Sailors can be a superstitious lot, and literature abounds with tales of ships cursed with ill-fate. Some curses, like the bad luck which supposedly befalls anyone who kills an albatross, are simply folklore passed down half-believed to generations. Others, like the demon-plagued Ivan Vassili, are simply fabrications. Others retroactively tie supernatural fates to known catastrophes. The paranormal favorites Mary Celeste and Joyita, both found adrift without their crews, have been identified as “jinx ships” (the latter even victim of a literal witch’s spell, by some accounts) that suffered misfortune long before their ultimate fate. Even the Titanic has inspired talk of curses, including an undead Egyptian mummy supposedly smuggled onboard.
It’s easy to laugh at such claims, with imaginative writers ascribing retroactive purpose to misfortune. But it’s harder to write off the mishaps experienced by the Great Eastern. The brainchild of legendary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Great Eastern was a massive, steam-powered ocean liner launched in 1858. Designed to carry 4,000 passengers and crew, it was revolutionary for its time, despite criticisms that it was too large and difficult to steer. Profit seemed less problematic, however, than the ship’s tendency to encounter misfortune. After several workers died during its construction, a steam explosion on its maiden voyage killed several crew members and caused severe damage to the vessel. The incident left Brunel so heartbroken that he died shortly afterwards; nonetheless, the Great Eastern continued to lurch from mishap to mishap.
The ship arrived in New York in 1860, becoming an object to wonder to Americans who eagerly booked passage for a short pleasure cruise. This cruise turned into a nightmare: berths were overbooked, food went bad due to poor refrigeration, and the crew and passengers quarreled during a miserable journey down the Eastern Seaboard. The ship further suffered damage in a major hurricane, collided with and sank a merchant vessel, ran aground off Long Island and a variety of other dubious incidents. Even worst, the Great Eastern was too expensive to maintain as a passenger ship; it was sold to entrepreneur Cyrus West Field, who enlisted the ship to lay the first trans-Atlantic cable from the United States to England. It served successfully in this capacity, sometimes as a hotel or floating showpiece, before it was broken up in 1890.
Legend covers the Great Eastern‘s story, already dramatic enough, with a supernatural gloss. Historian James Dugan, writing decades later, claimed that dockworkers allegedly found a skeleton wedged between its metal plates. The skeleton was an ill-fated riveter who disappeared during construction, his cries for help unheard amidst the clang of hammers. Other writers investigated Dugan’s claim, both dismissing it as unlikely (the hull had inspection hatches to allow workers to enter and exit during construction) and finding no contemporary evidence for the story. But the poor riveter found his way into book after book; now the Great Eastern wasn’t merely a victim of bad luck, poor construction and human error, but the victim of Fate’s bony hand.
A similar curse supposedly stalked the KMS Scharnhorst, a German capital battleship during World War II. One of the most powerful vessels in the Nazi Kriegsmarine, the 38,100 ton Scharnhorst boasted a fearsome complement of 61 guns, along with torpedo tubes, heavy armor, state-of-the-art electronic guidance systems and even an aircraft catapult. Alongside its sister ship Gneisenau,1 it served an eventful career battling the Royal Navy, terrorizing convoys in the North Atlantic and surviving multiple aerial bombings, before its destruction in December 1943. Yet aside from naval buffs, it’s remembered not for its impressive record but as the victim of a maritime jinx – without even a riveter’s skeleton to explain it.
Like the Great Eastern, the Scharnhorst‘s misfortunes began (so the story goes) before it even took to sea. Under construction in Wilhelmshaven, the ship somehow rolled over onto its side, killing 61 workers and injuring hundreds more. Though the state press dutifully covered up the incident, word leaked out in whispers. During the ship’s launching in October 1936, attended by Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking members of the Reich, the vessel broke free into the channel and smashed into two waiting destroyers (another source says towing barges). It was said that “the majority of the crew had to be drafted from other ships of the German navy,” because rumor quickly spread through the Kriegsmarine that the Scharnhorst was a “jinxed ship.”
The battleship’s war record, we are told, was no better. Scharnhorst took part in the bombardment of Danzig during the invasion of Poland, but suffered dozens of self-inflicted casualties from a misfired cannon; other crew members were asphyxiated by gas leaking from a turret. During the Nazi attack on Norway it was doubly unfortunate. Norwegian shore batteries at Oslo so badly damaged the ship that the Gneisenau had to tow it to safety. Several weeks later, in battle off Narvik, the vessel was severely damaged by enemy torpedoes, preventing it from capturing Norway’s King Haakon as he fled the country. Worse, as the Scharnhorst limped into the River Elbe for repairs, it ran straight into the ocean liner Bremen, causing severe damage to both vessels and putting both out of action for months.
After years of further mishaps, broken up by periods of repair, the warship took part the Battle of the North Cape in the early morning of December 26, 1943. Baited by an Allied convoy, the Scharnhorst and five destroyers were set upon by a Royal Navy squadron, headed by the Duke of York and including both British and Norwegian warships. After an exchange of fire the battleship fled into the darkness, beyond the range of British guns…or so the Germans thought. Bruce Fraser, commander of the British fleet, ordered a broadside out of desperation despite its 16,000 yard distance. The Scharnhorst‘s bad luck held; the improbable shot struck home and instantly destroyed the German vessel, killing all but 36 of its 2,000 man crew in a massive explosion.
Even the destruction of the Scharnhorst did not end its misfortunes. Two survivors managed to avoid capture and made their way to shore by raft, seeking refuge in a small hut on the Norwegian coast. They had brought along a small gas stove, and attempted to light it…resulting in an explosion which vaporized both of them. Clearly, Richard Winer wryly concludes in Ghost Ships, Norway “was not far enough away to elude the jinx of the Scharnhorst.”
This tale of a wartime curse became ubiquitous in books about unsolved mysteries. Unfortunately, one can debunk it simply by skimming the Scharnhorst‘s Wikipedia page. Even the basic facts are incorrect: the Scharnhorst’s launching, which did take place in Hitler’s presence, occurred without incident. It could not have bombarded Danzig, as it wasn’t fit for sea duty until November 1939, two months later (on its very first mission, it sunk the merchant cruiser Rawalpindi off the Faroe Islands). Nor did it take part in the attack on Oslo; it was severely damaged during the later Operation Juno, but not before sinking the aircraft carrier Glorious and two supporting destroyers, clearing the way for the Nazi capture of Narvik. The Scharnhorst never collided with the ocean liner Bremen2; the closest incident involved the submarine U-523, in August 1943, with both ships suffering only minor damage.
Captained by former gunnery instructor Kurt-Caesar Hoffmann for most of its existence,3 the Scharnhorst sank six convoy vessels and several warships during its four years of service. Its most famous exploit occurred in February 1942, when Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took part in Operation Cerberus, the famed “Channel Dash” where a squadron of German warships relocated from Brest to German ports, sailing through the English Channel and fighting their way past a poorly-prepared Royal Navy squadron, humiliating the British Admiralty. The Scharnhorst suffered severe damage from a mine, which put it out of action for months; but while historians debate its tactical wisdom, the Channel Dash was certainly a dramatic victory, and can hardly be listed among the Scharnhorst’s litany of disasters. Indeed, far from thinking themselves trapped on a cursed vessel, surviving crew told historian Fritz-Otto Busch that they felt “fierce pride” in their ship, even that Scharnhorst sailed under “a lucky star.”
The Scharnhorst did endure repeated punishment in naval battles and aerial attacks; besides its battle damage, it was severely damaged in several Allied bombing raids, including a strike by the carrier Ark Royal in June 1940 (soon after the Norway Campaign’s conclusion) that required six months of repair. Then again, considering that the Scharnhorst was one of the largest vessels in the German Navy, and took part in numerous operations over the course of four years, it’s not surprising that it was a repeated target of Allied attacks. In its last stand at the North Cape, the battleship wasn’t destroyed by a single freak broadside but by a prolonged shelling from the Allied fleet (the Norwegian destroyer Stord landed the decisive blows at close range, with Fraser personally commending their crew for “daring”).
It’s a stretch to call a battleship which lived its entire life during wartime “cursed.” Surely the Scharnhorst was no more unlucky than the Tirpitz, the Bismarck-class battleship which spent much of the war guarding Norway; it was repeatedly bombed and shelled in targeted attacks by the Allies, until RAF heavy bombers finally sunk the ship in November 1944. Or, for that matter, the vaunted Bismarck itself; even in its great triumph over the HMS Hood, Bismarck was seriously damaged by stray shots from the Prince of Wales which hampered its escape. Cornered and sunk by the Royal Navy, the Bismarck didn’t even survive its maiden voyage. One wonders if the entire Kriegsmarine was simply “cursed” by the Allies’ superior firepower.
From where, then, did the “curse” story originate? Attempts to trace its origin are difficult, as most of the “Unsolved Mysteries” books that discuss the Scharnhorst don’t cite their source – despite each book, article and credulous website repeating it almost verbatim. Nonetheless, answers about its veracity proved remarkably easy to unravel thanks to Vincent Gaddis’s Invisible Horizons, that classic repository of dubious nautical lore. Gaddis footnotes his retelling of the jinx with a reference to Frank Edwards’ 1953 book Stranger Than Science – for experienced readers of Things That Are Not, an answer by itself.
We’ve encountered Edwards before: he was an Indiana-born reporter and radio host who drifted from hard news to political commentary to paranormal musings over the course of his career. Unquestionably a skilled storyteller, Edwards is, simply, not a credible source for anything. He was a spinner of yarns, which he told on his radio show and repackaged in book form – collections of bite-sized anecdotes designed to send a shiver up a reader’s spine, more Robert Ripley than Richard Hough. While it’s possible that Edwards borrowed the story from another source – he rarely invented things from whole cloth – the lack of a citation makes it impossible to determine where he heard the story, or from whom.
It’s possible that Edwards simply mixed the Scharnhorst‘s story with other bits of WWII lore. The battleship’s fate roughly resembles the Hood‘s similarly abrupt demise at the Bismarck‘s hands. Hood‘s companion, the Prince of Wales, was also dogged with rumors of a “curse.” Its main claim to fame was transporting Winston Churchill to his famous conference with Franklin Roosevelt, resulting in the establishment of the Atlantic Charter. But the vessel suffered a remarkable run of misfortunes in its short lifespan: it was bombed while in dry dock, narrowly survived its encounter with the Bismarck and was damaged by Italian planes on convoy duty in the Mediterranean. Later sent to defend Singapore, Prince of Wales was sunk along with the Repulse by Japanese bombers on December 10th, just three days into the Pacific War.
Perhaps, like the crocodiles that supposedly devoured a battalion of Japanese soldiers in Burma, the Scharnhorst story endures as wartime karma. It’s not enough that the forces of fascism were vanquished through a hard-fought war: Fate, and the Gods themselves, must be on our side as well. Perhaps, like the Titanic, such stories endure as a tribute to the hubris of Man and his creations, in the face of nature, the unknown and forces greater than ourselves. Regardless, Edwards’ tale of a doom-cursed Nazi warship, morally pleasing though it is, is another nautical tale that simply doesn’t hold water.
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