss of control of the airplane.”
It was thought he hadn’t gotten enough sleep and had made a mistake as a result.
16. On April 10, 2007, another small aircraft,
this time carrying two people, went missing over the Bahamas. In this case, it’s said
the pilot hadn’t asked for a weather briefing. He should have known thunderstorms were forecasted
and it wasn’t a good time to fly. Aviation data tells us, “There was no request by
the pilot to air traffic control for weather avoidance assistance or weather deviation.
Radar and radio communications were lost, and the wreckage and occupants were not recovered.”
15. You probably didn’t know that some people
think William Shakespeare's play “The Tempest” was based on the wickedness and the wonders
of this treacherous part of the Atlantic. It’s said in the early 1600s stories got
back to England about ships being wrecked close to Bermuda, and this may have inspired
the scribe. There was a publication at the time in something
called the Repertory about the shipwreck of a ship named the Sea Venture, which was bashed
up near Bermuda on its way to Jamestown. The content, some scholars have said, bears similarities
to Shakespeare's play. He very likely read this about the real-life shipwreck:
“The seas did rage, the windes did blowe, distressed were they then; Their ship did
leake, her tacklings breake, in daunger were her men. But heaven was pylotte in this storme,
and to an iland nere.” We bet you didn’t know about this next one,
either. 14.
A guy named Joshua Slocum was some sailor. In fact, he was the first person ever to sail
around the world by himself. This intrepid man set off from the US to the West Indies
in 1909. He said bye to his wife, kissed her on the cheek and set sail. No one ever saw
him again. Fun fact, he couldn’t even swim and said there was no point in learning.
13. Since we’ve come to the unlucky number 13,
we thought we’d give you something spooky. We could have mentioned it earlier, but it’s
more fitting now. Remember Flight 19 and all those missing men?
Well, just before they lost communications with base one of them said, “Everything
looks strange.” 12.
We also didn’t tell you this. You already know the US Navy never figured out what happened
to Flight 19, but in one report someone wrote, it was, “as if they had flown to Mars.”
Now you’ll see how the Brits were equally stumped when they lost quite a few of their
countrymen around the same time. 11.
The BBC said back in the 1940s when passenger jets were really taking off, pun intended,
they were impressive things indeed. They were also fraught with dangers. Take
for instance British South American Airways. In three years running it reported 11 accidents,
five planes lost, 22 crew dead, 73 passengers also dead. Would you have taken a trip with
them? In 1948, a small British passenger plane just
vanished over the Bermuda Triangle. No one had any idea what happened. 25 passengers
and six crew were gone. The final report read, “It may truly be said that no more baffling
problem has ever been presented. What happened, in this case, will never be known and the
fate of Star Tiger must remain an unsolved mystery.”
Still, these days when we look at how dodgy those planes were, it is easy to come to the
conclusion that any manner of faults could have taken them out of the sky, especially
when in bad weather central. 10.
Let’s stay with the Brits. Almost exactly a year after that passenger flight went down
another took off. This one was traveling from Bermuda to Jamaica. One hour later the pilot
radioed in and said everything was fine. He had enough fuel. The weather was good. The
plane was tiptop. That was the last thing ever heard from the
pilot. 20 people died and not one single bit of that plane was ever found. A report stated,
“Some external cause may have overwhelmed both man and machine.” It was statements
like these that helped kick off decades of wild speculation.
Ok, we think you need some good news now. This will put a smile on your face.
9. In 1949, a US B-29 vanished. It was thought
all 20 men had died. But then a Canadian Destroyer was flying over the Bermuda Triangle and it
spotted something. There were 18 men floating in two rafts in the ocean. They’d been on
the move for three days and had traveled some 75 miles.
The New York Times wrote that all the men were in a serious condition and had to be
taken to the hospital with haste. At first, the survivors were so weak they weren’t
even well enough to explain what had happened. We only know that somewhere on the journey
from California to the UK things went wrong. The paper called it one of the biggest search
operations in peacetime. 8.
The SS Cotopaxi was believed to be a victim of the Bermuda triangle for many years. In
1925 she set sail with 32 people on board and vanished without a trace. We had to wait
until 2020 to hear that parts of the wreck found earlier were her.
Ok, now we’re approaching the big guns. 7.
This is a New York Times opening paragraph from October 18, 1976:
“A 590‐foot cargo ship with a crew of 37 has been missing since early Friday and
is feared sunk in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle, the Coast Guard reported yesterday.”
This was quite an original case because sometime after it disappeared an Argentine freighter
found one of its lifeboats. Only one hour after that, a British ship found a burnt life
preserver in the water. A spokesperson for the search party said,
“It's not easy to miss a 590‐foot‐long ship on a day with visibility of more than
40 miles and calm seas, so it doesn't seem too hopeful that it's still afloat.” It
wasn’t. It was never seen again. What’s strange, the ship had not sent a distress
message before it vanished. 6.
Did you know there’s another triangle in the world that is said to be cursed by paranormal
activity? It’s called the Dragon's Triangle and is located in the Pacific Ocean. So many
ships have gone missing there that the Japanese have declared the area a danger zone.
Now for another terrifying ghost story. 5.
Let us introduce the schooner named Carroll A. Deering. On July 19, 1920, it set off from
Puerto Rico with its captain and hero of WW1, William H. Merritt. He got sick and was replaced
by Captain Willis B. Wormell. They got to Rio, unloaded their cargo, and
had copious amounts of booze. They set off again and on January 31 the ship was spotted
hard aground next to some shoals with the sails set. This meant trouble. It took some
time because of harsh weather conditions, but rescue boats eventually got to ship a
few days later. Guess what…there wasn’t one person on
the ship. It was quite a bit smashed up on board, and the navigation equipment was gone
along with the ship’s log. The lifeboats and all the crew’s belongings were also
gone. The ship was in such bad condition that it was agreed that it should be blown up.
But what happened to the crew? Well, a fisherman in 1921 found a message
in a bottle. The message read: “DEERING CAPTURED BY OIL BURNING BOAT SOMETHING
LIKE CHASER. TAKING OFF EVERYTHING HANDCUFFING CREW. CREW HIDING ALL OVER SHIP NO CHANCE
TO MAKE ESCAPE. FINDER PLEASE NOTIFY HEADQUARTERS DEERING.”
The writing matched that of the engineer and the bottle had been made in Brazil. It looked
right, but then that fisherman admitted he’d forged the note in an attempt to look good
and get a job at Cape Hatteras light station. We just don’t know what happened. Freak
weather might have caused the trouble, but seriously, would all the crew have died in
those lifeboats? Possibly, but researchers have said the ship wasn’t heading into any
storms. Others have blamed pirates, or maybe smugglers,
or even mutiny, and then there’s the Bermuda Triangle theory. This story is a conspiracy
theorist’s golden goose. 4.
Ok, now for some healthy skepticism before we talk about the very worst thing that ever
happened in the Bermuda Triangle. Do you remember we talked about the pilot
Charles Taylor, the one who led trainee pilots in the Flight 19 operation and none of them
was seen again? Well, that pilot, as experienced as he was, had actually been lost two times
before and both times he had to be rescued. The Navy did indeed report the tragedy as
“cause unknown” although some skeptics say that was because of pressure from his
mother, who said if you can’t prove it was his fault then you can’t say that, even
though it’s said that fateful night he took the guys in the wrong direction.
3. Other skeptics have pointed out a simple fact:
just about as many disasters take place in the Bermuda Triangle as they do in other parts
of the world’s oceans. But the thing that inspires mystery is the
lack of distress calls and the fact things just vanish, whether planes or ships. As we’ve
told you, though, the water is insanely deep and the weather is about as predictable as
the number of views we get on videos. Then there are those darned methane events down
below in the ocean. Ok, last bit of skepticism.
2. We tracked flights that go over this area.
Using a live tracker, you can see that passenger planes fly over the Bermuda Triangle all the
time. Right now as we write this, the flight map of that place looks as busy as supermarkets
last year when people thought they were going to run out of toilet paper. Ok, now for what you’ve all been waiting
for. 1.
On March 4, 1918, the US suffered what is still the biggest loss of life in Navy history,
not including during combat. This was the sinking of the USS Cyclops. Well, some people
don’t think it sank and would prefer an alien abduction theory.
That day, 306 men lost their lives. They, and the entirety of the ship, just vanished.
The cause of the disaster is still listed as unknown.
On February 20, it set off from Salvador with the intention of heading back to the US. Something
terrible happened on the way, and despite umpteen investigations, no one knows what
happened. The Navy held up its hands and admitted, “Many theories have been advanced, but none
that satisfactorily accounts for her disappearance.” The theories obviously included one huge storm,
but then it was said the ship was overloaded, or maybe there were problems with the engine.
But get this, just as the search was coming to an end, the US State Department received
a letter signed by Charles Ludlow Livingston, the U.S. consul in Barbados. Part of it went
like this: “Master alluded to by others as damned Dutchman,
apparently disliked by other officers. Rumored disturbances en route hither, men confined
and one executed; also had some prisoners from the fleet in Brazilian waters, one life
sentence.” The letter seemed to suggest there had been
some kind of mutiny on the ship. It turned out it was actually written by the consul’s
cheeky 13-year old son. Now you need to watch, “50 Insane Cold War
Facts That Will Shock You!” Or, have a look at…
