Beaufort, March 7—A grim spectre stood unseen at the helm of the Bath-built schooner Carroll A. Deering when she cleared Rio de Janeiro harbor last December, riding light, and it winged out to sea with Norfolk port to make, via the Barbados.
The ship was tough and trim from truck to keelson, sound throughout and no more than sweetened to the ways of the sea by her year off the building stocks. A stout New England shipmaster, weathered to all the gales that blow, trod her quarterdeck. Above him clean, sound canvass towered away to the five great masts that drove more than a thousand tons through the water on airs that no more than fanned the cheek.
Today she is “The Ghostship of Diamond Shoals,” her bones bleaching in “the graveyard of the Atlantic,” her master and crew vanished, no man knows where or why. She has added one more page to the sea’s great book of mystery; paid tribute to the grim power of the deep that on occasion strikes through all that men and science can do to shackle it, to claim its own.
There is no record of the Deering’s last voyage. She sailed full handed, thrilling with life and power. A month later she staggered blindly shoreward, alone by night. To ram her way to her last berth on the shoal. No hand tended her wheel, no man stood to clak a sheet or spill the wind from her tortured canvas to ease her death struggle. She was a dead ship. No living thing saw her end.
Sunset was drawing down the gloom of night on a Sunday evening when patrols from the life saving statio looked their last for the day across the storm-fretted shoals. The surges ran white over the lurking menace of the sands, headstoned with relics of many a stout craft. But there was no sail in sight. The wide reach of sea beyond was empty in the gathering gale.
In the morning, the Deering lay before them in the grip of the sand, her canvas set and slatting to ribbons in the wind, her boat gear hammering overside, her boats and her people vanished. All day the life savers sought to reach her. Some of her crew might still be aboard. Time and again they were beaten back by wind and sea and it was a day later before it was known positively that she was an empty ship, stripped of all life before she had plunged into the death trap.
There was no mark on her to show why she had been abandoned. She was apparently undamaged until the wind and sea and sand had their will of her and slowly ripped her, timber from timber, on the shoal. Under the drive of her sail, the ship was buried beyond the power of tugs to pull her out. And in the weeks that have passed not a word has come to tell what became of her crew. Nobody has been washed up; no remnant of lifeboat or clothing come ashore.
The battered hulk of the big vessel, forlorn with toppling masts and grimy, torn canvas, the hull filling with sand through opened seams, stands a ghostly monument to the unconquered power of the sea.
From the front page of The Charlotte News, March 7, 1921. The first photo is from https://www.historicalblindness.com/blogandpodcast//the-carroll-a-deering-ghost-ship-of-cape-hatteras, a blog about this story, and the second is the cover of Bland Simpson's book about the incident called “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals.”
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