The Strange Fate of the Cyclops

The Strange Fate of The Cyclops

7/28/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
In a foreshadowing of things to come, in early March 1918, it was reported by the Navy that Willie J. Nettles, coxswain on the U.S.S. Cyclops was drowned on February 10, when he was swept overboard. His body was never recovered from the waters off Brazil.

Willie Nettles was serving on the Cyclops and was swept overboard. His body was never recovered. c.1918

Willie Nettles joined the Navy in 1913, when he was 16 years old. In July, 1915, his parents died within two weeks of each other, leaving only his married sister Maude as a relative. None would have suspected that his shipmates would soon share his fate.

The U.S.N. Cyclops was the biggest ship in the U.S. Navy. Powered by steam, she was 550 feet long and since 1910, she traveled between the Caribbean, Mexico and the Baltic Sea moving coal and refugees from port to port.

In 1917, due to WWI she transported troops and coal to fuel ships around the world.

In February 1918, she left Rio de Janeiro loaded with tons of dense manganese ore. Two days later she stopped at Salvador, Brazil. On February 22, the ship left for Baltimore with no stops planned, however the Cyclops docked in Barbados, because the water level was over the Plimsoll line used to indicate if a ship was overloaded.

When she left Brazil it was thought the ship was overloaded, which was a risky situation since before leaving from Baltimore, Commander Worley reported the starboard engine was not operating due to a cracked cylinder. The survey board recommended that repairs would be made when the vessel returned to the United States.

On March 3, a telegram was sent to the West Indian Steamship Co. in New York City which read: "Advise charterers USS CYCLOPS arrived Barbadoes Three March for bunkers. Expect to arrive Baltimore Thirteen March. Opnav." The next day, the collier departed Barbados.

No distress call was ever received. The last message was "Weather fair, all well." This was all ever heard of the Cyclops.

Later investigations completed in Rio de Janeiro confirmed the ship was properly loaded and secured, but conflicting reports found that Captain Worley left inexperienced crew to load the ship while in Brazil.

Initially the Navy denied the vessel had disappeared, but less than 30 days later the news stories had become grim. It seemed the U.S.S. Cyclops a naval collier could not be located. By the end of April hopes faded.

President Woodrow Wilson announced, "Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship."

The Navy sent in personnel to question fishermen along the coasts of the West Indian islands; retracing the route the ship took when it left Barbados. Two months had gone by and ships scoured the waters, but no trace of wreckage was found. It was feared she had been captured or sunk by a German submarine or raider. The ore she carried could be used to produce munitions.

The German authorities then and after the war, denied any knowledge of having intercepted the Cyclops.

There were 57 passengers, mostly navy personnel, 5 prisoners, 21 officers and a crew of 230. The total number lost has been estimated from 297 to 309.

Between March 9 and 10, a storm covered the Virginia Capes area. Captain E. C. Hilliard the captain of the Amalco sighted the Cyclops on March 9, 1918. He later told the Navy, "If I had been carrying manganese ore, I could not have survived the gale." This report was discounted since it was estimated that since the Cyclops was not expected in Baltimore until March 13, she could not have been in the waters off Virginia on March 9.

Questions abounded, however there were no answers. Did her cargo break the Cyclops in two? Did her cargo shift and capsize her? Was she sunk by an internal explosion? Was she sunk by a submarine or a mine? Was she captured by the Germans? Was she surrendered through treachery? Or was she "spurlos versenkt" (sunk without a trace)?

In the months that followed, without proof of her fate, the Navy stated, "Many theories have been advanced, but none that satisfactorily accounts for her disappearance." One June 1, 1918, the ship was declared officially lost, with all hands.

USS Proteus, the Cyclop's sister ship

Strangely her sister ships eventually shared the same fate, three of them in the same year.

The Proteus became part of the Canadian Merchant Navy in 1941, and was lost at sea seven months later while she traversed the Caribbean Sea. A crew of fifty went down with her, and the ship has never been found.

The Nereus was sold to the Aluminum Company of Canada in 1941, and was lost 10 months after she departed the U.S. Virgin Islands with a load of Bauxite ore. The wreck has never been located. She was following the same route as the Cyclops. The loss of the Nereus was blamed on catastrophic structural failure.

The Cyclops and her two sister ships disappeared while traversing the Bermuda Triangle.

The fourth collier of the group, the Jupiter was converted in 1920 into the US Navy’s first aircraft carrier, and was renamed the USS Langley. She was later converted into a seaplane tender, and was finally sunk by Japanese aircraft in the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942. This was within months of the loss of the Proteus and the Nereus. Most of the survivors were transferred to another ship, the USS Pecose, and this was also later bombed and sunk, with the Japanese machine-gunning the survivors in the water.

After the Proteus and Nereus were lost, the disappearance of the Cyclops is now theorized to also be a result of structural failure, where the I-beams that ran the length of the ship eroded due to the contents of her cargo, however unless her wreck is ever found this could not be confirmed.

John Frederick Wichmann AKA Lt. Cmdr. George Worley

During the investigation of the Cyclops, her captain Lieutenant Commander George W. Worley came under scrutiny.

He was born John Frederick Wichmann in Germany in 1862. He jumped ship in San Francisco in 1878. Twenty years later he changed his surname to Worley and he ran a saloon on the Barbary Coast. By then, some of his brothers had also immigrated to the United States. He gained a qualification as a ship's master, and commanded several merchant ships, transporting cargo; some legal, and some not. It was rumored that when he voyaged to the Far East he brought opium back. Worley developed a reputation as being a harsh captain that brutalized, and berated his crew including officers for minimal transgressions.

On February 21, 1917, he was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Auxiliary Reserve.

Later it was determined he would leave inexperienced men to oversee the loading of the cargo.

Whether deserved or not there were those who suspected he was a German sympathizer.

Prior to the declaration the Cyclops had been lost, Worley's wife Selma visited newspaper offices requesting the suppression of an interview she had given about her husband's change of name, and his birth in Germany. She said he came as a child, and changed his name to honor his foster father. This was not accurate since he was 16 years old when came to the United States, and changed his surname in Washington, prior to entering the navy.

Worley's sister, Anna M. Angermann confirmed to newspapers their family name was Wichmann. This information prompted an investigation by the Navy which examined Worley's records, where he listed San Francisco as his birthplace, which was a lie.

There was a brother, Hermann Wichmann who never altered his surname.

Near the time the search for the Cyclops was called off, a telegram was received by the State Department from Charles Ludlow Livingston, the U.S. consul on Barbados which read:

Secretary of State
Washington, D.C.
17, 2 April p.m.
Department's 15th. Confidential.

Master CYCLOPS stated that required six hundred tons coal having sufficient on board to reach Bermuda. Engines very poor condition. Not sufficient funds and therefore requested payment by me. Unusually reticent.

I have ascertained he took here ton fresh meat, ton flour, thousand pounds vegetables, paying therefore 775 dollars. From different sources gather the following: he had plenty of coal, alleged inferior, took coal to mix, probably had more than fifteen hundred tons.

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.

United States Consul-General Gottschalk passenger, 231 crew exclusive of officers and passengers. Have names of crew but not of all the officers and passengers. Many Germanic names appear. Number telegraphic or wireless messages addressed to master or in care of ship were delivered at this port.

All telegrams for Barbados on file head office St. Thomas. I have to suggest scrutiny there. While not having any definite grounds I fear fate worse than sinking though possibly based on instinctive dislike felt towards master.

LIVINGSTON, CONSUL.

Letter to Ida Morgan from her son Edward a crew member of the USS Cyclops

The following letter dated December 31, 1917 was written at the YMCA located in Norfolk Navy Yard, prior to the ship leaving on its last voyage. It was written by Edward Scott Morgan Jr., age 23 to his brother Clarence. Their mother Ida passed away in September, 1919 at the age of 53, less than 2 years after her son was lost at sea. Perhaps the heartbreak was too much. She'd already lost a daughter in 1891, age 8, from croup.

U.S.S. Cyclops,
December 31, 1917;
Dear Brother Clarence,
On this the last day of the old year I sit here in the Y.M.C.A. thinking of home. Clarence we are preparing for a trip which will last about six months. We sail for the Falkland Islands in the near future; from there we visit the Philippines so you can judge how long it will take us to go and return. To go to the Falkland Islands it will take 28 days.

Do not worry about me as I am in the best of health and I expect to have the best time of my life.

I am working in the machine shop so I am having a soft time of it and further more I will be rated 2 Class Fireman on January 10, so I will then receive $41 per month.

I have not had a slow moment since I have been in and the prospects for a slow time are small for the next six months; so I want you mother and all at home to live happy and forget your worries as I have done.

Boy at the rate I am going I will be an Oiler when I return home, and also as big as a house. Boy as soon as I joined the Navy I had no worries and I began to enjoy life.

Give mother all my best wishes of the season and tell them that when the song birds and the roses bloom I will return home again. Ewing can tell you where the islands lie. We will go though the Panama Canal. There will be no U Boats to worry us so you need not worry about that part of it.

Pictures of those lost on the Cyclops including Edward Morgan Jr, and J.M. Gottschalk c.1918

In January, 1922 The Greensboro Daily News described "that within two weeks after the Cyclops sailed and at least a month before she was reported as missing, a notice appeared in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper stating that a requiem mass would be celebrated for the American consul-general 'lost at sea in the American collier Cyclops'".

Americans in Brazil inquired about the announcement, however the newspaper in question disclaimed any knowledge of the person who had inserted the notice. American Secret Service agents tried to trace the clues of the newspaper clipping, but by then it was too late. The man who brought it for publication had disappeared. It was never explained how he knew about the disappearance of the Cyclops before it was made public.

This fed into the theory that one of the Cyclops' passenger, Alfred Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American consul-general at Rio de Janeiro was instrumental in "stirring up sentiment throughout Brazil in favor of the allied forces." Anonymous messages were made threatening his life prior to his return to the U.S.

There was also the belief that if not sunk by the Germans, the ship was taken in order to use her large cargo of manganese. After the signing of the armistice, American authorities examined all naval German records and there was no reference to the Cyclops. The only exception to this theory was that the ship was sunk by a submarine, who itself failed to return to port.

It was also noted that among the ships that had disappeared in those years, the Cyclops was the only one equipped with "wireless".

The USS Cyclops, in the background, transferring bags of coal with the USS South Carolina c.1914 (Source - US Naval History and Heritage Command

In 1922, a supposed message in a bottle from a member of the Cyclops washed up on the North Carolina coast. It was found near where the Carol A. Deering was last seen before she beached on Diamond Shoals. The Navy investigated, and it was discredited when it turned out the message was found on an island off the coast of Washington and "supposedly emanated from Japanese sources."

This was not the first time a message in a bottle was discovered. There was a report from August, 1918, when another message in a bottle washed ashore at Quarantine Island at the entrance to Baltimore Harbor. The message written in a hurried hand read: "Our collier, Cyclops, captured by German submarine off Virginia coast."

This was not the end of these discoveries. In October, 1926 another message scratched on a scroll of birch bark was found in a sealed bottle, entangled in a heap of seaweed off the coast of Massachusetts. Its sealed cap was oxidized from exposure. It read, "S.S. Cyclops is sinking 161 men on board 10 degrees six minutes, 10 degrees 40 minutes, G.P. Arm U.S.N." Parts of the message were indecipherable, however it was noted that among the roster of the missing crew, there were two names resembling the scrawled signature. One was George Jones Arminger, and the other Robert Armstrong.

In 1968, Master Navy diver, Dean Hawes found a large wreck in 180 feet of water about 40 miles northeast of Cape Charles, while he was searching for a lost submarine, the Scorpion. He surfaced with the intention of returning with a dive team, but bad weather forced them to abandon the endeavor and return to Norfolk. The Scorpion was located near the Azores, and the Navy decided not to return where a solitary buoy had been left to mark Hawes' discovery.

Dean Hawes returned years later, and by then he had compared a picture of the Cyclops to what he had seen, and he believed they were the same ship. On that trip, they found a different wreck, not the Cyclops.

Hawes believed that due to the storm and operating only on one engine, the ship went off course and ended up northeast of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Dean Hawes has since passed away.

The story of Henry Charles Ryder once an ensign on the Cyclops c.1931

In 1931, The Brooklyn Daily printed a story titled, "Sabotage on Cyclops before Fatal Voyage Bared by Ex-Officer".

Henry Charles Ryder, originally from Brooklyn was once an ensign engineer on the Cyclops up to the evening before her last voyage. The day before the Cyclops left from Norfolk for Rio de Janeiro, Ryder was transferred to the USS Azama, and escaped the fate of his shipmates.

When he came to the Kings County American Legion seeking employment, he told a story of mysterious happenings on the ship. He believed the ship was deliberately sunk by German agents who destroyed all flotsam. The soft-spoken Ryder was allegedly pressed to tell a story of strange signal lights and intrigue. He retold of a prior voyage, from France to New York. This was his story:

There was a general spirit of uneasiness among the crew, there was talk of five German spies being on board. Suspicion was rampant, the more disturbing because nothing could be found at first which seemed to warrant it. Then came the direct evidence.

One day the rope hoists of a lifeboat were found cleanly cut. A quick inspection of the hoists of the other lifeboat hoists was made. Every one of them had been cut clean with a keen blade. The lifeboats had been rendered virtually useless in an emergency. There was a quiet investigation. It never was learned who was responsible but the feeling of unrest among the crew was intensified.

From New York we went up to Halifax. Suspicion began to center on several men. One of them was in my gang in the engine room. It was reported to me that this man had been seen with a sledgehammer near one of the valves. From that time on I kept him on extra hours of duty and remained on duty myself until we were both physically exhausted, so that I could keep him constantly under my eye.

On the way back from Halifax to New York one of the officers discovered that a light had been run up on the mainmast. Further investigation disclosed wires and a key. The lamp had been rigged as a 'blinker' signal. Again an investigation failed to disclose who was responsible.

Of course it was wartime and we were running without lights. Then one night ensign Roy T. Smith on duty on the bridge, saw a light flashing from the quarters of the medical officers aft on the starboard. He told me it appeared to be a pocket flashlight and was being used to signal. Fearing a reprimand if he left his post on the bridge to make an immediate investigation for getting aft on the Cyclops was no simple matter, he did not report it to the captain until he went off duty in the morning. The result was another fruitless inquiry.

If she had merely foundered and sunk there would have been wreckage of some kind adrift or washed ashore during all these years. What became of the life rafts? What became of all of the other things that would have floated? The water pressure undersea alone would have been sufficient to tear the lifeboats loose. Fragments, at least, of the battered boats would have come to the surface. It is my belief that the plotters had ample time to destroy all traces. It is possible, I merely offer it as a possibility that they succeeded in poisoning the food of all on aboard, and then jammed everything that would float in the hold of the collier before they sank her. It is also possible that they scuttled or blew up the ship, escaped to a German vessel with whom they had been in signal communication and, after the destruction of the Cyclops, painstakingly destroyed all floating wreckage.

Route taken by the Cyclops on her last voyage

The same article described where a year before, a former marine sergeant said that a man with who he chanced to room in Texas with had left behind a diary.

The entries told of a story of how the writer along with four other men "packed dynamite around the engine of the Cyclops" with plans to escape to a waiting German vessel; only two of them made it. The writer of the diary, who was supposed to be a chance acquaintance of the marine, was never found.

The news story went on to describe that Lt. James M. Hays, navigating officer on the collier Orion, a month after the Cyclops was lost, sighted a life preserver and raft which he suspected belonged to the Cyclops. He reported it to the captain, but he refused to put the ship off her course to pick up what Hays had seen.

In February, 1920, Donald Fraser a Chicagoan reported that on Gun Key in the Bahamas he had found fragments of a lifeboat with the "U.S. Cyclops" stenciled on it. He also described a sunken hull of a ship, 2000 yards off the key. The Navy never found the wreckage.

…Not a bit of the wreckage nor sign of any description has been found. Usually a wooden bucket or a cork life preserver identified as belonging to the lost ship is picked up after a wreck, but not so with the Cyclops. She just disappeared as though some gigantic monster of the sea had grabbed her, men and all, and sent her into the depths of the ocean, and the sadness of her destruction is amplified by the absence of any wireless calls for help being picked up by any ship along the route that the Cyclops followed.
(The Santa Fe Magazine, Vol. 15, 1920.)

Gordon Dewees lost his life on the Cyclops when he was 18 years old

THE PRISONERS
On December 1917, Oscar Stewart, age 17, a 3rd class fireman was murdered as a result of an altercation on the armored cruiser USS Pittsburgh while at anchor with the South American Squadron off the coast of Brazil. He was found in a pool of blood in one of the boiler rooms.

Court-martialed for the offense were Bernard DeVoe, Moss Whiteside and James Coker. Whiteside received 15 years, DeVoe life in prison, and Coker death. With the exception of Coker, the others, including two deserters, were taken aboard the Cyclops as passengers, albeit in irons, bound for the brig at Portsmouth, N.H.

U.S. Consul to Barbados, C. Ludlow Livingston hinted in his letter that one of these men may have been executed on Worley's orders before they reached Barbados. It's unknown if this person was Coker, since his name does not appear on any of the Cyclops' lists.

In addition to the prisoners, forty-two men from the Pittsburgh were sent stateside on the Cyclops for reassignment.

After the loss of the Cyclops, a rumor circulated, one of many, that some of the men from the Pittsburgh were said to be friends of those convicted in connection with the murder. It was hinted that a mutiny had been planned. James Coker would be transferred to the Cyclops for his execution; their friends would mutiny to free his accomplices; the crew would mutiny to free Lieutenant Harvey Forbes, with the result that a captain known as the "damned Dutchman", who was going insane would lose command of the ship.

Whether these rumors were grounded in truth will never be known, as all those who could say otherwise took their truths, secrets and regrets to a watery grave.

Perhaps the Cyclops was cursed along with her sister ships, or claimed by a mysterious force that exists between those three points of the Devil's Triangle.

Although the ship disappeared on March 4, 1918, the designated date of death for every one on board is June 14, 1918. The loss of the Cyclops is often described as the single largest loss of U.S. Navy lives not directly involving combat.