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On January 11, 1890, the iron sailing ship the Marlborough set sail from Canterbury, New Zealand, with a cargo of wool and frozen lamb. She relayed a message of 'All well' to another vessel on January 23. But no further contact was made with the ship or crew and she was reported as missing on July 31, 1890.
In 1913 a newspaper report stated a ship was sighted off Tierra del Fuego which appeared to be green from masthead to waterline. This 'green' turned out to be seaweed and mould.
When boarded, the ship proved to be the Marlborough; she was literally full of bones - those of her crew, passengers and sheep. Since the log was 'indecipherable' it could only be assumed that an epidemic or poisoned food had killed all on board.
The Admiralty took the newspaper report seriously enough to ask the New Zealand Minister of Maritime for further details, but only repetitions of the original story could be found. Various embellishments did appear over the years - rusty cutlasses, uncanny stillness etc. One of these by an American seaman, who reported finding one of the Marlborough's boats and nearby tent containing seven skeletons, after he was wrecked on Tierra del Fuego, was the only story with any plausibility.
Eventually the story was exposed as a hoax, and as icebergs were reported along the route of the Marlborough it is now assumed she struck one of these and sank. We will probably never know exactly what happened to her, or the 36 other British vessels lost without trace in 1889/90.
While the Caribbean and outlying waters have a long history of strange occurrences, few recognised a pattern in the location of the events until E.V.W. Jones wrote an article about a number of strange occurrences in the area between Florida and Bermuda in 1950. Two years later, a story in fate magazine elaborated on this, describing many more disappearances that research had uncovered.
In 1964 when Vincent Gaddes wrote an article entitled "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" for Argosy magazine the name and dimensions of the phenomena were first set down. He placed the points of the triangle in Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rica.
It wasn't until 1974 however that the popular media treated the triangle as a full-blown story, prompted by the best selling book "The Bermuda Triangle" by Charles Berlitz. His book appealed to the media with it's hodgepodge of aliens, government conspiracies and other bizarre ideas. A flurry of writers flocked to the headlines putting forward their own theories and altering the dimensions of the triangle to suit. Some placed its points in Newfoundland, the Azores and down to the Colombian Coast, encompassing most of the Northern Atlantic!
However the following year Larry Kusche wrote "The Bermuda Triangle Solved". He had found that in many cases important facts regarding the legends had been omitted and as a result mysteries were made out of rationally explainable tragedies. Often calm seas were in fact 20 foot-high seas and fifty-mile-per-hour winds, veteran crews had been recently transferred to new vessels and were unfamiliar with the region, and in some cases derelict ships supposedly found wandering without a crew were actually well known wrecks from which the crew had been rescued.
Kusche's explanations were once again taken as gospel truth and excitement over the triangle soon died off, the public assuming the mystery was solved. It wasn't until these explanations were examined more closely that these easy explanations were found to be hasty and sometimes just possibilities, and not in fact based on any hard explanations. Although many mysteries had been solved, there are still a significant number that could not easily be explained. The triangle remains a puzzle and the door is open to new theories…
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