Thirty-Nine Men and a Tank of Molten Sulphur: The Vanishing of the Marine Sulphur Queen

2026-09-08 · Ghost Ships · 8 min read

On the evening of February 2, 1963, the tanker Marine Sulphur Queen came down the ship channel at Beaumont, Texas, and turned out into the Gulf of Mexico. Her main deck was warm to the touch. Beneath it, in a single tank longer than a city block, lay 15,260 tons of sulphur, held liquid at roughly 255 degrees Fahrenheit by a lattice of steam coils, and the heat rose through the steel all day and all night. Thirty-nine men were aboard. The master was Captain James V. Fanning. The passage ahead was routine: east across the Gulf, around the Florida Keys, then north to Norfolk, Virginia. Two days out she sent a short radio message. It was the last anyone heard from her. No wreck, no lifeboat and no body has ever been recovered.

She had not begun life carrying sulphur. She was launched on March 8, 1944 at the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company yard in Chester, Pennsylvania, as the Esso New Haven, a T2 tanker of the class the United States turned out in the hundreds to keep the war supplied with oil. She was 504 feet long, with a beam of 68.2 feet, and measured 10,642 gross tons. Like every T2 she had been built at speed, and like every T2 she carried a reputation that seafarers summed up in two words: weak back. Under load, at a point already thinned by corrosion, a T2 hull could split across the middle. Several of them had done exactly that.

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