Late one night in 1909, while the SS Waratah steamed for Durban South Africa,
a first-class passenger named Claude G. Sawyer rose from his birth and walked on deck.
The sky burned crimson and the sea churned. Then, on the horizon, a hellish figure rose from the sea
swinging a sword with one hand and clutching a blood-soaked rag in the other. As the apparition
grew near, it called out ‘waratah’ again and again until Sawyer finally awoke from his nightmare.
The next morning, he couldn’t shake the sense of dread, and night after night he had the
same terrible dream. The same specter, crying out the word ‘waratah’ over and over again.
When they arrived in Durban, Sawyer left the ship for good, ending his voyage early.
He would continue his trip to Cape Town on another liner.
Only a few days later, the SS Waratah, with 211 souls on board, would vanish without a trace.
In 1869, William Lund founded the Blue Anchor Line.
The company operated a fleet of sailing ships that primarily serviced routes between London,
South Africa, and Australia. By 1890, Lund and his sons, replaced their fleet
of sailing ships with versatile steamers designed to carry both cargo and passengers.
Their livery featured a black and white funnel with a distinctive blue anchor design.
In 1907, the Lund family commissioned a new cargo and passenger vessel with the shipyard Barclay,
Curle & Co. of Glasgow. The design was modeled after the SS Geelong, a
7,700-ton liner launched in 1904 but this new liner would be nearly 2,000 tons larger,
making her the largest and most luxurious ship in the Blue Anchor fleet.
Yard number 472 was launched on September 12th,
1908, and christened by Mrs. J. W. Taverner, wife of the Agent-General of Victoria and
person whose first name no one seemed to think was enough important to write down.
The SS Waratah came in at 9,339 tons with a length of 465 feet and a beam of just over 59 feet.
She was powered by two sets of quadruple-expansion steam engines
that drove two screw propellers, achieving a service speed of 13 and a half knots.
She was equipped with a double bottom and her hull was divided into eight watertight compartments.
She featured luxurious accommodations for up to 128 first-class passengers with well
equipped staterooms, a saloon, and a music lounge. Her third-class accommodations could
hold up to 300 passengers. In addition to these spaces, the Waratah was designed to
function as an immigrant ship, with cargo holds that could easily be converted into
dormitories capable of holding up to 700 steerage passengers on outward voyages
and general cargo on return trips from to London. She also carried a crew of 154.
After a successful set of sea trials held on October 23rd,
1908, she was turned over to her owners and immediately began her short career.
She left London on her maiden voyage on November 5th, 1908 commanded by Captain
Joshua Edward Ilbery, a veteran of the Blue Star Line with 30 years of experience.
During this first voyage she suffered an engine room fire that was quickly brought under control
and repairs were made in Sydney. She completed the voyage, returning to London on March 7th 1909.
Upon his return, Captain Ilbery was apparently not completely satisfied with the ship
and was said to have reported that she suffered stability issues,
making it especially difficult to properly load cargo.
In hindsight, it’s difficult to know the extent of Captain Ilbery’s concerns, which were scrutinized
by the later inquiry and heavily sensationalized by the press at the time. Ilbery was an
experienced and well-respected captain and despite whatever concerns he might have had, he considered
the Waratah safe enough to embark on her next voyage, a voyage that would prove to be her last.
Waratah is a species of flower native to the southeastern part of Australia
and a state emblem of New South Wales. The name waratah comes from the Eora Aboriginal people
who inhabited the area that would become Sydney.
In 1848, a ship bearing the name Waratah was lost in the English Channel.
Another was lost on a voyage to Sydney in 1887, and yet another was lost in the Gulf
of Carpentaria in 1897. In total, at least 4 vessels with the unlucky name
were lost before Blue Anchor Line’s Waratah sailed her final voyage in 1909.
This voyage was only Waratah’s second, leaving London on April 27th, 1909. The first few legs
were uneventful as she made her stops in South Africa but she faced severe gales as she made her
way from Adelaide to Melbourne. She reached Sydney in June without any damage or noteworthy issues.
She left Sydney loaded with 7,800 bars of bullion, wool, frozen meat, dairy and flour on June 26th
and picked up additional cargo and passengers in Adelaide and Melbourne.
She left Australia on July 7th with about 100 passengers, bound for her stops in South Africa.
During this leg of the voyage, first-class passenger, Claude Gustav Sawyer, a Swiss
born engineer living with his family in Sussex, grew concerned as he observed severe issues with
the ship’s stability. He claimed that even in calm seas the ship had a considerable list to starboard
and would unexpectedly recover with a sudden jerk so violent that it injured two passengers,
Mrs. Cawood who would also disembark in Durban, and Miss Lascelles, as well as the ship’s surgeon,
Dr. Howard Fulford. He made it widely known to his fellow passengers that he was convinced
the Waratah was an unhappy ship. Mr. Sawyer was a well-educated and seasoned traveler.
He understood how a properly designed ship should behave in a variety of conditions.
But as the liner continued, her ever-present list had eased to only a few degrees and soon
Mr. Sawyer nearly forgot his concerns. But then three or four days out from Durban he
dreamed of the strange apparition with the sword and blood-soaked rag. He would have
the same nightmare each of his remaining nights on the ship. Another passenger, Mr. Ebeworth,
when asked what he made of the vision said that it was probably a warning. This was enough for
Mr. Sawyer and he decided that he would get off the ship in Durban and finish his journey
on another liner. He tried to convince other passengers to do the same, but no one joined him.
Claude Sawyer left the ship when she arrived in Durban on the morning of July 25th.
The next day, the SS Waratah left Durban, bound for Cape Town, South Africa.
Mr. Sawyer had one last nightmare a few days later, on July 28th. He saw
the ship in the distance, fighting through heavy seas when a huge wave swept over her,
rolling her onto her starboard side. She soon disappeared beneath the waves.
The Waratah was expected to reach Cape Town on the 29th of July. She never reached her destination.
Her disappearance launched a considerable search effort, numerous claimed sightings,
and wild speculation over what could have happened to the brand new liner and the 211 souls on board.
The last confirmed sighting of the SS Waratah came from the steamship Clan MacIntyre
at around 4:00 on July 27th. The two vessels communicated by signal lamp
as the newer and faster Waratah overtook the older steamer
near the mouth of the Bashee River and eventually faded into the horizon at 9:30.
The weather in the area deteriorated rapidly and a storm rolled in the next day on July 28th.
The Captain of the Clan MacIntyre would later report that it was some
of the worst conditions he had ever experienced in his 13 years at sea.
As the Waratah’s scheduled arrival time came and went, concern slowly grew.
It was not at all uncommon at the time for vessels to arrive a day or two,
or even a few weeks late. While the Waratah was a new and modern ship,
she was not equipped with a wireless set, leaving her to face emergencies on her own.
As the days turned to weeks theories and rumors spread like wildfire through the public and the
press. The Waratah was considered unsinkable. This was 3 years before the Titanic disaster
would call modern safety features into question. So at this point, confidence in ship design was
at an all-time high and Waratah featured a modern design with watertight compartments
and a double bottom hull. She was also provisioned with enough supplies in her
cargo holds to comfortably sustain her passengers and crew for months. So the prevailing theory was
that she lost power at some point during her voyage and was now set helplessly adrift. This
was bolstered by an incident involving the SS Waikato in 1899. The vessel broke down off the
coast of Cape Town and drifted 2,500 miles over the course of 100 days before being rescued.
The tugboat T.E. Fuller was the first vessel sent to search for the lost liner on August 1st
but they were soon forced to return due to harsh weather. The search quickly resumed and was joined
by the Royal Navy cruisers HMS Pandora, Forte, and Hermes. They concentrated in the area where
she was last spotted but encountered waves so large that HMS Hermes suffered hull damage
and had to be placed in dry dock for repairs. On August 10th, a report of a Blue Anchor Line
ship slowly making its way for Durban raised hopes but this proved to be a false alarm.
In September of 1909, the Blue Anchor Line chartered the Union Castle cargo ship Sabine
to conduct a search that covered 14,000 miles, but nothing was found.
On December 15th, 1909, over four months after the liner vanished,
Lloyd’s of London officially posted the Waratah as missing. But soon after, in 1910,
relatives of the Waratah’s passengers sent another search party in a desperate attempt to find the
missing ship. They chartered the Wakefield, which would spend another 4 months searching,
covering an additional 15,000 miles but again,
despite these exhaustive efforts, no trace of the missing Waratah or her passengers was ever found.
In December 1910 the Board of Trade conducted an official inquiry into the disappearance.
But with the lack of evidence or witness testimony, they struggled
to find a definitive explanation for the disaster.
In the years that followed, numerous theories have been entertained
but there are two that seem to carry the most weight.
The first, and most popular, is that the ship was top-heavy and
prone to stability issues that proved catastrophic
in the heavy seas Waratah no doubt faced after she overtook the Clan MacIntyre on July 27th.
The official inquiry spent much of its time going over the plausibility of this theory.
The Waratah was based heavily on the design for the Geelong,
which by this point had been sailing for years and had proven itself a safe
and reliable vessel. Numerous expert witnesses agreed that she was built and designed properly
and she also just passed numerous inspections by her builders, her owners, the board of trade,
and two separate inspections from Lloyd’s of London, which gave her their top rating.
Still, rumors of instability persisted from passengers on her maiden voyage and
others familiar with the vessel. One former passenger even reported that it was impossible
to take baths on the ship at times due to the severe and persistent list. There was also of
course the testimony of Mr. Sawyer, who was so concerned by these issues that he left the ship.
But for all the accounts of stability issues that came out during the inquiry,
there were just as many accounts praising the ship and her performance. Agnes Hay, a passenger on
the Waratah’s ill-fated final voyage was actually also a passenger on her first voyage. She wrote to
friends and family telling them how satisfactory she found the ship and complimented the officers
and crew. Clearly, she was confident enough in the liner to book passage for a second voyage.
If Waratah was plagued by such severe stability issues how did she clear every
inspection? Why did passengers, crew, and officers remark on how fine a ship she was?
And why would Captain Ilbery, an experienced and well-regarded captain, deem her safe?
At the time, it wasn’t all that uncommon for passenger ships to be slightly top-heavy,
even major transatlantic liners. The Imperator, for example, built a few years later,
was famously unstable, earning the nickname Limperator (a nickname that I will work into
every video I make) and even the RMS Queen Mary was famous for rolling in heavy seas.
So it’s hard to know whether a handful of passengers were reacting,
in hindsight, to perhaps heavy but somewhat normal rolling
or if the Waratah in fact did suffer a significant design flaw that left her vulnerable to capsizing.
If she was unstable, it’s a terrifying sight to imagine
as she would likely have gone over in minutes or even seconds. The people on board would
have almost no time at all to comprehend what was happening or attempt an escape.
But there’s another chilling theory that gets less attention now though it saw considerable
speculation in the press at the time. This was that the Waratah suffered an explosion
that caused the liner to sink almost instantly.
One disputed eyewitness account gives credence to this theory. At around 7:30pm on July 27th,
Captain John Bruce of a ship called the Harlow and other members of his crew saw two mast lights
about 10 miles away from a ship emitting an abnormally large amount of smoke. (The
Harlow’s Chief Engineer also sighted the ship but claimed it was much closer) Soon after, they saw
two broad fantail flashes on the horizon that they thought were likely caused by a bunker or boiler
explosion. The lights and smoke from the nearby ship vanished almost immediately after the blast.
The most glaring issue with the Harlow sighting is that its location contradicts the confirmed
sighting from the Clan MacIntyre as the MacIntyre communicated with the
Waratah further along in their course to Cape Town, hours earlier that same day.
The only way the Harlow could have seen the Waratah at the coordinates Captain Bruce provided
is if the Waratah for some reason turned back to Durban.
Captain Bruce and his crew were adamant about what they saw
and the Captain even went so far as to suggest that they run a wire to search for the wreck
three to four miles from the mouth of the St. John River where they saw the burning ship explode.
A boiler explosion might not be a farfetched explanation,
especially considering that the Waratah suffered an engine room fire not long before. It’s possible
that the fire left more significant damage to one of her boilers than what was detected at the time,
leading to an eventual explosion.
While nothing was ever officially confirmed,
there were some reports of charred wreckage found in the area and there have been other explosions
at sea that took vessels down quickly with minimal debris left on the surface.
But with all of this, it’s important to take these accounts with a grain of salt.
Many were recollections from months after events took place, many were relayed through newspaper
accounts looking to report a dramatic story, and many have been distorted by the passage of time.
The Waratah disaster proved devastating for the Blue Anchor Line.
Their reputation never recovered from the incident and they eventually sold their
fleet to P&O. The ultimate fate of the Waratah remains unsolved.
And that leaves us with only one certainly– we will probably never know what really happened to
the 211 souls who vanished with the Waratah over a century ago. Numerous efforts to find her wreck
over the years have so far proven unsuccessful. And with the vastness of the sea and the passage
of time, it’s likely she will never be found. Perhaps it makes no difference to the people
who lost their lives but to us, the uncertainty of tragedies like the Waratah gnaw at our desire
to understand the world we live in. If something happens to someone we love, we want to know why.
We want a complete story, with a satisfying ending. But as our tools to make sense of
the world fail, the unknowns pile up. We’re left adrift, wondering what will come for us.