The world of the sea is so exciting because of the combination of adventure and mystery with which it is usually caulked. Territory fertilized for the legend due to the ignorance of what was historically unfathomable, the imagination was in charge of covering the numerous gaps left by that blue immensity that still continues to give us surprises from time to time. And so there are many historical mysteries whose solution has been hidden in the depths. One of them is that of the shipwreck of the S.S. Ourang Medan not so long ago, in 1947.
One of the most overwhelming moments of Dracula , the novel by Bram Stoker, is the one in which the schooner Demeter arrives at the coast of Whitby from Varna and runs aground in the middle of a night storm. When the police come on board they find the captain dead, tied to the wheel of the helm and with a look of horror on his face; no sign of the rest of the crew except for a mysterious black dog that jumps ashore and runs away.
The scene has points of contact with the famous case of Mary Celeste , the brigantine that appeared adrift in the middle of the Atlantic in 1872 with its cargo intact but not a soul on board, and which also inspired a literary account by Arthur Conan Doyle. And a kind of mixture of both seems to be the enigmatic case of Ourang Medan , a Dutch merchant who was said to have made a dramatic S.O.S. Telegraphic was found with all his crew dead and fear etched into his expressions.
In June 1947 the American steamers City of Baltimore and Silver Star , among others, were sailing through the Strait of Malacca when they received a distress signal from a ship called the Ourang Medan . The message, sent in Morse code, was as disconcerting as it was disturbing: “S.O.S. from Ourang Medan * * * we float. All officers, including the captain, dead in the cabin and on the bridge. Probably the entire crew dead * * *» More signs followed but confused, meaningless, until the lurid words that ended the transmission:"I die" .
The Silver Star located the Ourang Medan and a rescue team boarded it to find everything in apparent order except for the terrible detail that the crew was dead, including a dog, with contorted faces and forced postures but none of the corpses showed signs of violence. When the sailors of the Silver Star were about to prepare the towing maneuvers, a fire broke out in hold number 4 that began to cause explosions. For safety they evacuated the ship and returned to theirs; just in time because the Ourang Medan he flew into the air and sank taking her secret with him.
The problem is that everything is too ethereal and I am not referring only to the circumstances of the ship but to the story itself, since there is no material evidence of it:neither ship nor first-hand documentation. In the Netherlands, presumed place of origin, there is no record of any ship registered with that name, nor in other states. The Lloyd's Register of Shipping , a classification society (non-governmental organizations dedicated to promoting maritime safety, both material and human) founded in the eighteenth century (in fact it was the first) has not registered the case either and it has only been proven that there was an Silver Star (which at that time was called Santa Juana ), although it is not clear if it is the same because his logbook does not say anything about the incident.
The first known reference was made between February and March 1948 in an Indonesian trade magazine -the ship was sailing in those waters when it all happened- called De Locomotief:Samarangsch handels- en advertentie-blad ; is a series of three articles written in Dutch (the Dutch East Indies were in the process of decolonizing from the Netherlands and would proclaim their independence in 1949 becoming the Republic of Indonesia) that place the incident 400 nautical miles (about 740 kilometers) to the southeastern Marshall Islands.
They focus on describing the experience of the presumed sole survivor, a German sailor who would have been picked up on the Toangi atoll (also called Bokak) by an Italian missionary and who died shortly after, although he had time to explain that they had all died from gaseous emanations from a broken container, since the cargo they were carrying was sulfuric acid. The author of the report said that the ship had surreptitiously set sail from a Chinese port and was sailing towards Costa Rica, avoiding contact with the maritime authorities, as well as that Silvio Scherli, the missionary, later wrote a report on the matter.
After this publication others echoed that same year. British newspapers The Daily Mirror and The Yorkshire Evening Post and the US Albany Times they did reviews, Associated Press reports indicate. The North American newspaper, by the way, cited as a source the Dutch weekly called Elsevier’s Weekblad . As usually happens with stories that spread from mouth to mouth without a concrete basis, the details began to differ and instead of the Marshall the incident was located in the Salomón, changing the words of the S.O.S.
In 1952 the Merchant Marine Council Minutes published by the US Coast Guard also included a mention of the case and thus the history of the Ourang Medan , whether it was true, fictitious or deformed, was established and spread, especially among the media dedicated to mysterious and esoteric themes, since no tangible evidence of the existence of the freighter continued to appear. That is why a multitude of publications were launched to speculate with theories, some plausible and others fantastic, about what could have happened.
Of course, there was no shortage of paranormal nonsense attributing the event to forces from another world, at a time when the UFO phenomenon was beginning to make its way; Fate magazine , recently founded, progressed precisely thanks to the attention it paid to this case (after all, its creator was Raymond A. Palmer, also responsible for a pulp as famous as Amazing Stories ). However, there were also attempts to find rational explanations for what would have happened on board the Ourang Medan .
Based on her suspicious behavior, it is pointed out that she was carrying dangerous contraband goods that, for whatever reason, produced toxic gases and poisoned her people. We have already seen the episode of the survivor who spoke of sulfuric acid and some suggest that the very coal in the boilers could catch fire -or there could be a failure in said boilers- and the carbon monoxide could have fatal consequences. Now, more interesting is the proposal that, for whatever reason, too much water entered the hold and reacted with the cargo, releasing deadly fumes; Potassium cyanide and nitroglycerin are pointed out (which would explain the final explosion of the ship).
This leads to another even more suggestive theory:what the Ourang Medan was carrying. it was nerve gas or some kind of chemical weapon stored in China by the sinister 731 Squadron, one of the units of the Japanese army dedicated to carrying out bacteriological warfare tests during the Second Sino-Japanese War first and the Second World War later (we talked about it in the article dedicated to Operation Sea-Spray). In 1945 the Allies would have seized that material and instead of destroying it they decided to take advantage of it. In order not to leave an official trace, they chartered a ship that they did not register and that would be in charge of transferring that agent to their own territory, perhaps the United States, perhaps a Pacific island.
However, everything is speculation that does not go beyond mere formulation, given the total absence of evidence. That is why the story of the S.S. Ourang Medan It is considered, today and as long as nothing concrete appears, a seafaring legend. Other.
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Essential stories for travel lovers (Alberto Granados)/Stranger of all (Frank Edwards)/De Locomotief:Samarangsch Handels- en Advertentie-Blad (Delpher)/Mysterious events /Wikipedia