Some people are said to have been lucky if they bought a winning lottery ticket. And some who avoided the grim reaper thanks to impulsiveness or even a dream.
Of the 213 passengers and crew of the S.S. "Warratah", a passenger ship that traveled in the opposite direction from the then popular route for settling the South land, that is, from Melbourne, Australia - to Britain in 1909 - 211 people disappeared without a trace or a sound, except for two who we will come back to later.
There was a passenger ship that carried emigrants to Australia and was returning with a new round of passengers who were going to visit the ``old country``, a brand new ship, although not particularly exceptional, displaced some 16,000 tons of water - quite solid dimensions for the time. That ship had already made one trip to Britain and back. The second voyage will remain recorded as another in the series of inexplicable mysteries that fill the ocean expanses. Departing from Melbourne, the ship stopped in Durban, South Africa, among other ports, to refuel. The next stop was Cape Town, another in a series of ports on the way to Europe.
One of the passengers, tormented by nightmares the previous day in which he clearly dreamed that the ship would sink - decided to disembark in Durban. Another, completely impulsively decided to shorten the trip and try to find work in Durban. This would save their lives because the next day the ``Warratah`` set sail on a journey, on which it would be spotted by several ships, before disappearing totally, completely and irrevocably.
At least two ships passed by the ``Warratah``, the second even exchanged Morse signals using the ship's searchlights. Everything was in order, the sea was relatively calm although the weather forecast was not the best. The last ship to spot the `Warratah` was 180 nautical miles from Durban. The `Warratah` was expected to arrive in Cape Town in a few days...which turned into a few weeks, which gave way to months...never to arrive and to this day after 116 years the fate of the ship is unknown.
The usual culprit was sought in the heavy seas but the "Warratah" was a large ship with powerful engines and the conditions were far from threatening for such a ship. Others speculated that the ship's center of gravity in relation to the metacenter was allegedly miscalculated which reflected in the ship's construction with incorrect statics and accordingly impaired buoyancy and stability... but this is unlikely since the ship had already traveled from Britain to Australia, the longest sea route in the world. An unstable ship would have a hard time doing that, especially since ships always have ballast to maintain stability. In 1999, there was a rumor that the sunken ship had been found, but later examinations indicated that it was nothing of the ``Warratah'' but a completely different sunken ship from World War Two.
The team that was searching for the ship in 2004, after 22 years of research and searching, finally gave up on it all because the ship was nowhere where, according to all the laws of logic, it should have been. The passenger who had the dream about the sinking tried to warn several passengers to get off. No one listened to him...
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