SS Marine Sulphur Queen

On 2 February 1963 the SS Marine Sulphur Queen, a wartime T2 tanker rebuilt three years earlier to carry 15,260 tons of molten sulphur, sailed from Beaumont, Texas, for Norfolk, Virginia. At 01:25 on 4 February a crewman used the radio to place a buy order for wheat with his broker in Tampa, as Newsweek reported a month later; the ship was then somewhere near 25 45' N, 86 00' W, in the Gulf of Mexico, and nothing was ever heard from her again. All thirty-nine men aboard were lost. A search covering 348,400 square miles found nothing, and a second search off Key West brought up nine kinds of floating gear and no wreckage. The Coast Guard's inquiry found a ship whose conversion had cut down her keel and removed nine watertight bulkheads, whose logs recorded twelve fires or uses of the steam smothering system between August 1961 and December 1962, and whose last crack had been hammered shut by the chief engineer on the day she sailed. It offered four possible causes, refused to rank them, and stated that the exact cause could not be determined. A federal court went further in 1972: the ship was unseaworthy, and "no one knows how the ship was lost". The Bermuda Triangle got her anyway.

She was nineteen years old and she was an experiment. Built at the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1944 as the SS Esso New Haven, she was one of the mass-produced T2-SE-A1 turbo-electric tankers of the war programme: 504 feet long by 68.2 in the beam, 7,240 gross tons, a Westinghouse turbo-electric drive of 7,240 shaft horsepower, official number 245295. In the latter part of 1960 the Bethlehem Steel Company shipyard at Baltimore rebuilt her insides to carry molten sulphur, a cargo that until then no self-propelled ship had carried exclusively, and she was renamed Marine Sulphur Queen. She belonged to the Marine Sulphur Transport Corporation and was run under bareboat charter by Marine Transport Lines, Inc., both at 11 Broadway, New York. What the conversion did to her is the whole of this story, and it is set out in the Coast Guard's own findings. To make room for one continuous independent tank 306 feet long, 30 feet 6 inches wide and 33 feet high — internally divided into four sulphur tanks — the yard removed every transverse bulkhead in the way of the original centre tanks. Nine watertight bulkheads amidships were replaced by one watertight bulkhead at frame 59, two partial diaphragm bulkheads and six bolted top connections, and the Board found flatly that "the replacement members did not possess the strength of the original watertight bulkheads." To seat the tank, the centre vertical keel between frames 46½ and 72½ was cut down from 7 feet 6 inches to a constant 3 feet 4 inches, and the centreline deck girder from 5 feet 1 inch to 2 feet 8 inches. The tank sat in a void with about three and a half feet under it, two feet at the sides and three feet over the top, and it moved: it was bolted through slotted holes so it could grow lengthwise when heated, and one expert put the extra tensile stress on the hull at about 2,000 psi. Crewmen heard the tank expanding as loud noises throughout the ship. She began carrying molten sulphur in January 1961 and she leaked, burned and cracked from almost the first voyage. On 8 April 1961 a major spill at Carteret, New Jersey, drove sulphur down onto the insulation of No. 1 tank and into the void below; about 4,500 square feet of insulation had to be replaced. A second spill followed on 28 December 1961 at No. 3 pump house. In late 1961 a crack about 12 inches long opened in the steel of the starboard sump at the after end of No. 4 tank; it was veed out, welded and doubled in February 1962, and a second crack developed in the same area afterwards. From the late summer of 1962 until the day she sailed for the last time, molten sulphur leaked from the insulation at the after end of No. 4 tank on every loaded voyage, and the crew had to shovel the solidified sulphur out of the bilges each time to stop it plugging the suctions. When she left Beaumont on 2 February 1963 there were an estimated 20 to 70 tons of set sulphur lying in her bottom. That second crack had not been repaired: the Board records that it "was peened over by the Chief Engineer in Beaumont while loading cargo for the voyage commencing on 2 February 1963 and found tight." The real repair was booked for the March 1963 yard period. The fires are in her own logs. Deck and engine room smooth logs record fires or the use of the steam smothering system on 24 August 1961, 7 and 8 October 1961, 15 February 1962, 16 and 20 October 1962, 3 November 1962 and on 22, 26, 27, 28 and 29 December 1962; all but the first were in the void spaces, in insulation soaked with sulphur. They were pie-shaped, seldom more than a few square feet, usually not put out by steam, and in almost every case the master or a crewman went down into the void with a fresh-air mask and doused them with fresh water. Previous crew members testified that they felt little or no alarm about them, and that the general alarm was never sounded. She had also grounded twice at Tampa on 13 October 1961, ridden out hurricane Carla on 7-9 September 1961 (after which an 18-inch fracture was found in shell plate strake F at web frame 61) and hurricane Ella in October 1962, and her log for 4 March 1962 notes that heavy seas and deep swells were "noted to put racking stress on the vessel." Her last cargo, 15,260 tons of molten sulphur at 273-276°F, went aboard between 1915 on 1 February and 0600 on 2 February 1963. She left the Beaumont dock at 1330 CST and dropped her pilot at the Sabine Bar Sea Buoy about 1900, bound for Norfolk with an ETA of noon on 7 February. At 0125 EST on 4 February RCA Radio took a personal message from a crew member. Newsweek, reporting a month later, named him: able seaman Willie Manuel, putting in a buy order for 5,000 bushels of May wheat with his broker in Tampa. That is the last thing anyone ever heard from the Marine Sulphur Queen. Her estimated position was 25°45' N, 86°00' W, reckoned from a speed of advance of 14.5 knots — some 183 nautical miles west-north-west of the Dry Tortugas, in the Gulf of Mexico. At noon the day before, the SS Texaco California, about 38 miles away, had logged northerly winds of force 6 to 11 and her decks awash. RCA called her at 1123 on 4 February and got nothing. She was not reported overdue until 2100 EST on 7 February, and the Board later found that the operating company had explained away the missing 48-hour and 24-hour arrival messages as bad weather and then waited several hours past her ETA before telephoning: "as a result of this delay, very valuable time was lost in instituting the search for the vessel and/or possible survivors." The search began at 0800 on 8 February and ran to 13 February: 83 sorties, 499.6 flight hours, 348,400 square miles, and 42 ships that might have seen her all checked out with negative results. Nothing was found. Then, on 20 February, a U.S. Navy torpedo retriever boat working about 12 miles south-west of Key West picked a fog horn and a life jacket out of the water, both stencilled with her name. A second search followed, and the Navy hunted for the hulk from 20 February to 13 March with six vessels and 523 hours on scene. Everything ever recovered from her fits in one sentence of the report: 8 life jackets, 5 life rings, 2 name boards, 1 shirt, 1 piece of an oar, 1 storm oil can, 1 gasoline can, 1 cone buoy and 1 fog horn. Experts from the Bureau of Standards, the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Fisheries examined it at Washington; two life jackets and the shirt tied to one of them had been worn by people; the tears in the jackets indicated attack by predatory fish; the FBI found no laundry marks on the shirt and no trace of sulphur on anything; and nothing showed any sign of fire or explosion. The search was called off at 1740 on 14 March 1963. One loose end is worth keeping. On or before 29 April 1963 a note in a whisky bottle turned up on a spoil island in Laguna Madre, near Corpus Christi. It was written in ballpoint on a piece of manila paper, unsigned, and spoke of an explosion and two men hurt; it carried a rough map of the Gulf, the Florida Straits and Cuba with a circled X marked "SHIP". A federal questioned-documents examiner compared it with crew signatures and a letter one man had written to his sister and concluded it was the hand of a particular member of the crew. The Board still ruled it out, on two grounds: the Director of the Coast and Geodetic Survey said the bottle could not have drifted to Corpus Christi from anywhere east of 85° W without days of strong south-easterly wind, and on 3 and 4 February the wind was northerly; and writing the note, bottling it, taping it and dropping it would have taken time in which a distress message could have been sent instead. Thirty-nine men went down with her, and their names are not a secret. The master was James V. Fanning of Beaumont; the chief mate George E. Watson of Galveston; the radio officer George E. Sloat of Baltimore; the chief engineer Leon B. Clauser of Beaumont. Others were Adam Martin Jr. of Austin, Willie T. Manuel of Ville Platte, Louisiana — the wheat speculator — Jesse I. Vicera, the pumpman, born in Naval, Leyte, in the Philippines and living in Linden, New Jersey, and Aaron Heard, wiper, of Norfolk, Virginia. The wrongful-death case that ran for the next decade is captioned, in the Second Circuit, with the name of Ida Ruth Heard.

There is nothing to visit, and saying so plainly is part of the point. The Marine Sulphur Queen has no wreck site, no memorial building and no address. Her last known position — 25°45' N, 86°00' W — is open water in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, some 240 nautical miles west of Key West and 183 west-north-west of the Dry Tortugas, and it is an estimate rather than a fix: the Coast Guard calculated it by dead reckoning from her departure and a speed of advance of 14.5 knots. The nearest land that can be reached at all is Dry Tortugas National Park, roughly 70 miles by boat or seaplane from Key West. The hull has never been found. The U.S. Navy searched the bottom for it from 20 February to 13 March 1963, from the shoals out to the 100-fathom curve between Key West and 24°35' N, 83°30' W, with six vessels, 523 hours on scene and a computed 80 per cent probability of detecting the hulk, and found nothing. The most serious attempt since was made on 27 January 2001, when the Association of Underwater Explorers dived an unidentified wreck lying about 140 miles offshore of Fort Myers, in the Gulf, at the invitation of a charter skipper and with funding from the BBC for a documentary; a daughter of one of the lost crew was aboard the boat. Four divers reached the wreck on trimix; the bottom was at 423 feet and the shallowest point of the hull at about 360. The ship lay on her side, heavily encrusted, with a long mast projecting over the sand. The diver who led it, Mike Rodriguez, measured the beam with a knotted reel and made it 48 feet, against the Queen's registered 68.2, and reported the identification as inconclusive. The site is still known only as "Deep 423". This is technical diving far beyond recreational limits, at a depth and a distance from help where a mistake is not survivable, and it is not a destination. What you can actually go and read is unusually good, and it is all free. The Marine Board of Investigation's report of 23 August 1963 and the Commandant's action of 17 March 1964 were published together as a 44-page document and survive as a scanned PDF in the Internet Archive's copy of the Coast Guard site; it is the single best source on this ship and it is in the public domain. The Second Circuit's opinion, In the Matter of the Vessel Marine Sulphur Queen, 460 F.2d 89, decided 25 April 1972, is free on the public case reporters and reads as a summary of everything the Coast Guard could not conclude. And the crew list, with home towns, ratings and photographs collected from relatives, was assembled from 1998 onwards by Debbie Corwin, daughter of the pumpman Jesse I. Vicera; her pages went offline with the closure of her hosting service and survive in the Wayback Machine. Her site is also where the transcriptions of the contemporary Newsweek report and of the Coast Guard summary can be read side by side. On land, the ship's two ends are ordinary working places that still exist. She loaded at the Texas Gulf Sulphur docks on the Neches River at Beaumont, Texas, and she was bound for Norfolk, Virginia. Corwin's memorial page also records a church door at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Port Arthur, Texas, carrying a ship in memory of the crew; five of the thirty-nine men were from Port Arthur or Groves. That last item comes from the memorial site rather than from a parish source, and anyone making the trip should check before travelling.