Post by auntym on Mar 26, 2012 11:52:38 GMT -6
www.ufodigest.com/article/haunted-seas
The Haunted Seas[/color]
Submitted by Scott Corrales on Mon, 03/26/2012 - 11:56
By Scott Corrales
Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy
UFO Digest Latin America Correspondent
More Maritime Mysteries: The Haunted Seas
By Scott Corrales
(c) 2012
My grandmother was not particularly into telling spooky tales; some of her stories of the “old days”, her formative years in a post-1898 Cuba and a childhood spent in pre-tourist Key West, Florida, had elements that would have served as grist for the mill of a mystery novelist.
One of these stories involved a disappearance that, to my knowledge, is still missing from books about mysteries of the sea. It does not appear in Vincent Gaddis’s Invisible Horizons, Ivan Sanderson’s Invisible Residents, or any of Charles Berlitz’s books on the so-called Bermuda Triangle. It concerns the passenger liner Valbanera.
It may seem hard for readers in the Internet age to imagine of a time when the only way of getting from one part of the world to the other was by ship. Passenger liners – not cruise ships – plowed the North Atlantic between the major ports of the Iberian Peninsula (La Coruña, Vigo, and Cádiz, among others) and the islands of the Caribbean, ferrying families relocating to the Americas or else returning to Europe with their fortunes safely made. Clipper ships might take a month to make the journey, being at the mercy of the ocean’s currents and winds, but coal-fired ships – steaming along at fifteen knots an hours – might make the crossing in a fortnight. Ships of the Compañía Transatlántica Española and the Pinillas Line were a common sight on the high seas, blowing their whistles at passing Cunard liners and sending their compliments to Southampton-bound captains. While no author of maritime heroics has turned his/her pen in this direction, the skippers of the Spanish Line, as it was known, played major roles as blockade runners in the 1898 war, attempting to run Admiral Dewey’s blockade of the Philippines.
Built in 1906 at Glasgow’s Connell & Co. shipyards, the Valbanera was a small passenger liner, clocking in at nearly five thousand tons (for comparison purposes, the RMS Titanic was forty-six thousand tons), it could convey twelve hundred passengers across the Atlantic with ease and was considered one of the Pinillas Line’s most comfortable ships.
In 1919, the Havana-bound liner was under the command of Captain Ramón Cordero, scion of a renowned seafaring family from southern Spain. We will never know if he was aware of the concerns of his passengers regarding the safety of his ship: the Pinillas Line had lost two other passenger vessels – The Apollo and the Principe de Asturias – and the Valbanera itself had been at the center of a scandal regarding a shipboard flu outbreak that resulted in dead passengers being thrown overboard.
The passenger liner reached Santiago de Cuba on 5 September 1919, unloading nearly a thousand workers from the Canary Islands who had secured employment opportunities as cane-cutters and millers in the prosperous sugar industry. The ship rounded Cape Maisi on Cuba’s easternmost end and entered the Old Bahama Channel, hoping to reach Havana four days later. Captain Cordero found himself in a race against the weather, as a hurricane raged ahead. His only hope was to make port before encroaching storm.
On the night of 9 September, passengers aboard another liner anchored in the Port of Havana while the storm raged around them were able to hear a ship’s whistle. The harbormaster at the Morro Castle was able to see a fleeting silhouette of a ship against the raging waters, and understood that it was the Valbanera. But the liner never entered the port: it vanished into the pages of maritime legend with nearly five hundred lives.
CONTINUE READING: www.ufodigest.com/article/haunted-seas
The Haunted Seas[/color]
Submitted by Scott Corrales on Mon, 03/26/2012 - 11:56
By Scott Corrales
Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy
UFO Digest Latin America Correspondent
More Maritime Mysteries: The Haunted Seas
By Scott Corrales
(c) 2012
My grandmother was not particularly into telling spooky tales; some of her stories of the “old days”, her formative years in a post-1898 Cuba and a childhood spent in pre-tourist Key West, Florida, had elements that would have served as grist for the mill of a mystery novelist.
One of these stories involved a disappearance that, to my knowledge, is still missing from books about mysteries of the sea. It does not appear in Vincent Gaddis’s Invisible Horizons, Ivan Sanderson’s Invisible Residents, or any of Charles Berlitz’s books on the so-called Bermuda Triangle. It concerns the passenger liner Valbanera.
It may seem hard for readers in the Internet age to imagine of a time when the only way of getting from one part of the world to the other was by ship. Passenger liners – not cruise ships – plowed the North Atlantic between the major ports of the Iberian Peninsula (La Coruña, Vigo, and Cádiz, among others) and the islands of the Caribbean, ferrying families relocating to the Americas or else returning to Europe with their fortunes safely made. Clipper ships might take a month to make the journey, being at the mercy of the ocean’s currents and winds, but coal-fired ships – steaming along at fifteen knots an hours – might make the crossing in a fortnight. Ships of the Compañía Transatlántica Española and the Pinillas Line were a common sight on the high seas, blowing their whistles at passing Cunard liners and sending their compliments to Southampton-bound captains. While no author of maritime heroics has turned his/her pen in this direction, the skippers of the Spanish Line, as it was known, played major roles as blockade runners in the 1898 war, attempting to run Admiral Dewey’s blockade of the Philippines.
Built in 1906 at Glasgow’s Connell & Co. shipyards, the Valbanera was a small passenger liner, clocking in at nearly five thousand tons (for comparison purposes, the RMS Titanic was forty-six thousand tons), it could convey twelve hundred passengers across the Atlantic with ease and was considered one of the Pinillas Line’s most comfortable ships.
In 1919, the Havana-bound liner was under the command of Captain Ramón Cordero, scion of a renowned seafaring family from southern Spain. We will never know if he was aware of the concerns of his passengers regarding the safety of his ship: the Pinillas Line had lost two other passenger vessels – The Apollo and the Principe de Asturias – and the Valbanera itself had been at the center of a scandal regarding a shipboard flu outbreak that resulted in dead passengers being thrown overboard.
The passenger liner reached Santiago de Cuba on 5 September 1919, unloading nearly a thousand workers from the Canary Islands who had secured employment opportunities as cane-cutters and millers in the prosperous sugar industry. The ship rounded Cape Maisi on Cuba’s easternmost end and entered the Old Bahama Channel, hoping to reach Havana four days later. Captain Cordero found himself in a race against the weather, as a hurricane raged ahead. His only hope was to make port before encroaching storm.
On the night of 9 September, passengers aboard another liner anchored in the Port of Havana while the storm raged around them were able to hear a ship’s whistle. The harbormaster at the Morro Castle was able to see a fleeting silhouette of a ship against the raging waters, and understood that it was the Valbanera. But the liner never entered the port: it vanished into the pages of maritime legend with nearly five hundred lives.
CONTINUE READING: www.ufodigest.com/article/haunted-seas