The Mystery of the Vanished USS Cyclops Still Unsolved 100 Years Later

By Greg Norman
Fox News via the military.com web site

One hundred years ago Wednesday morning, March 14, the USS Cyclops, a massive American World War I transport ship hailed as a "floating coal mine," should have been docked in the waters off Baltimore, fresh off a journey from Brazil.

The USS Cyclops in 1913. The mammoth coal-hauling transport ship disappeared in 1918 and its whereabouts, to this day, remain unknown. (US Naval History and Heritage Command)But the vessel -- reported to be the Navy's biggest and fastest fuel ship at the time -- and the 309 men onboard it never pulled into the Chesapeake Bay on March 13, 1918, and its whereabouts to this day remain unknown.

"In terms of loss of life and size of ship, it's probably the last great mystery left unresolved," James Delgado, an underwater explorer, told the Baltimore Sun this week as recent discoveries of historical shipwrecks are renewing hopes amongst the scientific community of finally finding the Cyclops.

The 540-foot long and 65-foot wide ship, outfitted with 50-caliber machine guns to help transport doctors and supplies to American Expeditionary Forces in France during The Great War, was last seen in Barbados on March 4, 1918.

Built in Philadelphia eight years earlier, the USS Cyclops was capable of transporting 12,500 tons of coal and could lift two tons of it in single buckets along cables that ran along the ship, leading newspapers to call it a "floating coal mine," according to the Baltimore Sun.

But on its final journey, the Cyclops was loaded up with 10,000 tons of manganese ore -- a denser and heavier cargo -- and stopped at the Caribbean island for nine days to resupply before vanishing into the horizon.

Read the entire article on the military.com web site.

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