THE KOBENHAVN MYSTERY

Evening Star, Issue 20510, 14 June 1930, Page 26

THE KOBENHAVN MYSTERY

A CREWLESS BARQUE MR LINDSAY'S STORY [By a Correspondent in ‘ The Times. ] The Danish training ship Kobenhavn, a steel five-masted barque with an auxiliary oil engine, sailed from Buenos Aires on December 14, 1928, for Australia. . She was spoken by a Norwegian stedmer eight days later, when she was 900 miles west of Tristan da Cunha and making good headway. After that she was never definitely heard of, and on September 8 was declared lost, an active search over several months, in which the British Admiralty lent assistance, having proved fruitless. There was a complement of sixty, of whom forty-five we,e Danish cadets.

On first reading the reports from Buenos Aires and later from New York that a Air Philip Lindsay, from Tristan da.Cunha, had seen the end of the missing Danish five-masted barque Kobenhavn, one was inclined a little towards scepticism. Mr Lindsay was lay preacher at Tristan da Cunha, relieved after three years. The reports, headed 4 Phantom Barque ’ and so on, referred vaguely to the apparition of a large sailing vessel which had been seen sailing towards Tristan from nowhere, and then had suddenly changed her course, when quite close to the beach, towards nowhere again. It was not what Mr Lindsay had - said that aroused scepticism, but the manner of its presentation in the newspapers. Then Mr Lindsay returned to Liverpool. I wrote to him, anxious to hear something further of this story. The date he mentioned —January 21, 1929 —fitted in approximately with the known movements of the Kobenhavn, Her story, in brief, is that, distinguished as the largest and best of the sailing ships still in commission, she sailed from Buenos Aires in mid-De-cember of 1928 bound to Australia to load wheat for the Continent, and never arrived. Steamers searched for her, sweeping large sections of the roaring forties and visiting St. Paul, New Amsterdam, and the Kerguelens. They found nothing. Other sailing ships, making the passage of the roaring forties about the time the Kobeuhavn should have been there, reported a heavy ice season. Two of them, the four-masted barque Herzogiu Cecilie and the full-rigged ship Grace Harwar, had narrow escapes item collision with roaming bergs. The Archibald Bussell, bound with timber from the Baltic to Australia, sighted 200 bergs in one day iu 41deg south, somewhere south of the Ca. eof Good Hope. It was generally concluded as the months passed and nothing of the Kobenhavn was found that she -tad somehow been lost in collision with the ice. That would have been easy enough. SHIPS AT TRISTAN. Tristan da Cunha was without means of communicating with the outside world. It is rarely visited. From time to time wireless sets of varying efficiency have been sent there, hut in the whole period of the search for the Kobenhavn mere was no means of getting into touch with the island. Somehow no one went to Tristan to investigate. There were at first some rumours of the Danish barque’s presence in the neighbourhood, since a sailing-ship had been sighted by a steamer not far away, hut it was discovered later that this ship was the Finnish four-masted barque Ponape, outward bound from Europe to Australia. Sailing ships making that passage are commonly found in the vicinity of Tristan. Coming down through the south-east trades with the wind close on the port beam they are driven westwards ni the' direction of South America, and so arrive at the horse latitudes and tho entrance to that stormy stretch of dangerous waters called .by sailors the roaring forties. Through _here_ they swing in a south-easterly direction, aiming to .make a landfall of Tristan in order .that they may correct their positions and have a check on -he accuracy of their instruments before actually beginning the passage of the often fogfilled and always gloomy forties A sailing ship is a long while at sea upon such a passage, and has few chances to correct her observations. I have seen Tristan twice from the sea in such ships, but in neither case did we approach nearer when once we definitely picked up the land. That was sufficient for our purpose. The discovery tiiat the ship seen in the neighbourhood was tho Ponape seemingly put Tristan out of all reckonings of the Kobenhavn’s fate until Mr Lindsay came back to civilisation.

That I actually saw the end of the Kobenhavn (he write; in answer to my request for information) is absolute rot; but there is not much doubt about the ship we saw. Long before 1 knew that the ship was missing I could describe her fairly accurately. She was five-masted, but her fore or main mast was broken. A huge white band round her hull was the most prominent mark. It was on January 21 last year that she passed. The course she was taking was due north, and

as she was roughly in the middle of the island, she would in the ordinary course of events have struck our

beach, where the settlement- was. However, when still a long way off (possibly seven miles and a-half) she seemed to be drifting to the eastward, and it was at this time that we watched her most. 'The sea was rough for our boats, which are made only of canvas, and so wo could do nothing but watch her gradually crawl past and run inside the reefs to the west side of the island.' . A DRIFTING DERELICT. She was certainly in distress. She was using only one small jib, which appeared to be set from the bow to

the broken mast, and her stern was very low in the water. It was almost down to the white band round her hull. This was all seen through glasses from a distance of about three and a-half miles, so that we could hardly be mistaken. The usual charts of Tristan have no reefs marked on them, and this is very dangerous, as the island is pretty well reef-hound, especially so where the Kobenhavn went in. I estimated

that she was within a quarter of a mile of the shore when we last saw her, and the reefs stand out about a mile and a-quarter, so she must have been well inside. We saw her no more after that, and the place where she went in was quite inaccessible. Several things were afterwards washed up, but I cannot say that they were from the Kobenhavn—dovetailed boards with buff paint on them, boxes about 3ft long by Sin broad by Sin deep, and then a 30ft flat-bottomed boat last September. To me it is a complete mystery. It would have been impossible for the ship to drift free of the reefs again

once being bound by them. Many questions remain to bo answered. Why didn’t she drop a lifeboat? Were they all dead? Had she been abandoned before reaching us? To such questions as those 1 can only answer that 1 do not know, but .1 am convinced that the ship which approached tho Tristan beach was the missing Kobenhavn. It sounds convincing. It is convincing. If the Tristan islanders saw a five-masted barque they saw the Kobenhavn. There was no other fivemasted barque then iu commission, and has been none for years. There never were many—perhaps six all told—in tho whole story of sail. There were tho two Frenchmen, both named France; the last of these was lost at New Caledonia years ago. There were the Germans Potosi and It. C. ILckmers. The Potosi alone survived tho war, sailing a while as the Flora under a South American flag. Then she caught fire, was abandoned, and la er found by a cruiser and sunk by shellfire. That definitely disposes of e.ery five-masted barque except the Kobenhavn, which was the last and the best of them all. There has been only one five-masted ship—the Preussen, lost in the Channel twenty years ago. The only other five-masted sailing vessels afloat are tho American schooners and barquentines, which are all built of wood and are little seen at sea in these days. None was missing then. None has gone missing since. ' are not so many that still survive. No_ other big sailing ship was on the missing list at the time Mr Lindsay saw this ship. To remember another ship that might account for tho derelict one must go back six years. Tho colour Mr Lindsay describes fits the Kobenhavn. She was painted black, with a broad white band. She was altogether an unmistakable ship. The only thing left to account _ for is how she came to bo there, drifting towards the Tristan beach, unmanned and derelict. She must have boon crewless, or her people would have taken to her boats. Here must lie a very great sea mystery—perhaps the greatest since the Marie Celeste. Granted that this ship was the Kobenhavn, what had happened? She had wireless and an auxiliary engine. She had a big crew and ample boats. She was. as sailing ships go, practically a new ship. She should in the ordinary course of events have reached Australia in forty-five days or so without tho use of her engine. She had made that passage before. By January 21 she was over a month out, and should therefore have been well past Tristan if nothing had gone wrong. She approached tho island, Mr Lindsay tells ns, from tho south. The obvious explanation seems to be that something caused her hasty abandonment before there was time to send a distress signal out by the use of the wireless; tho abandonment was premature, the crew lost, and v- e ship remained afloat and so came, borne by the currents, almost to the very beach of the Tristan settlement. The' partial dismasting and the absence of sails, except for the single headsail, might be accounted for after the abandonment. An unmanned ship —particularly a long, heavily-rigged ship such as she was—may safely bo trusted to lose her own masts in those stormy waters if she goes on long enough or at least to blow what sails may have been set out of their bolt ropes. She would, be caught aback, and her sails -would soon go. It is harder to blow out a storm headsail, and that may have stood. “ Explanations ’’ are merely speculatory, and Mr Lindsay has opened up

1 a great field for them. But one hazards the conjecture that collision with ice, causing the ship to make water alarmingly, brought about her hurried desertion. The Kobenhavn had a few watertight bulkheads iu her hold—the usual sailer has only one, right forward—and obviously these saved her. It would he impossible for tho ordinary steel sailing ship iu ballast to become waterlogged. But with the hold divided into watertight compartments, some of which were not injured, she might float. Generally when a sailing ship is abandoned her crew, Jying-to in the boats, endeavour to keep her in sight. But the region where tho Kobenhavn went is a belt of fogs and other disturbing elements, and it would have been easy lor the crow to lose sight of the ship. Or they might have abandoned her at night—they probably did, since that is the time of greatest chance of panic. Then the boats were all lost—perhaps they may not have been—and, down by the stern and partially dismasted, the Kobenhavn drifted on. THE FIVE SHEPHERDS. There remains one more point. If the Kobenhavn was lost finally among the reefs of Tristan, how came it that so little drifted ashore? But anyone who knows those parts, who has seen anything of other islands and of storms down there, will readily understand that the cliffs of Tristan might grind a hundred ships and leave of them nothing but a splinter or two of matchwood. That it was impossible ior the islanders to see tho end of a ship which apparently went to her doom so close to them seems curious. I. have not been ashore on Tristan, but I have visited several other islands in that belt—Campbell, the Aucklands, and the Macquaries. They are surely the- bleakest and most inhospitable places upon earth. At Campbell Island there are four harbours, and yet there is a stretch of its coastline that no one can see from anywhere on the island. It is hopelessly inaccessible. When I visited the island in a Norwegian whaling steamer returning from the Ross Sea in 1924 we found five young New Zealand shepherds who had been there for fifteen months. They told us that they had never seen this piece of coastline. For weeks on end it was often impossible for them to see anything. Whenever they went out from their hut to look after tho sheep they were accustomed to take' a week’s food with them and some dry wood and a tent in case they could not find their hut again for the fog. Yet the island covers only 50,000 acres or so. At the Aucklands I remember being shown from a spot on a high cliff the remains of a barque lying in tho sea beneath that no one had seen for fifteen years after Lor loss. It could ho seen only from that one position.