Billions of dollars of lost gold, a World War I ghost ship, and a submarine that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. Finding any one of these shipwrecks could rewrite history, but to this day, they're still lost to time.
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00:00Billions of dollars of lost gold, a World War I ghost ship, and a submarine that disappeared
00:05in the Bermuda Triangle.
00:07Finding any one of these shipwrecks could rewrite history, but to this day, they're
00:11still lost to time.
00:14Every schoolchild in the U.S. knows the three ships that carried Christopher Columbus to
00:17the Americas — the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
00:21Yet, familiar as those names may be, we don't actually know much about what happened to
00:25them.
00:26And, of course, those weren't really the names of the ships, but that's for another
00:30Anyway, the Niña and the Pinta eventually returned to Europe, but the Santa Maria, once
00:34the flagship of the three, was wrecked on a reef near Haiti on December 24, 1492.
00:38Now, the timbers were reportedly salvaged to construct a nearby settlement, but upon
00:43Christopher Columbus' return to the area in 1493, it had burned down, and any crewmembers
00:48left behind had either died or left.
00:51Nothing of the Santa Maria-derived settlement has definitively been found, nor have searches
00:55along the reef uncovered the remains of a 15th-century ship that would fit the bill.
00:59In 2014, a marine archaeologist named Barry Clifford did claim to have uncovered the wreck.
01:04How sure are you that this is the Santa Maria?
01:08I'm extremely confident.
01:10But a UNESCO team concluded that what Clifford had found came from a much later shipwreck,
01:15meaning that the search for the Santa Maria continues.
01:18While much has been made of the Titanic, there are other major ocean liner disasters that
01:22deserve at least as much attention.
01:25And while the wreck of the Titanic was finally discovered, the 20th-century cruise liner
01:28S.S.
01:29Warratah was not only dramatically lost, but remains unfound.
01:33The Warratah was a large, luxurious British liner meant to travel between Europe and Australia.
01:38It left London on its first voyage in 1908, stopping off in Cape Town, South Africa, before
01:42heading to Adelaide, Australia, and then making a safe return to London in early 1909.
01:47The second voyage was less uneventful.
01:51In June 1909, so three years before the Titanic, the Warratah docked in Australia.
01:56There it loaded up with cargo that included 880 tons of lead and 7,800 bars of metal bullion,
02:02along with 215 passengers and 119 crew.
02:06It made it to Durban, South Africa, where engineer Claude Sawyer disembarked after noticing
02:10the alarming way the ship rolled in the waves.
02:13Sawyer was grimly correct.
02:15The Warratah left Durban and, apart from a sighting by a passing ship, was never seen
02:19again.
02:21Historical theories for the disappearance focused on possible structural flaws in the
02:24ship, an overloaded cargo hold, bad weather, and even an explosion.
02:28But despite intense efforts to recover the wreck, nothing's come up.
02:32Even a champion of the effort, filmmaker Emlyn Brown, concluded in 2004 that the search for
02:37the Warratah had hit a wall.
02:39So when you think about lost shipwrecks, you usually picture them lying under the vast
02:43waters of our planet's oceans.
02:45But there are also mysteries hidden in some relatively smaller bodies of water, like with
02:49Michigan.
02:51At one point in the Great Lakes, in Lake Superior, lies some 1,332 feet below the surface.
02:56It's no wonder, then, that the Great Lakes still hide some of the most mysterious shipwrecks
03:00in history.
03:01One of the most famous may be Lake Griffin, which sank somewhere in northern Lake Michigan
03:05in 1679.
03:07Led by René Robert Cavillier, Sir de La Salle, the ship set off on an arduous voyage across
03:12the Great Lakes, often needing to be hauled by hand between the lakes, to the northern
03:16coast of Lake Michigan.
03:18The goal was to collect furs for trading, and in September 1679, La Salle sent Lake
03:23Griffin ahead to begin the return journey to sell their wares.
03:26But as autumn came, it became clear that Lake Griffin had vanished.
03:29Was it mutiny?
03:30A storm?
03:31To this day, no clear evidence for the ship's fate has been found, including its wreck.
03:36"...probably the most sought-after shipwreck in the Great Lakes.
03:39It's quite literally the holy grail, if you will, of shipwrecks."
03:43There have been multiple false positives over the years, most recently in 2024 when two
03:47divers told the Detroit Free Press that they believed that they had found what remained
03:51of Lake Griffin near a small island south of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
03:55But others were vocally skeptical, saying that the underwater footage shows a 19th-century
03:59wreck.
04:00To them, the search for Lake Griffin remains ongoing.
04:04The 16th-century Flor de la Mar was the pride of Portugal.
04:07At least, it wasn't the beginning.
04:09After Portugal took the rich port of Malacca, now part of southwest Malaysia, and loaded
04:13the Flor de la Mar with treasure, things went wrong.
04:17Departing Malacca on November 1511, the ship skirted Sumatra and encountered a tempest
04:21so fierce that the Flor de la Mar broke apart.
04:24The treasure sank to the bottom of the ocean, and some 400 sailors died.
04:27Naturally, the wreck of the Flor de la Mar has attracted many treasure hunters in the
04:31intervening centuries.
04:32The ship reportedly contained a staggering 80 tons of gold, along with chests full of
04:37jewels and coins that would make any pirate swoon with joy.
04:40Only no one's been able to find it.
04:42Perhaps it was quietly looted by locals, or just possibly, it's still out there waiting
04:47to be found.
04:49The disappearance of the Andrea Gale was certainly a tragedy, although only a local one at first.
04:54And it probably would have remained that way if not for an aspiring freelance writer named
04:58Sebastian Younger, who lived in the ship's home port of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
05:02Younger first published a story in Outside magazine in 1994 that detailed the disappearance
05:06of the Andrea Gale.
05:08That story became a non-fiction book, The Perfect Storm, which sold over 5 million copies
05:12and inspired the 2000 film of the same name.
05:15Billy, these storms have collided!
05:17They are exploding!
05:19Andrea Gale encountered a massive storm somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland, and presumably
05:24sank with her crew of six on October 29, 1991.
05:28A brief conversation between the Andrea Gale's captain, Billy Tyne, and fellow fishing boat
05:32captain Linda Greenlaw referenced the lousy weather, but was otherwise unremarkable.
05:38After that, the ship disappeared, with no radio communications indicating trouble.
05:41When it became clear that something had gone wrong, the U.S. Coast Guard began searching,
05:45but the efforts were called off after 10 days.
05:48The next month, the ship's emergency beacon washed ashore, but nothing else on the ship
05:52has ever been recovered.
05:53And although millions of people became familiar with the story through Younger's book and
05:57the film, the real-life wreck of the Andrea Gale has never been found.
06:01Finding it may or may not provide much new evidence about that fateful October night,
06:05but it would surely bring some closure to the families of the six men who were on board.
06:10Look, we all know that oceans are some pretty big places, but nothing really hammers home
06:14the vastness of the seas like the U.S. Navy losing one of its biggest ships.
06:19How big?
06:20In 1918, the USS Cyclops was one of the largest in the entire fleet, coming in at 540 feet
06:25long and 65 feet wide.
06:28Originally, it was a civilian vessel meant to transport coal, but it was pressed into
06:31military service once the U.S. entered World War I in 1970.
06:35On its last voyage, the Cyclops traveled to Rio de Janeiro to drop off nearly 10,000 tons
06:40of coal and return to Baltimore with 11,000 tons of manganese, needed for the steel industry,
06:45a key component of the ongoing war effort.
06:48On the way back home, the Cyclops took an unexpected resupply stop in Barbados.
06:53But after leaving port in Barbados, the ship never reappeared.
06:57More than 300 sailors were aboard, yet no communications beyond a terse, whether fair
07:01or well, were received.
07:04Finding the wreck — presumably somewhere in the Atlantic between Maryland and Barbados
07:08— would likely provide some answers.
07:10But despite the efforts of explorers and some of the crew members' descendants, no trace
07:14of the lost Cyclops has ever been found.
07:17During World War I, there was an increased demand for ships of war, including minesweepers
07:21meant to search out and neutralize enemy explosives.
07:24Their manufacturing partner for the French Navy was the Canadian Car and Foundry Company,
07:28which built 12 minesweepers for France during the course of the war.
07:33Manufactured in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the ships were sent in small groups through Lake
07:36Superior, moving via canals and the other Great Lakes to the Atlantic.
07:40The final three included the Sebastopol, Inkerman, and Sarasols, which left in November 1918.
07:46While they were midway across Lake Superior, the trio encountered a fierce storm.
07:50The ships lost sight of one another, and while the Sebastopol made it to safety, neither
07:54the Inkerman nor the Sarasols was ever seen again.
07:58The Sebastopol's crew assumed the other two had simply gotten ahead and that they'd rendezvous
08:01with the next port, which meant it took days before anyone realized something was wrong.
08:06Despite a large search, the missing ships were never found.
08:09It's as if those vessels just vanished off the face of the Earth.
08:12Why have these two ships been so hard to find?
08:15There are tales of the sunken minesweepers that have surfaced occasionally, including
08:18one eerie legend of human remains sporting a French Navy uniform found on a Lake Superior
08:23shore in 1919.
08:25Certainly something of the Inkerman and Sarasols remained in the depths of Lake Superior, though
08:30whether or not someone will find the wreckage and answer lingering questions about the ships
08:34remains to be seen.
08:36High-tech expeditions using side-scan sonar haven't yet found the minesweepers, though
08:40it's possible that one day they'll turn up.
08:43The Bechemo story began in 1914, when the cargo steamer left the shipbuilding yards
08:47of Gothenburg, Sweden, for its new home in Germany.
08:50It was turned over to Britain after World War I, and by 1920, it had been sold to the
08:54Hudson's Bay Company.
08:56It began operating on the icy western shores of Canada and Alaska.
08:59It was a harsh environment by any stretch, where ships were often at risk of getting
09:04caught in the ice.
09:05But luck ran out in 1931, when a September storm battered the already-worn ship.
09:09By October, the Bechemo was locked in ice.
09:13Most of the crew left via aircraft, while some set up camp nearby to keep an eye on
09:17the ship and its cargo.
09:19But one morning, after a blizzard, they emerged to see that the Bechemo had disappeared.
09:22It didn't sink, though.
09:24It stayed afloat, and occasionally reappeared.
09:27She was spotted over a dozen times over the years, the last time in 1969.
09:32That's 38 years later.
09:34After that, the Bechemo was presumed to have finally sunk beneath the waves.
09:38Either that, or it's still out there, a mysterious ghost ship sailing the frozen seas.
09:44Among the submarines put into service during World War II, few were more astonishing than
09:47the French Surcoupe.
09:49Built in the late 1920s, it was 361 feet long, weighed in at 2,880 tons, and carried a crew
09:56of 150.
09:57This included some serious artillery, including two 8-inch guns and 14 torpedo tubes, as well
10:02as a seaplane.
10:04The Surcoupe spent much of its time during World War II escorting Allied craft in the
10:08Atlantic and Pacific.
10:09However, in early 1942, something went wrong.
10:13In Nova Scotia, for Tahiti, the Surcoupe was meant to cross into the Pacific via the
10:17Panama Canal.
10:18It never made it, and nobody ever saw it again.
10:21So what happened?
10:23One likely possibility is that the Surcoupe was struck by a friendly vessel.
10:26The evening of February 18, the American freighter Thompson Likes was in the area, and the crew
10:30reported that they had struck something partially submerged.
10:34Whether that something really was the Surcoupe remains a mystery.
10:37Finding the wreck of this long-lost submarine could potentially answer the question of its
10:40wartime end, and at least bring some closure to family members of the lost crew.