Even more fantastic than this, however, is the story of the great United States collier _Cyclops_. This vessel, of nineteen thousand tons displacement, five hundred and eighteen feet long, of sixty-five foot beam and twenty-seven foot draught, with a cargo capacity of twelve thousand five hundred tons, was built by the Cramps in Philadelphia in 1910. She was designed to coal the first-line fighting ships of our fleet while at sea and under way, by means of traveling cables from her arm-like booms. She had frequently accompanied our battleships abroad, had transported the marines to Cuba and the refugees from Vera Cruz to Galveston in April 1914. On a trip to Kiel in 1911, she was wonderingly examined by the German naval critics and builders, who declared her to be a marvel of design and structure. [Illustration: _Wide World._ ~~ _U. S. S. CYCLOPS_ ~~] On March 4, 1918, the _Cyclops_ sailed from Barbados for an unnamed Atlantic port (Norfolk, as it proved), with a crew of 221 and 57 passengers, including Alfred L. Moreau Gottschalk, United States Consul General at Rio de Janeiro. She was due to arrive on March 13. When that date had come and nothing had been heard from her, it was announced that one of her two engines had been injured and she was proceeding slowly with the other engine compounded. But on April 14 the news came out in the press that the great ship was a month overdue and totally unaccounted for. For a whole month the story had been veiled under the censorship while the Navy Department had been making every conceivable effort to find the ship or some evidence of her fate. There had been no news through her radio equipment since her departure from Barbados. There had been no heavy weather in that vicinity. She had been steaming in the well-traveled lane of ships passing between North and South America, yet not a vessel had spoken her, heard her radio call or seen her at any distance. Destroyers had been searching the whole Gulf, Caribbean, North and South Atlantic regions for three frantic weeks. They had not found so much as a life preserver belonging to the missing ship.