In 1964 a survey party landed on the one flat ledge of Bouvet Island and found an open boat with no markings, and a pair of oars laid out on the rock 90 m away. No people, no camp, no bodies. Two years later the boat was gone.

A cargo ship found a small racing yacht drifting with nobody aboard, and 3 logbooks on the table that explained everything except the one thing that mattered.

A 222 metre ship with 29 men aboard vanished from another vessel's radar in a November storm. There was no distress call and no survivor. Fifty years and two official inquiries later, nobody agrees on what sank her.

Three men sailed out of Airlie Beach one autumn morning. Five days later their boat was found drifting 88 miles offshore, engine idling, food on the table, and nobody aboard.

She sailed from Texas with a cargo held liquid at 255 degrees and never arrived. A federal court ruled her owners liable for a loss nobody has ever been able to explain.

Two Royal Navy ships sailed into the Arctic in 1845 and were never seen again. A single sheet of paper, found in a pile of stones fourteen years later, is still the only word any of the 129 men left behind.

Five men left Hana Bay for a morning of fishing in 1979. Nine years later their boat turned up on an uninhabited atoll two thousand miles away, and beside it someone had buried one of them under a cross of driftwood.

On a clear winter morning in 1909 a brand new liner overtook a cargo steamer off the coast of South Africa, exchanged polite signals, and pulled ahead. Nobody has seen her since, and after a century of searching not one plank has ever been recovered.

Abandoned in the Arctic ice in 1931, the crewless SS Baychimo went on sailing by herself for nearly four decades - sighted, boarded, stripped of furniture and a whaleboat, and lost again, until she vanished for good.

January 1921: a five-masted schooner hard aground on Diamond Shoals, sails set, dinner mid-preparation — and eleven men gone without a trace. Five federal departments investigated. None could explain it.

In November 1955 the MV Joyita was found half-submerged and drifting in the South Pacific, five weeks overdue, her radio tuned to the distress frequency and a doctor's bag of bloodstained bandages on deck. Her cork-lined hull made her almost unsinkable. So why did all 25 aboard abandon her — and where did they go?

In March 1918 the USS Cyclops, a massive US Navy collier, sailed from Barbados toward Baltimore and dissolved into the Atlantic. No SOS, no wreckage, no bodies — the Navy's greatest non-combat loss remains unexplained, and the ship has never been found.