Dinner on the Stove. No Crew Aboard. Rations for Twelve.

On January 31, 1921, a man on the lookout at the Cape Hatteras Coast Guard station in North Carolina saw a five-masted ship stuck fast on Diamond Shoals, a deadly stretch of sandbars the sailors called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.¹

Her sails were set. Her lifeboats were gone. Heavy seas kept rescuers away for days.

When they finally climbed aboard, they found the schooner Carroll A. Deering. No one was on her.²

The crew's belongings were gone. The navigation equipment was gone. The steering gear was damaged. But in the galley, the reports said, food appeared to have been prepared for a meal.³ The only living things left aboard were reportedly the ship's cats.⁴

Eleven men were missing. They were never found.

The case became one of the largest investigations of its time. Five federal departments looked into it, including the Navy, Commerce, Justice, State, and Treasury.⁵ They considered pirates. They considered rum-runners, since Prohibition had just begun. They considered mutiny, since the captain had complained about his crew. A Soviet plot was even suggested.

A message in a bottle was found on the beach, claiming the ship had been captured. It was later revealed to be a hoax by the man who claimed to have found it.⁶

No one ever learned what happened to the eleven men of the Carroll A. Deering.

The history society in Hatteras had the ship's galley bell. Someone had donated it in the 1950s, along with a notebook and a glass bottle, in a crate labeled DEERING / COOK. Hollis Brandt, the volunteer curator, opened the crate for the first time in seventy years because he was making a display for the centennial.

The notebook belonged to the cook. His name was in the front. A careful man, from his handwriting. He had kept a list of rations, how much flour, how much salt pork, how many coffee beans, day by day. Ordinary.

Until the last two weeks.

Jan 17. Rations for 11.

Jan 18. Rations for 11. Captain says the dark water off the Carolinas has things in it that follow ships. I said those are sailors' stories.

Jan 20. Rations for 12.

The cook had crossed out 11 and written 12. Then, below it, smaller:

Someone is eating. I count the men every morning. Eleven. But every night there is one more plate used than there are men.

Jan 22. Rations for 13.

Jan 23. Rations for 14.

The mate says the old rule on these waters. If something comes aboard in the dark, you do not feed it. You do not set its place. Feeding it is inviting it to stay. And whatever is invited to stay brings the rest of its crew.

I have been feeding it. I did not know. I thought I had counted wrong.

Jan 25. Rations for 17.

The men say they hear more footsteps on deck at night than there are men. They say there are faces in the rigging. They say someone is singing in the hold in a language none of us know.

Jan 27. I have stopped setting the extra plates.

Jan 28. The plates set themselves. I come into the galley in the morning and they are laid out. Every one used. The cups wet.

Jan 29. Rations for 22. Eleven of us. Eleven of them.