THE Bermuda Triangle has long been the subject of myth, legend, speculation, claim and counter-claim, but one undeniable fact is that 100 years ago this week, the USS Cyclops disappeared off the face of the sea in the middle of the Triangle.

It remains the biggest disaster yet reported in the Triangle in terms of loss of life, and to this day no one knows what happened to her, though being a Triangle story, much has been written about the ship.

At 22,000 tons including her cargo, she was also the biggest ship to have sunk in the Triangle until her two sister ships also disappeared without trace and with no survivors in the Second World War.

The SS Faro subsequently became the largest ship to sink in the Triangle, the 31,000 tons roll-on, roll-off cargo vessel going down with all hands on October 1, 2015, due to Hurricane Joaquin and human error – the ship should not have sailed into the storm. We know what happened to her as the wreck was found and voice transmissions gave details of what happened – no such recording devices were available when Cyclops sank.

HOW MANY DIED?
IN what remains the biggest loss of life for the US Navy in a non-combat sinking, some 309 passengers and crew died without a trace.

The US Navy’s own theory is that Cyclops, a collier transporting manganese ore from Brazil to Baltimore, went down in a sudden storm. She was known to be overloaded with passengers and was at the absolute limit of her cargo capacity. Cyclops was also many miles from her planned course, as her captain, George W Worley, had decided to dock in Barbados and take on provisions.

Cyclops left Barbados on March 4, 1918, and she was last sighted the following day. Sometime from March 6 onwards, she is believed to have sunk with the loss of all on board.

There were reports that she had been sighted on March 9, but the captain of the vessel which allegedly saw her vehemently denied the sighting.

Somewhere in the Triangle – its three points are Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico – USS Cyclops simply vanished. Despite an extensive search over hundreds of thousands of square miles of sea as well as the many islands the area, no trace of her has ever been found. No bodies and no wreckage have ever been found in the sea or on land, and the many surveys of the sea bed have detected nothing.

Speculation about her fate has included Cyclops being sunk by German U-boats – no U-boat captain ever claimed to have done so and there were none on patrol that far south. Her metallic cargo is supposed to have reacted with her superstructure causing hull failure, but again there is no proof at all.

There was also a rumour that her eccentric captain handed her over to the Germans, except that Germany has long denied it.

Which leaves the usual Triangle theories – supernatural or extraterrestrial intervention which, by their very nature, can never be proved.

DID THIS TRAGEDY START THE TRIANGLE STORIES?
NO. It was not until the 1950s that the Bermuda Triangle myth – and it is a myth – was started in American newspapers that sensationalised the disappearance of Flight 19, a group of five American torpedo bombers which never returned from a routine training flight off the coast of Florida.

Soon any boat or plane that went missing in the Triangle was presumed to have been downed by some sort of supernatural force, and USS Cyclops was retrospectively added to the list.

IS THERE REALLY A BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION?
IT took until 1975 and a book by American pilot and author Larry Kusche to comprehensively debunk the Triangle “mystery” and since then many more writers have poured scorn on the concept, not least because the number of wrecks and fatalities in the Triangle is much the same as any comparable area of ocean near to a continental land mass with a considerable population.

What is undeniable is that wrecks and disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have never been explained, but that is true of many losses at sea all over the world.

The disappearance of USS Cyclops remains inexplicable, as is the case with her two sister ships, the Proteus and Nereus that both sank in the Triangle in late 1941, again with no German U-boat claiming them. Perhaps it is time for their joint mystery to be investigated again.