The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

I Disappearing Act 1909

“There is a strange feeling afoot,” Captain Joshua Ilbery said. “Vibrations in the winds.”

The date was July 23, 1909. Waratah was less than an hour from her scheduled stop in Durban, and the trip had not been without incident. As soon as the ship left London on her maiden voyage to Australia via South Africa, Ilbery had noticed her tendency to roll to starboard. The first such twitch had happened on maiden day in the English Channel off Guernsey. It had been a clear day, with fair seas and winds from the west. A series of three waves, each larger than the last, borne from an underwater disturbance far out in the Atlantic Ocean, had rocked the ship. The waves were nothing really — eight-, ten-, and twelve-foot rollers against seas of six — but Waratah had immediately reacted with displeasure. Like a punch-drunk fighter, she had bobbed far to starboard as though she were going to drop. Then, as the waves passed, she shrugged off the seas and settled into a rolling pitching that lasted for close to a quarter hour. Ilbery had thought that the incident was a result of improper loading in the cargo hold and ordered the stores balanced, but the stability was not improved.

“Strange feelings on Waratah?” Second Officer Charles Cheatum joked. “Will wonders never cease.”

Ilbery turned to Cheatum and smiled. If nothing else, his right-hand man had tried to maintain his spirits on the long journey. When Waratah had shuttered off the Azores on the way south, Cheatum had commented that they must have struck a whale. Off Cape Hope, it was a rogue wave. Far in the Indian Ocean, two days from Sydney, the ship had suddenly shook as if she were going to come apart. Cheatum had joked that it was a sudden gust of gravity.

Even so, for all the strange occurrences, Waratah was still steaming.

From Sydney, the ship had called on Melbourne, then Adelaide. There she was reloaded with cargo and passengers for the return to London. All told, the voyage had lasted for eighteen months and should show a profit for the owners of Waratah, the Lund Blue Anchor Line. Profit or not, this would be Ilbery’s last voyage as captain of the vessel. He would be turning over the ship to Cheatum as soon as they reached London. Ilbery believed he had cheated fate one too many times.

Claud Sawyer was in the grips of another nightmare. The apparition had returned. In one hand, the wraith held a medieval sword, in the other hand a bloodstained sheet.

“Away,” Sawyer screamed in his sleep, awakening himself.

Sitting upright in his berth, he struggled to calm himself. Swiveling in the berth, he placed his bare feet on the deck, then reached across to a small table. Grasping a hand towel, he dried the icy sweat from his brow, then sipped from a half-full glass of water. Rising to his feet, he took a few steps to the brass porthole and stared through the circle.

“Land,” he said to himself, staring at the cliffs near the port of Durban. “God, I miss you so.”

Reaching for his shirt and pants, he quickly dressed and walked toward the door to the outer deck. Once he opened the door, he stared back at his berth. An outline of his body in sweat, thick torso and twin lines where his legs had lain, was evident on the cotton-padded berth cushion. The design resembled the bloody outline on the sheet clutched by the apparition. Sawyer grabbed his single suitcase and hurried from his cabin. He would watch the docking from deck. Durban was to be his final stop.

Captain Charles Deroot stared at the approaching ship from the pilothouse of his tugboat Transkei.

“Ugly spud,” he said to his deckhand.

“Lines like a bread box on a gravy boat,” the deckhand agreed.

The tides were pulling Transkei out to sea. DeRoot pushed his throttles forward to remain on station, then resumed his viewing. Some ships have a grace and elegance you can see from afar. The ship coming into view had all the style of a square dancer with a clubfoot. DeRoot knew the history of Waratah—it was a hobby of his to know the pedigree of the ships he serviced — and this vessel was far from a thoroughbred.

Built by the British firm Barclay, Curle & Company as a sistership to Geelong, she came into being under two dark clouds. The first strike was the most basic, her design. Geelong had proven to suffer stability problems, and the construction specifications for Waratah were drafted to address that problem. To cover themselves, the builders had inserted two words, if possible, into the contract. Apparently, it was not. The ships had a flawed design, and there was little that could be done to correct the problem.

The second strike was her very name. Of the three other ships since 1848 to be named Waratah, all had so far vanished or wrecked. Most men of the sea are superstitious, and DeRoot was no different. A cursed name atop a bad design was an omen he could not ignore.

“Backing down,” DeRoot shouted to the deckhands, as he spun Transkei around and checked the transmissions in reverse.

All was in order, so he stared back to Waratah.

Nearly five hundred feet in length, with a displacement of 9,339 tons, Waratah was a large vessel for her day. Her hull was jet black, now showing some streaks of rust from the year and a half she had been at sea. Her upper decks were a pale yellow. The ship’s single funnel, which vented the smoke from the steam boilers that fed power to the twin screws, was painted a two-color scheme of black at the base, a middle band of white, then black again at the top. Twin masts pierced the air — one on the forward deck, the other aft — but the masts did little to subtract from the vessel’s squat appearance.

In DeRoot’s view, Waratah was an ugly duckling dancing on the sea.

“Slow and signal the pilot boat,” Ilbery ordered Cheatum.

Cheatum turned to the signalman, who semaphored the instructions to a nearby boat.

A few minutes later, the pilot boat came alongside and dropped off the pilot, who climbed a stairway to the main deck, then walked across to the pilothouse stairway. Climbing the stairs, he stopped at the door to the wheelhouse and knocked.

“Durban pilots,” he said loudly.

“Permission to enter,” Ilbery said, motioning for the door to be opened.

The pilot entered the pilothouse and walked over to Ilbery with his hand outstretched. “Peter Vandermeer,” he said. “I’ll be taking you inside.”

“Welcome aboard Waratah, Captain Vandermeer,” Ilbery said.

“Thank you, Captain. Anything I should know,” Vandermeer asked, “before we start inside?”

“She’s a little sluggish,” Ilbery noted.

“Full of cargo, eh,” Vandermeer said pleasantly.

“Not really,” Ilbery said quietly, “just a sluggish gal.”

Vandermeer stared at Ilbery. It was slightly odd for a captain to speak any ill of his command — perhaps Ilbery was just jesting. “So noted,” he said.

“Pilot’s in command,” Ilbery said loudly, handing the command to Vandermeer.

Twenty minutes later, with help from the tug Transkei, Vandermeer steered Waratah up to the dock. By then, he knew exactly what Ilbery had meant.

Vandermeer had piloted canoes with more stability.

Claud Sawyer stood on the deck near the gangplank and willed it to lower. He stepped from one foot to the other as if the deck were on fire. He kept switching the suitcase from hand to hand. Just then, Waratah’s steam whistle pierced the air, signaling that they were secure. Five minutes later, the gangplank was lowered. Sawyer muscled his way to the front of the line. As soon as the chain was withdrawn, he ran down the gangplank to the dock. Moving off to the side, he kneeled down and kissed the wooden dock. Six feet away, a sandy-haired lad on a bicycle sat watching.

“Mister,” he said, “you’re still on the dock and over water. If you want to kiss land — it’s about twenty feet over there,” he said, pointing his finger.

Sawyer looked up and smiled. Then he grabbed his suitcase, walked over to land, and kneeled down again. He stayed on the ground a full ten minutes.

Captain Ilbery stared at the manifest. Wheat from the farms to the north. Tallow and hides from the vast cattle ranches in the interior of South Africa. Lead concentrates on their way to Capetown for processing. And more passengers, some bound for Capetown, others going through to London, 211 in total.

It was the massive shipment of raw lead that bothered Ilbery.

The weight would be concentrated in a small area, and with the shipments already on board from Australia, there would be no way for the porters to secure the load exactly amidship. Any way you sliced it, Waratah had proved unstable. The addition of more weight, to either side, was something of concern. The weather was another.

Ilbery had steamed these waters enough years to know the signs. The Indian Ocean was a deceptive mistress. Days like today, with clear blue sides and an ocean of flat-slabbed waves surging to shore like a screen door flapping in the wind, hid a dark secret. Offshore, some disturbance was creating the surging tides. Ilbery knew that next the waves would begin to fragment and turn choppy. Sometime soon, it might turn ugly.

“Secure the cargo,” Ilbery ordered Cheatum. “I’m going ashore.”

“Very good, sir,” Cheatum said.

The date was July 25, 1909. The time just past 4 P.M. Waratah was scheduled to steam from port at first light in the morning. Ilbery walked along the dock, then climbed the stairs leading to the port office. A hot dry wind was blowing from the Kalahari Desert far to the north, and Ilbery could taste the grit on his teeth. Wiping a few drops of sweat from his brow, he opened the door to the office and entered.

“Afternoon, sir,” the clerk said.

“I’m Captain Ilbery of Waratah. Do you have an updated weather forecast?”

The clerk shuffled some papers on the desk, then removed a single sheet. “There’s not much,” he admitted. “Ministry in Pretoria warns of dust storms and thunderstorms in the interior continuing through the twenty-eighth.”

Ilbery nodded.

“We’ve had two ships make port since your arrival. The clipper Tangerine crossed from Madagascar midday, and she reported rough conditions in the Mozambique Channel. Her mainsail was shredded and her decks raked with hail.”

“Hail?” Ilbery said in surprise.

“I know,” the clerk said. “Most odd.”

“What of the other ship?” Ilbery asked.

The clerk consulted the sheet again.

“The cargo ship Keltic Castle out of Port Elizabeth. She makes a regular run from Cape Town to Durban. The captain noted rough seas between the Xora and Mbashe rivers.” He stared at the sheet again. “Said there were choppy conditions and much debris in the water. That’s about it.”

“Appreciate it,” Ilbery said, touching the brim of his cap. “Do you have the tugs scheduled for seven A.M., as ordered?”

The clerk removed a clipboard from under a pile of papers on the desk and glanced.

“Waratah, seven A.M.”

“Thank you,” Ilbery said, as he turned to leave.

“Captain,” the clerk said, as Ilbery opened the door, “good luck and fair seas.”

Ilbery smiled a grim smile, nodded, then walked out the door.

Six hours, six pints of ale, and six shots of whiskey later, Claud Sawyer was seeing stars. The Royal Hotel was plush by frontier standards. Electric lights and ceiling fans, indoor plumbing on each floor. As soon as Sawyer had checked in, he’d made his way to his room. A large wooden, four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting. Cotton sheets and hand towels for the bathroom down the hall. Sawyer had washed up, changed into clean clothes, and lain on the bed, but sleep would not come. After a few hours, he had given up and walked downstairs to the bar. He’d been there ever since.

The ornate bar was nearly twenty feet long and carved from zebra wood. To the rear, the back bar had several panes of stained glass lit from behind by lightbulbs. The floors were made of a sandstone-colored tile. Carved chairs sat in front, and Sawyer had parked there for the first few hours. Once the night had cooled some, he had made his way outside.

“Sir,” the bartender said, walking out to the patio, “we’ll be closing soon.”

Sawyer was staring skyward at the Milky Way. He looked down and smiled at the man. “Nothing else, thank you,” he said.

The bartender walked back inside.

Sawyer had failed to eat since lunch, and he had vomited his lunch into the toilet in the lobby bathroom upon arriving. His head was not swimming, but it was far from placid. The alcohol had failed to have the desired effect. Waratah was never far from his mind. Rising unsteadily to his feet, he made his way to the stairs in the lobby and climbed them to his floor. After several tries, he managed to unlock his door and enter his room. He prayed he would pass out soon.

Captain Ilbery stood on the foredeck of Waratah. He was smoking a pipe and staring at the sea. Even over the smell of his cherry-tinted tobacco, he could smell the ocean. A bitter, acrid odor like that of a copper coin cooked in a cast-iron skillet. Knocking the dottle from the pipe, he made his way to his cabin.

The sheets were bathed in sweat, and Sawyer’s feet were entangled in the mosquito netting. He had passed into a stupor, a feather pillow pressed against his mouth making breathing difficult. Sawyer shook his head from side to side for air.

Waratah was steaming into a storm. Sawyer could see it as clear as if he were standing only a short distance away. Then, in Sawyer’s mind, the ship became small, as if he were watching it from the heavens. He watched as a rogue wave far out to sea made its way toward the vessel, then slammed into the side. Then the image faded, and a knight in medieval armor appeared. “Stay clear of Waratah,” the knight said ominously.

Sawyer bolted upright, the pillow flying to the side.

The rest of the night he tried to sleep, but sleep never came.

Captain Deroot maneuvered Transkei alongside Waratah and began the push away from the dock. The Lund Blue Anchor Line ship was responding differently than he remembered. If possible, the ship seemed stiffer and more ungainly than before.

Captain Ilbery stood alongside the chief pilot, Hugh Lindsay, as he guided Waratah out of the harbor and past the outer bar. After a celebratory drink with Lindsay, then his transfer off, Ilbery assumed control of Waratah. Ordering a course along the coast, he tried to shake his feelings of impending doom.

Corporal Edward “Joe” Conquer stepped from his tent along the Xora River mouth. His unit, the Cape Mounted Rifles, was on field maneuvers. For the last hour, a warm rain had been falling. It leaked through the crude canvas and soaked the crude wood-planked floor. Conquer had waited for the storm to abate before venturing outside. Staring over the cliff to the ocean, he could see that the skies were temporarily clear. Farther out, Conquer could see another storm building. A black wall of clouds had formed. At that instant, gusts of wind raked the camp. The temperature, which had been hovering around ninety degrees, dropped into the seventies as if by magic.

Conquer reached up and smashed his hat down on his head before it blew away.

Then he reentered his tent to strap on his side arm.

“Merciful Allah,” the African said, “protect me.”

She came with a fury on a wind of destruction, with no name or number to mark her passage. Formed of hot wet winds far in the Indian Ocean, she moved on a westward course like a relentless marching army. The leading edge of the hurricane packed winds of nearly a hundred miles an hour. Lightning streaked from water to heavens, and booms of thunder racked across the tossing seas. Waterspouts fanned out from the center, sucking fish and marine life high into the air.

Urbuki Mali was in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

His cargo dhow Khalia was carrying a load of cinnamon and pearls, enough for Mali to retire at last. A trader in East London had agreed to buy the load — all Mali needed to do was bring it home. It was greed that made Mali tempt the weather, and avarice that would end his life.

Twelve miles from land, Mali might have seen the shoreline had the weather been better; as it was, he was surrounded by a tempest that refused to release him. A strong gust carried his foremast away.

“My fortune for fair winds,” Mali shouted.

And then the sky rained fish, and Khalia turned turtle.

On Waratah, Captain Ilbery was fighting a losing battle. The leading edge of the storm was still miles offshore, but the effects were being felt in the pilothouse. Choppy waves raked against the hull, and twice already his vessel had dropped into troughs, as if the seawater had been sucked out to sea. All at once, Waratah listed hard to starboard and hung suspended at a forty-five-degree angle. Fully three minutes passed before she righted herself.

“Mother of God,” Ilbery said.

Second Officer Charles Cheatum could no longer contain his anxiety. His face was ashen white, and moments earlier he had nearly vomited onto the floor.

“Captain, this is bad,” Cheatum said loudly.

“Hell, I know,” Ilbery said. “Go below and check the cargo hold. I feel it’s shifted.”

Cheatum tried to move, but the muscles in his legs were knotted with tension. Pounding his upper legs with his fist, he made a few steps toward the door before he had a stomach spasm and vomited onto the pilothouse floor.

“Swab that down,” Ilbery shouted to a deckhand.

Cheatum wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and walked woodenly out the door.

Fully half of the passengers were clustered in the dining room. Each time the ship listed, they were tossed from one side of the great room to the other. Most were bruised and bloodied from slamming into tables and flipping from their chairs. Fear was palatable — chaos was reigning. Carl Childers, a robust Australian cattle baron on his first trip to London, did his best to quell the increasing pandemonium.

“I peered out the port,” he shouted. “I can see land.”

Sydney diamond merchant Magness Abernathy found no solace in Childers’s words.

“Well, it best be close enough to swim to,” Abernathy yelled, “because that’s what we’ll soon be doing.”

A deckhand made his way into the dining room with an armful of cork life vests. The children were outfitted first, the women and elderly second.

“She’s pitching and wallowing,” Ilbery shouted, as he spun the wheel in an attempt to bring Waratah back on a solid heading.

Deep in the engine room, Chief Engineer Hampton Brody could sense things were not right. Every time Waratah heeled over, one of the two propellers was wrenched from the water into the air. Without the drag of water, the shaft would spin rapidly, taxing the steam boiler providing power. At just that instant, a pressure valve on the starboard boiler exploded, and the engine room was filled with clouds of scalding steam.

Cheatum made it down to the cargo hold. He raced amidships to where the container carrying the unprocessed lead had been stowed. Three of the massive wooden crates had tumbled from the top row and broken apart. Several tons of rock lay scattered on the starboard side. There was nothing he could do but report his findings. Turning on his heel, he started for the ladder.

“Engine room,” Captain Ilbery shouted into the speaking tube, “I’ve lost starboard propulsion.”

He repeated his pleas, but no one answered.

Twelve dead, including Brody. Their bodies were boiled — their skin cooked from their bones. Three African shovelers had been spared, but they did not understand the words that came out of the copper tube. They held their shovels in their hands, frozen in horror.

Joe Conquer peered through his telescope as the cargo vessel came into view. Wiping water from the lens, he stared again. She was an ungainly vessel, with a squat black superstructure and yellow decks. Her single stack was black, with a band of white in the center.

As Conquer watched, she heeled to one side and hung there for a few moments.

Fate can come in many packages. For Waratah, it would arrive on a rogue wave.

His ship was already wounded, and Ilbery knew this. The best he might hope for was to ground her on shore or limp back to Durban on a single engine. He waited for a clear spot, then spun the wheel to the stops.

A mile distant from the struggling ship, the rogue wave was gathering force. Fifteen, then twenty feet in height, and she kept growing. A half-mile away, the surface tension of the water should have broken, but it did not. The thousands of gallons of seawater that should be sliding down the leading edge of the wave rose higher and higher, as if stuck together with glue. A single object lay between the wave and shore.

“Mother of God,” Ilbery managed to say.

Waratah was struggling to turn on a single engine and was just past the halfway point of the arc. Captain Ilbery looked out the side window. He saw death and he knew it. The seconds ticked past as he awaited the arrival of fate.

From where he stood on the cliff, Conquer could see the cargo ship and the sea behind. He watched in horror as a giant curled wave raced toward the stricken vessel. He held his breath as it slammed into the vessel.

Clinging to the metal ladder leading from the cargo hold, Cheatum felt Waratah lurch hard to starboard. Farther and farther she heeled over, until she passed the point of no return. The upper decks went awash, and thousands of gallons of water flooded into the holds. Cheatum lost his grip on the wet metal rung and fell the twenty feet to what had moments before been the inside of the upper deck. His neck snapped like a twig, and then there was only blackness with a tiny pinpoint of growing light.

No one had time to react. Not the frightened passengers in the dining room, not the passengers in their cabins. The few crewmen lucky enough to have been on deck were tossed into the water and not trapped in the ship. Their deaths would take longer.

Captain Joshua Ilbery was shaking his fist at the wave when Waratah flipped on its end beams. His head struck the ship’s binnacle, shattering the glass and removing his scalp from his skull. He drowned minus his hair. Waratah filled with water and plunged down. Flipping upright as she sank, she settled on the bottom on her keel.

Joe Conquer could not believe his eyes. Three minutes had elapsed from the time the wave had struck the ship to the time the last part of her hull had slipped beneath the waves. It was as if a hole in the sea had opened and swallowed the ship whole. Wiping the lens again, he scanned the water. A few pieces of debris, a shiny spot where oil had spilled. Then the storm increased, and the surface of the sea was swept clean. Folding up the telescope, he made his way back to his tent a few minutes ahead of the approaching wall of rain. Using a quill pen, he wrote a report of what he had witnessed.

When the ship failed to reach Cape Town, authorities hoped for the best but feared the worst. Waratah was known to be unstable, and the hurricane that had raked the coast at the same time was one of the worst in the last decade. The 211 passengers were mourned, and at Lloyd’s of London the bell was rung. The mystery of what became of Waratah remained unsolved.

Lieutenant D. J. Roos talked to himself when flying. He found comfort in uttering his motions aloud, as if he were verifying his actions with heaven’s copilot.

“Richer fuel mixture,” he said, twisting the knob.

The throbbing from the engine evened out.

Roos was piloting an experimental South African air force plane on a mail run from Durban to East London, and the aircraft was performing almost flawlessly.

“I think I’ll take her out to sea a bit,” Roos said aloud.

It was a glorious day, and Roos was happy. The skies were clear, with unlimited visibility, and the sea below showed nary a wave. Days like today happened maybe once a year — crystal-clear skies and the Indian Ocean appearing as a pond. Roos stared at the water out of the side window. A dozen T-shaped images appeared in the water below.

“Hammerheads,” Roos said quietly, as he continued along the coast.

Lighting a cigarette, Roos puffed contentedly.

“Fuel three-quarters, manifold temperature dead on,” he said.

A whale, a small sailboat, and ten minutes passed. Roos pushed the yoke forward and descended two hundred feet. He smiled to himself and watched the water again.

“Whoa,” he said.

A ship came into view — two hundred feet below the water. It looked close enough to touch. The ship sat upright, as if it were steaming for a port it would never reach. This was a sea mirage, and Roos knew it. He turned the plane and circled around.

“Damn,” he said.

Sure enough, it was a ship, and a big one. Must be close to five hundred feet, Roos thought, and the smokestack is still attached. He adjusted course and passed down one side. The decks must be yellow, he thought, that’s why it looked like the sandy bottom. Must have sunk in a storm, he thought. Marking the position on his chart, he turned the plane around and continued to New London. Then he reported his findings.

The next day on his return trip, the seas were rougher and the bottom not visible.

He passed over the area three times, but he couldn’t find the phantom ship.

II Is It Here or Is It There? 1987–2001

The question that has been asked for more than ninety years is what happened to Waratah and the 211 people she had on board. From the time she sailed into oblivion during a storm off the east coast of South Africa, her ultimate fate has never been far from the minds of dedicated marine historians. And yet, since the day she vanished in 1909, no one seemed interested in launching a search for her until Emlyn Brown and I met up during my book tour in South Africa in 1985.

I was speaking at a book conference in Cape Town when Emlyn came up to me and asked if I was familiar with Waratah. He seemed mildly surprised that I had researched the ship’s disappearance in the hope that someday I might go out and search for it. We later met at the Mount Nelson Hotel and discussed the possibility of joining forces for a search. The meeting led to a friendship that remains strong to this day. Emlyn is one of the nicest men I’ve ever met. I couldn’t have been luckier in finding someone like him to run the show. Courteous, determined, and dedicated to finding the legendary ship, he formed a branch of NUMA as a closed South African corporation in 1990.

Emlyn believed the freak wave phenomenon — that a tremendous wave smashed over Waratah and took her to the bottom. He theorized that the rapidly sloping continental shelf and the power of the Agulhas Current, combined with a severe gale, caused a series of gigantic waves that engulfed Waratah and drove her to the bottom. That she wasn’t a stable ship must not have helped during her struggle with a sea gone berserk.

Over many years, Brown pieced together every scrap of data pertaining to Waratah, with an emphasis on the reports surrounding her loss. Although maritime historians believed she went down much farther north due to sightings by other ships that survived the tempest, Brown bet his cards on the observations of Joe Conquer and D. J. Roos. Both men met not long after Roos claimed to have seen a ship lying on the bottom off the mouth of the Xora River, and they compared notes. They agreed on a location, and Roos drew a map with an X marking the spot.

They put the final resting place of Waratah four miles off the Xora River where its waters met the sea off Transkei Coast. This area is known as the Wild Coast, an inhospitable shoreline where severe ocean conditions prevail.

Roos followed up with several flights over the next few years but never again found the sea visibly clear enough to reveal a shipwreck on the bottom. Engine trouble and poor weather conditions also worked against him. Unfortunately, he was killed in a car accident, and his map was missing for several years before his family found it in the back of a desk drawer.

In 1977, a routine sidescan sonar survey by a South African university recorded an unknown wreck 360 feet deep several miles off the Xora River. The contact caused much speculation, but most historians ruled it out as Waratah.

After an unsuccessful sonar survey in the southern area preferred by historians, Brown became more certain than ever that the reports by Conquer and Roos of a wreck they swore they saw off the Transkei Coast pointed to the Waratah.

Believing wholeheartedly that the legendary ship could be found, I funded Emlyn’s searches, beginning in 1987, when he conducted an intense sidescan survey of the area surrounding the wreck six miles offshore. Making several passes, Emlyn’s crew estimated that the vessel’s dimensions were quite similar to those of the long-missing ship.

Emlyn came back early in 1989 and attempted to lower cameras over the wreck. But little was accomplished, because the powerful five-knot Agulhas Current swept the cameras past the wreck and left him with only blurred images of the seafloor.

Later that year, he returned aboard the survey vessel Deep Salvage I. Using a sophisticated diving bell, Captain Peter Wilmot, master of the vessel, descended to the wreck and captured vague video footage of the hull. But again, the current was too much for the bell, and Wilmot’s video images fell far short of making a positive identification.

This was proving one tough mystery to solve.

Not one to give up against the odds of a Las Vegas keno game, Emlyn plunged forward. In 1991, he was on site with Deep Salvage I again, only this time he was accompanied by the world-famous scientist Professor Hans Fricke and his sophisticated submersible Jago, which was capable of diving to depths of nine hundred feet. It was inside Jago that Professor Fricke became the first person to observe and film living coelacanths in the ocean.

History repeated itself. The current again bedeviled operations during the ten-day mission, and Jago was never even launched.

Back to the drawing board.

In 1995, Emlyn was approached by Rehan Bouwer, a professional technical diver who believed he could reach the wreck during a carefully calculated Trimix dive, using a combination of three different breathing mixtures.

The first attempt was defeated by foul weather, and not until January 1997 did Emlyn and Bouwer’s expert divers make another attempt. Pushing mixed-gas decompression tables to the limits, Bouwer and Steve Minne, the two-man team that had successfully dived on the cruise liner Oceanos that sank almost within sight of Emlyn’s wreck, dropped deep into the restless sea.

They were unable to reach the bottom, the unrelenting current sweeping them thirty-six feet over the wreck. At that depth there was little light from above, and they had to rely on dive lights. They didn’t see much, but there was no doubt in their minds that the vessel they’d drifted over was the size of Waratah. She was lying upright with a slight list. Most of her forward superstructure appeared gone, as if destroyed by a monstrous wave. During the thirty-five-second flyby, Minne was certain that the upper bulwark of the stem could have been that of Waratah.

The dive plan allowed a descent time of only three minutes to reach the seafloor at 340 feet, where they spent twelve minutes. This was followed by a complicated decompression ascent lasting two hours. During the drift-decompression stops, the five-knot current dragged the divers far downstream from the wreck site before they could be retrieved. Rarely had technical deep diving been so severely tested without the slightest mishap.

Over the next two days, the dive team conducted three more descents but could not come close enough to positively identify the elusive ship on the bottom.

Sadly, Rehan Bouwer was later lost in a diving accident in June of 1998.

Undaunted, Emlyn teamed up in 1999 with Dr. Ramsey and his crew from the Marine Geoscience Unit to conduct a high-resolution sidescan sonar image of the wreck off the Xora River. Everyone was certain their highly sophisticated equipment would produce the final proof that the wreck was indeed Waratah. The expedition members set sail in June, which in the Southern Hemisphere is wintertime.

Astounding imagery was captured by the Marine Geoscience team, and all the early indications pointed to a high probability that the wreck was indeed Waratah. Closer inspection of the sonar imagery suggested that the dimensions and various features of the wreck seemed quite similar to those contained in the Waratah’s shipbuilder plans.

A black-and-white camera was mounted on the sidescan and towed seven meters above the wreck. This seemed to be the only plausible way of beating the strong current. For fear of losing an expensive sensor and camera, the gear was not swept as close as Emlyn might have liked. Yet Emlyn found good images that matched portholes, deck machinery, and winches, as the camera flew over the stem section like a kite.

Confident that the wreck was indeed Waratah, and dogged in his stubbornness to prove once and for all that the lost ship was within his grasp, Emlyn initiated what he thought would be the final expedition. For this mission, he hired the services of Delta Oceanographic and their two-man submersible, which flew from the United States especially to close the final chapter on Waratah.

Excitement began to mount when the team arrived over the wreck site. All systems were tested and okayed, the weather was clear without more than a four-knot wind, and the sea was calm. Since all attempts over the past eighteen years had been plagued by technical problems and adverse weather conditions, Emlyn could not believe his luck. Incredibly, even the notorious current seemed to have slackened. Seeing the flat sea, Emlyn thought it might be a sign. Conditions were too good not to have been touched by the wand of good fortune.

He and Dave Slater, the submersible pilot, slipped through the hatch and settled into their cramped positions. The crane lowered them into the water, and divers unhooked the lift cable. Once free, Slater took the sub down to the seafloor. Visibility was more than one hundred feet as the upright image of the ship’s superstructure came into view. Elation began to cool and was replaced by concern as they moved closer to the wreck. What they saw did not square with what they thought they should have been seeing.

Through the submersible’s ports they recognized a military armored tank standing on the bottom. Their mood quickly became one of shock and disbelief.

“It is not the Waratah—I repeat, not the Waratah,” came the voice of Slater over the radio to the stunned team above on the survey ship.

They moved alongside the hull and rose even with the main deck. Tanks, with their guns pointed into the gloom, and rubber tires could be seen still secured where they had been tied down when the ship left port. At first Emlyn naively wondered how Waratah could have been carrying tanks when World War I was still six years away when she sank. Surely this was not possible. It was difficult to accept the hard fact that this was not the 1909 British mail ship Waratah.

It proved the eye sees what it wants to see. The general characteristics and dimensions of the two ships were very similar. The diver accounts and sidescan sonar recordings had all been misinterpreted. What Emlyn had discovered after all this adversity was most likely a World War II cargo ship that had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. As it turned out, that is exactly what she was.

Eleven tanks were counted, and scattered dumps of small arms. Emlyn and Slater searched for a name or some identifying clue that would reveal the identity of the sunken cargo ship, but none was found.

Disheartened, Emlyn and his team returned to Cape Town. His later research showed that the name of the ship he had thought was Waratah was actually the 4,926-ton Nailsea Meadow. She was transporting a cargo of tanks and other military hardware for General Montgomery’s Eighth Army on a voyage north toward the Suez Canal to Egypt when she was torpedoed by the U-196 in 1942. Like so many ships found by NUMA, she was not where she was supposed to be. Documented records put her four miles north of her actual watery grave.

So where was Waratah? Why has all the evidence gathered over years of intense research pointed to this location? The thinking now is that the old liner lies much closer to shore, a theory I’ve always held because it seemed unlikely to me that Roos could have seen Waratah from the air through 350 feet of water—150 to 200 feet maybe, but not beyond the length of a football field, plus the yardage of the goalpost and then some.

There is little doubt that Joe Conquer witnessed a ship with a black hull and khaki-colored upper deck superstructure roll over and sink in a violent storm. If he and Roos are correct, then Waratah lies much closer to shore than where Emlyn found Nailsea Meadow.

Emlyn’s efforts have not been abandoned. He remains focused, and we are both more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the mystery. Early in 2001, Emlyn conducted a helicopter surveillance survey over the waters off the Xora River where we think Waratah is most likely to be found. His primary objective was to establish boundaries for an extensive sidescan sonar search to be held later in the year when the weather settled down.

I still have great confidence in Emlyn and his NUMA team. The search will continue, but, for now, Waratah retains her secrets, and the mystery lives on.