Nel 1964 una squadra sbarcò sull'unico ripiano piano dell'isola Bouvet e trovò una lancia aperta priva di ogni marcatura e un paio di remi posati sulla roccia a 90 m. Nessuna persona, nessun accampamento, nessun corpo. Due anni dopo la barca non c'era più.

Una nave da carico trovò un piccolo scafo da regata alla deriva senza nessuno a bordo, e 3 giornali di bordo sul tavolo che spiegavano tutto tranne l'unica cosa che contava.

Una nave di 222 metri con 29 uomini a bordo sparì dal radar di un'altra imbarcazione durante una tempesta di novembre. Nessun segnale di soccorso, nessun superstite. Cinquant'anni e due indagini ufficiali dopo, nessuno concorda su cosa l'abbia affondata.

Tre uomini salparono da Airlie Beach una mattina d'autunno. Cinque giorni dopo la loro barca fu trovata alla deriva a 88 miglia dalla costa, motore al minimo, cibo in tavola e nessuno a bordo.

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.