In 1909, a ship carrying two hundred and eleven people vanished off the coast of South Africa. She has never been found. One passenger got off at the last port, because of a dream.

The ship was the Waratah, the brand new flagship of the Blue Anchor Line, sailing from Australia to London. They called her Australia's Titanic. On board was Claude Sawyer, an engineer and a seasoned ocean traveller, and he did not like what he felt under his feet. The ship rolled strangely. She leaned over and hung there, as if deciding, before she came slowly back up. In his cabin, Sawyer watched the water in his bath sit tilted while she rolled, and concluded the ship was top heavy. Then the dreams began. Three times on the voyage he woke from the same vision: a man in strange clothes, holding a long sword in one hand, and a rag soaked in blood in the other.

Sawyer was ticketed through to London. It did not matter. When the Waratah reached Durban, he gathered his luggage, walked down the gangway, and threw his fare away. He cabled his wife: he thought the ship top heavy, and he had landed at Durban. On the evening of July the 26th, the Waratah sailed for Cape Town with two hundred and eleven people aboard, into a rising gale. The next morning she exchanged signals with a passing steamer. Then, nothing. No distress signal. No confirmed wreckage. No bodies. And while the ship was still listed as missing, Sawyer dreamed again: the Waratah in enormous waves, a great sea burying her bows, the whole hull rolling over and going down.

At the official inquiry in London, Claude Sawyer testified under oath. The visions, the bathwater, the telegram: all of it went into the record of the Board of Trade, where you can read it today. The inquiry decided the Waratah had probably capsized in a gale of exceptional violence. The sea has never confirmed it. Search ships hunted her for months. Sonar expeditions hunted her through the eighties and nineties. One man searched for twenty two years, and gave up in 2004. More than a century later, she is still missing. The premonition is a public record. The ship is not.

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