SS Waratah: The Titanic That Disappeared

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Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: SS Waratah: The Titanic That Disappeared

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re on another sea voyage, and around here, those never end well. But let’s head out!

On July 26, 1909, the steamship SS Waratah left Durban, South Africa, on 3-day a voyage to Cape Town. She’d begun the trip in Australia, and from South Africa, she was headed back to Europe, with 211 people on board. She was a grand ship, expected to spend many years making the crossing between Australia and Europe in lavish style, just like the Titanic on its Europe-to-America route.

Both ships would suffer awful fates. It’s just that in the case of the Waratah, we don’t know exactly what went wrong. The ship known today as Australia’s Titanic went down with no witnesses, and no one left alive to tell the tale.

There are two big clues to the Waratah’s fate. #1 is that the ship was widely reported to be “unstable.” That meant when the Waratah rolled from side to side with the motion of the sea, she took a long time to come back upright. This might have been a design issue, possibly even done on purpose to keep a gentle roll for passenger comfort. Or it could have been the fact that the Waratah took both passengers and cargo on different trips, which made loading (and thus stability) complicated. The Waratah was less than two years old, which meant it was up to the latest safety standards, but largely untested on the open sea.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:

Call out the spirits. 211 people lost their lives on the Waratah, leaving countless friends and family members behind. You could write a dramatic treatment of bereavement, focusing on a relentless search for answers by those left behind. If you want to get speculative, you can throw in a psychic connection between parted lovers that never quite faded, or an attempt to make contact with the lost passengers via seance. Just the way Arthur Conan Doyle did in real life. No, really.

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