The Waratah in Port Adelaide, Australia, just before her final voyage

SS Waratah: The Titanic that Disappeared

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re on another sea voyage, and around here, those never end well. But let’s head out!

On July 26, 1909, the steamship SS Waratah left Durban, South Africa, on 3-day a voyage to Cape Town. She’d begun the trip in Australia, and from South Africa, she was headed back to Europe, with 211 people on board. She was a grand ship, expected to spend many years making the crossing between Australia and Europe in lavish style, just like the Titanic on its Europe-to-America route.

Both ships would suffer awful fates. It’s just that in the case of the Waratah, we don’t know exactly what went wrong. The ship known today as Australia’s Titanic went down with no witnesses, and no one left alive to tell the tale.

There are two big clues to the Waratah’s fate. #1 is that the ship was widely reported to be “unstable.” That meant when the Waratah rolled from side to side with the motion of the sea, she took a long time to come back upright. This might have been a design issue, possibly even done on purpose to keep a gentle roll for passenger comfort. Or it could have been the fact that the Waratah took both passengers and cargo on different trips, which made loading (and thus stability) complicated. The Waratah was less than two years old, which meant it was up to the latest safety standards, but largely untested on the open sea.

Whether the Waratah was more unstable than other ships of the time is debated. The inquiry into the disappearance received contradictory opinions from experts and former passengers. One passenger on Waratah’s final trip, Claude Gustav Sawyer, was so unnerved by the rolling ship that he disembarked in Durban and took another ship to Cape Town. Thus he is the only survivor of Waratah’s fatal voyage.

Clue #2 is that when the Waratah left Durban, there was terrible weather, with high waves and harsh winds. In fact, two days later, the storm developed into a cyclone. While waters around South Africa are often rough, this was especially bad.

The Waratah’s first-class lounge/music room

However, it’s also possible the ship became disabled and drifted. The Waratah carried no radio, which was normal at the time, so there would be no distress signal sent. But because the sea lanes around Cape Town are so heavily trafficked, for the Waratah to disappear, she would have had to drift south toward Antarctica. If so, she might even have hit an iceberg, Titanic-style. Certainly the wreckage would be nearly impossible to find in such a vast and changeable area.

Contemporary searchers hoped the ship was still afloat, because the Waratah carried provisions for a year, and could wait for a rescue. But no sign of the ship has ever been found. 

And now for some high seas writing prompts!

• Death is coming. Passenger Claude Gustav Sawyer did not only disembark the Waratah because he feared she would capsize. He also had a creepy dream that he took to be a bad omen: a man holding a sword and a bloody cloth. Sailing is a superstitious endeavor, probably because the sea is vast and powerful and ships are comparatively tiny and weak. A passenger or crew member has little control over their fate on the open ocean, and so superstitions arise to return that sense of control. The Final Destination series is based on the idea of premonitions of doom before voyages. But you could write a story where the premonition lies. What if Mr. Sawyer had a dream of clear skies and sunny seas? What if that happy dream calmed him (and maybe even other passengers) so much that they chose to stay on a ship they thought might be unsafe?

• Frozen ghosts. You could write a story about a ship like the Waratah being found frozen in the antarctic ice. Maybe the discovery happens soon after the disappearance, which is somewhat plausible, or many years later, which is not. But that’s okay, this is fiction! So who would find the ship? Shipwreck detectives with a theory to prove? A scientific expedition? Castaways from another lost ship? The Waratah boarders might find log books, evidence of damage, or even frozen passengers and crew.

• The last place you’d expect. What if the Waratah was found…but not where she should be. Somewhere she couldn’t possibly have drifted or gone down, like Greenland or the English Channel. We’re probably writing a speculative story at this point, so possible explanations include teleportation, aliens, magic, cursed objects, or a hollow Earth. You could also give your story the wild, modern-day MH370-type conspiracy treatment: someone could have sailed the Waratah secretly somewhere else, in disguise, for some nefarious purpose.

• Call out the spirits. 211 people lost their lives on the Waratah, leaving countless friends and family members behind. You could write a dramatic treatment of bereavement, focusing on a relentless search for answers by those left behind. If you want to get speculative, you can throw in a psychic connection between parted lovers that never quite faded, or an attempt to make contact with the lost passengers via seance. Just the way Arthur Conan Doyle did in real life. No, really.

• Castaway. What if there were survivors of the Waratah sinking? Perhaps the ship was disabled and drifting, so some folks set out in a life boat. Or maybe the ship went down, and a few people got away on floating wreckage. A survival drama is a great place to examine themes of life, death, loss, religion, hunger, and violence. Your survivors could make contact with another ship, land on some nearby island, or just drift, forever undiscovered.

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! Wherever you go next, I hope you have a steady voyage.

Sources & further reading:

‘Australia’s Titanic’ – the sinking of the SS Waratah: State Library South Australia

The Silence of the Sea: The Mystery of the ‘unsinkable’ Waratah: Bow Creek to Anatahan

SS Waratah: Wikipedia