Shipwreck Mysteries: Lost Ships

The bell that tolled 113 times stopped a crowd and held them counting A single church bell rings out over a summer morning in Brighton, and a waiting crowd stands still, counting each stroke as it comes — one for every year belonging to a man born in a Victorian terrace and buried in the age of satellites and smartphones. He watched shells skip across the water at Jutland from a trawler's deck, then spent thirty years quietly drawing car body panels in Dagenham. What does it take for a witness like that to finally be found? In this episode, we trace the full span of Henry Allingham's life, from a fatherless boyhood in Walthamstow through two world wars to a funeral that became a nation's last formal goodbye to an entire generation, asking what a person owes to the things only they lived long enough to witness. Person: Henry Allingham Location: Brighton, England Date: 30 July 2009 Case: the funeral and 113-toll bell for the last Jutland survivor and RAF founding member Status: died 18 July 2009, aged 113 years and 42 days, natural causes, in his sleep - Born 6 June 1896 in London; his father died of tuberculosis when Henry was fourteen months old - Served with the Royal Naval Air Service from 1915, witnessing the Battle of Jutland from the deck of HMT Kingfisher - Transferred into the newly formed Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918, becoming one of its last surviving founding members - Worked as a car body engineer at Ford's Dagenham plant from 1934 until retiring in 1961 - Rediscovered as a public figure in 2001 at age 105 by Denis Goodwin, after eighty years of obscurity - Marched past the Cenotaph in 2005, the last First World War veteran ever to do so - Received a Chartered Engineer designation from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in 2008, at age 112 - Died on 18 July 2009 at the Blind Veterans UK centre in Ovingdean; his funeral bell at St Nicholas' Church tolled 113 times

The marble pillars that moved Waterloo's station ceiling to a wine cellar In a wine cellar in Cambridgeshire, marble pillars once held up the ceiling of the Long Bar at Waterloo railway station — not photographs, not casts, the originals, hauled out before demolition and set down among the bottles by a man who left school at fourteen. He built a caravan from Spitfire brakes and barrage balloon fabric, invented a roadside diner chain from eleven seats, and drove English wine to Paris in a pre-war Rolls-Royce. What made a hairdresser's son from Forest Gate decide that beautiful things were his to save? In this episode, we trace Samuel Alper's path from a night-school engineering course to Sprite caravans, Little Chef, and an English vineyard, asking what happens to the things one person rescues after that person is gone. Person: Samuel Alper Location: Chilford Hall, Linton, Cambridgeshire Date: not stated Case: marble pillars from waterloo station's long bar, relocated to a private wine cellar Status: survived a later arson attack that destroyed the adjoining barn complex; remain standing in the cellar, unused - Born April 11, 1924, in Forest Gate, Essex, to a hairdresser father; left school at fourteen and studied electrical engineering at night school - Served in the Fleet Air Arm during the war rewiring Swordfish biplanes - Built his first caravan in 1947 using magnesium wheel stock, Spitfire brakes, and barrage balloon fabric; the Sprite, launched under £200, sold 500 units in its first year - Opened Little Chef near Reading in 1958 with eleven seats; founded Caravans International in 1963, which won the Queen's Award for Enterprise in 1966, the year he was appointed OBE - Caravans International went into liquidation in 1982, while Alper's parallel projects at Chilford Hall — an 18-acre vineyard planted in 1972 and a relocated Curwen Print Study Centre in 1989 — continued - Died at Chilford Hall on October 2, 2002, at age 78

The snapped mast that forced her to rebuild a sail at sea She was a thousand nautical miles from land when the mast came down — alone in the Southern Ocean, seventy-two days into a solo attempt, with nothing around her but water that has traveled uninterrupted for thousands of miles. What does a person build from the wreckage when the nearest coast is still weeks away? In this episode, we follow Lisa Blair's path from hostess in the Whitsundays to record-chasing solo sailor, the seventy-two-day passage that ended in a knockdown, and the improvised repairs that carried her and Climate Action Now toward Cape Town. What does it take, hour by hour, to keep sailing once the thing built to get you there is gone? Person: Lisa Blair Location: Southern Ocean, en route to Cape Town Date: 2017 Case: dismasting roughly 1,000 nautical miles from land Status: reached Cape Town under a jury rig, then completed the circumnavigation with one stop - She began work on boats at age 25 as hospitality crew in the Whitsundays. - In 2008 she crossed the Pacific as delivery crew on a yacht bound for Hawaii. - She crewed Gold Coast Australia in the 2011-12 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, which won the overall trophy. - She bought a 2003 Hick 50 in 2015 and raced it in the 2015 Rolex Sydney to Hobart. - After seventy-two days solo in the Southern Ocean in 2017, the mast came down about one thousand nautical miles from land.

The Messdeck Door That Forced a Captain to Sit Down Eighty-three men lock themselves behind steel doors on a warship moored in a foreign river, and say nothing. Outside, a civil war is closing in on the capital city. Inside, a captain stands at the hatch with a word in his power that could end every one of those men's futures — so what does he do instead? In this episode, we trace HMCS Crescent from her wartime construction on the Clyde to a silent standoff on the Yangtze River in 1949, asking what a navy owes the men inside it when the rulebook offers only punishment. Person: not stated (the captain's name does not survive in the record) Location: Nanjing, China, on the Yangtze River Date: March 20, 1949 Case: the locked messdeck standoff aboard HMCS Crescent Status: no formal charges filed; the men eventually emerged and Crescent continued her posting - HMCS Crescent, a C-class destroyer, was laid down by John Brown and Company at Clydebank on September 16, 1943, and launched July 20, 1944 - Eighty-three junior sailors locked themselves into Crescent's messdecks on March 20, 1949, while the ship was on the Yangtze River near Nanjing - Within the same week, near-identical collective refusals occurred aboard HMCS Athabaskan at Manzanillo, Mexico, and HMCS Magnificent in the Caribbean - HMS Consort relieved Crescent at Nanjing on March 23, 1949; the People's Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze and took the city on April 23, 1949 - Crescent's ship's bell was used to baptize sailors' children between 1946 and 1957, and is now held by the Army, Navy and Air Force Veterans in Sidney, British Columbia - Crescent was rebuilt as an anti-submarine vessel in 1955, paid off in 1970, and broken up in Taiwan in 1971

The bomb that missed the battleship sank a sailor instead At five in the afternoon on September 6, 1931, every aircraft the Chilean Air Force owned flew over the harbor at Coquimbo and aimed for a single battleship sitting still in calm water. The bomb missed. What it hit instead — and what that miss could not stop — is a story that starts with unpaid wages and ends with a government bombing its own navy. How does a labor dispute over a thirty percent salary cut turn into twenty-six warships in open mutiny against the state that built them? In this episode, we trace the 1931 Chilean naval mutiny from Petty Officer Ernesto Gonzalez's first cable demanding rescinded pay cuts to the government's full military response, asking how a nation gutted by the Great Depression turned its own bombers on its own fleet. Person: Petty Officer Ernesto Gonzalez Location: Coquimbo naval anchorage, Chile Date: September 6, 1931 Case: the air raid intended for the battleship Almirante Latorre Status: mutineers surrendered unconditionally at Valparaíso on September 7, 1931; all were pardoned within a year - On August 31, 1931, enlisted sailors seized the battleship Almirante Latorre and, by dawn, all fourteen ships then at Coquimbo - The League of Nations had named Chile the country most damaged by the Great Depression, with 130,000 unemployed in a population under five million - Finance Minister Pedro Blanquier's thirty percent salary cut followed a prior ten percent reduction and the outright cancellation of accumulated bonuses - The Southern Fleet joined from Talcahuano on September 3, bringing the mutiny to twenty-six ships, plus the Arica and Maipo army regiments on land - The September 6 raid on Coquimbo used two Junkers heavy bombers, fourteen Curtiss Falcon and Vickers Vixen light bombers, two Vickers-Wibault fighters, and two modified Ford transports, but struck the submarine Quidora instead of the Almirante Latorre, killing one man and wounding another

A single bale of cotton ignited the hold and blew up a city The smell of smoke reached the dockworkers just after two in the afternoon, drifting up from a hold packed with raw cotton, lubricating oil, and something far more volatile hidden beneath it. On most ships, a thread of smoke like that means a manageable problem. This was not most ships. What was stacked below deck that afternoon in Bombay's Victoria Dock would leave a harbour giving up its secrets for the next sixty-seven years — so what exactly was down there, and why did no one raise the flag that would have warned everyone in time? In this episode, we trace the voyage of the SS Fort Stikine from Birkenhead to Bombay, the wartime decisions that packed her hold with explosives, gold, and cotton, and the explosion that followed — asking how so many separate, ordinary failures were allowed to stack on top of each other until a city paid for them. Person: Captain Alexander James Naismith Location: Victoria Dock, Bombay Date: April 14, 1944 Case: the explosion of the SS Fort Stikine Status: roughly 800 dead, the docks destroyed, and cargo still surfacing from the harbour floor decades later - The Fort Stikine carried 238 tons of category-A explosives stored beneath 8,700 bales of raw cotton and barrels of lubricating oil - 124 gold bars, each weighing nearly 25 kilograms, were packed into the hold in 31 wooden crates - The ship never flew the required red B flag signaling dangerous cargo - 66 firefighters were among the 231 dock and fire personnel killed fighting the blaze - The explosion was felt as a tremor at Shimla, over 1,700 kilometers away, and heard 80 kilometers from Bombay - British-Indian censorship delayed press reports for nearly a month, while Japanese-controlled Radio Saigon broadcast the story the very next day - The last recovered gold bar surfaced in February 2011, and a live 45-kilogram shell was dredged up that October — 66 and 67 years after the explosion

The tallow cask's crooked brand matched a lost ship and killed forty‑nine On a beach at Lord Howe Island, a resident found a salt-crusted tallow cask with a crooked brand burned into its side — the middle letter smaller than the other two, as if the iron had slipped. Weeks earlier the same man had found a charred case of benzine and fragments of a boat, with no idea a ship was even missing. What did that mark actually connect, and why did it take two and a half weeks for anyone beyond that island to find out? In this episode, we trace the final voyage of the SS Canastota from her Sydney departure through the silence that followed, the search that missed her by hundreds of miles, and the debris that told Lord Howe Island residents what no radio could, asking how a ship carrying hundreds of thousands of gallons of volatile cargo was allowed to sail with the safeguards everyone in the chain knew were missing. Person: Captain Andrew Joseph Lockie Location: Tasman Sea, between Sydney and Lord Howe Island Date: June 13, 1921 Case: a tallow cask branded T-o-T found washed ashore on Lord Howe Island Status: ship and crew never found, formal court inquiry never convened - The SS Canastota sailed from Port Jackson on the evening of Monday, June 13, 1921, carrying 50,950 cases of benzine and motor spirit — 407,600 imperial gallons — and forty-nine crew. - Wharf labourers at Brisbane and Newcastle refused to load or unload the cargo because of fumes; no loading permit was ever applied for at Brisbane. - R.O. Crockett, Acting Superintendent of the Explosives Department, testified that a standard New York–Australia voyage produced roughly one percent leakage from benzine drums, with each additional handling adding at least another one percent. - Herbert Thomas Wilson found a charred benzine case on Lord Howe Island on July 14, 1921, and the branded tallow cask on July 27; the island had no radio and the news did not reach Sydney until the steamer Makambo called on August 1. - The Preliminary Inquiry, conducted by Captain Fergus Cumming and delivered September 1, 1921, concluded Canastota was destroyed by fire or explosion shortly after leaving Sydney; Crown Solicitor John Varnell Tillet advised against a formal Court of Marine Inquiry, and the only penalty issued was a two-pound fine against Dalgety and Company on November 18, 1921.

A misplaced crate of lithium batteries ignited the ship and erased a $750M carrier At eight fifty a.m. on July twelfth, 2020, a fire broke out in the lower vehicle-storage deck of USS Bonhomme Richard, docked in San Diego for routine maintenance. It burned for four days, gutted eleven of fourteen decks, and injured sixty-three sailors — and when investigators finally looked for someone to blame, they found broken hoses, unclosed hatches, untrained crews, and, eventually, a twenty-year-old seaman apprentice charged with arson. Did he do it — and if he didn't, who or what actually destroyed a warship with more than two decades of service? In this episode, we trace the fire aboard USS Bonhomme Richard from ignition to acquittal, asking how a ship that survived combat deployments and humanitarian missions could be lost in port during peacetime maintenance — and whether the institution that built her ever answered for it. Person: Seaman Apprentice Ryan Sawyer Mays Location: Naval Base San Diego Date: July 12, 2020 Case: fire aboard USS Bonhomme Richard Status: mays acquitted on both charges; fire's cause never legally established; ship decommissioned and scrapped - The fire burned from July 12 to July 16, 2020, taking four days to extinguish and consuming eleven of the ship's fourteen decks - The Navy sold the ship's hull for scrap at $3,660,000, against an estimated replacement cost of about $4 billion - Mays was charged under Article 126 (aggravated arson) and Article 110 (hazarding a vessel) of the UCMJ - After an eleven-day trial beginning September 19, 2022, the military judge acquitted Mays on both charges on September 30, 2022 - Retired Vice Admiral Richard Brown received a letter of censure in July 2022; twenty sailors total were punished, including Captain Gregory Thoroman, Captain Michael Ray, and Command Master Chief Jose Hernandez - Bonhomme Richard was formally decommissioned on April 15, 2021

The wheelchair that rolled off the deck and pulled a man into the sea An empty wheelchair sits on the deck of a cruise liner in the eastern Mediterranean. Its owner has already gone into the water below, and the ship beneath them both has been accumulating disaster for nearly half a century. What chain of collisions, fires, and a war-delayed hull brought this vessel to that exact morning? In this episode, we trace the life of the vessel from a 1938 Dutch order through wartime interruption, postwar launch and decades of incidents, and ask how every collision, refit and fire led toward the moment the wheelchair left the railing. Person: Leon Klinghoffer Location: eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Egypt Date: October 8, 1985 Case: a wheelchair and its occupant going overboard from a cruise liner Status: ship sank in 1994; wreck never located - Leon Klinghoffer was sixty-nine years old when he was shot and pushed overboard from his wheelchair on October 8, 1985. - The ship was ordered in 1938 and construction began in 1939 at the Koninklijke Maatschappij De Schelde shipyard in Vlissingen. - Work halted during World War II after two bombing raids left the half-completed hull exposed for six years. - The ship was launched in July 1946 and completed in late 1947 as the Willem Ruys, 192 metres long and 21,119 gross register tons originally. - A 1958-1959 refit added 100 cabins, extended air-conditioning, raised the forward funnel and increased tonnage to 23,000 gross register tons.

An unattended cigarette ignited gasoline vapor and blew apart LST‑353 Eighty drums of high-octane fuel sat stacked fifteen feet from an ordnance elevator, where army stevedores with no training in handling live rounds were unloading mortar shells from a landing craft nested among dozens of others at Pearl Harbor's West Loch. Within minutes, the pier was a fireball visible across the harbor, six ships were sunk, and the U.S. Navy sealed the inquiry for sixteen years. What actually triggered the first blast, and why did the government let the graves of the dead read only "Unknown" for decades? In this episode, we trace the West Loch disaster of May 1944 from the crowded piers of Tare Eight to a still-unresolved debris field on the Pacific floor, asking how far a wartime government will go to protect an invasion timetable, and what that silence costs the men who die for it. Person: Francis P. Hammerberg Location: West Loch, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Date: May 21, 1944 Case: the explosion of LST-353 and the destruction of six landing ships Status: declassified in 1960, sixteen years later, with the death toll still disputed - LST-353 exploded at 3:08 p.m. on May 21, 1944, at Tare Eight, igniting nested Landing Ships Tank loaded for Operation Forager, the invasion of the Mariana Islands. - The Naval Board of Inquiry convened the next day, ruled out a Japanese attack, and concluded the disaster was preventable; Admiral Ernest King called it "not an act of God," yet no courts-martial or reprimands followed. - Official casualty figures range from an initial report of 27 dead and 100 missing to a 2005 Sea Classics estimate of 392 dead, with 163 the most widely cited figure. - Navy diver Francis P. Hammerberg died in a salvage cave-in on February 17, 1945, and received the only Medal of Honor awarded for a non-combat action in World War II, at a time when the disaster that killed him was still classified. - Gravestones in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific read only "Unknown" until Congress ordered them amended in the 2000s to read "Unknown, West Loch Disaster, May 21, 1944." - Three confirmed pieces of a Japanese Ko-hyoteki class midget submarine have been found in the same offshore debris field where 1944 salvage wreckage was dumped, raising the theory that the fifth, unaccounted-for midget sub from the Pearl Harbor attack was recovered and discarded without being identified.