Ourang Medan

The word (also written Orang) is Malay or Indonesian for 'man' or 'person', whereas Medan is the largest city on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, giving an approximate translation of 'man of Medan'. Accounts of the ship's accident have appeared in various books and magazines, mainly within Forteana. Their factual accuracy and even the ship's existence, however, are unconfirmed, and details of the vessel's construction and history appear to be undocumented. Searches for any official registration or accident investigation recorded have proven unsuccessful. ==Story==

The 1940 version of the story told of a distress signal being sent out in an area south of the Solomon Islands. The first received stated "SOS from the steamship Ourang Medan. Beg ships with shortwave wireless get touch doctor. Urgent." This was followed by "Probable second officer dead. Other members crew also killed. Disregard medical consultation. SOS urgent assistance warship." After giving her position, the final message received was an incomplete phrase "crew has... ". Vessels responding to the Ourang Medan received no reply. The 1940 version of the story describes rescue vessels approaching the ship listing in the water, and upon boarding locating multiple crew dead at their posts. As they ventured further into the ship, explosions were reportedly heard and so the rescuers abandoned the ship, and watched it subsequently go ablaze and sink into the Pacific. By 1948, the story was embellished with further details. According to one version of the story, at some point in or around June 1947, two American vessels navigating the Straits of Malacca, the City of Baltimore and the Silver Star, picked up several distress messages from the nearby Dutch merchant ship Ourang Medan. other sources such as Vincent Gaddis, list the approximate date as early February 1948.) A radio operator aboard the troubled vessel is reported to have sent the following message in Morse code: "S.O.S. from Ourang Medan * * * We float. All officers including the captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead * * *." After a few more incoherent dots and dashes, the words "I die." were received. No further communications were received. Some versions of the story attribute further details to the sole survivor, an unnamed German, of the Ourang Medan crew, who swam to safety, and was subsequently found by an Italian missionary and natives on Taongi Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The man, before perishing, tells the missionary that the ship was carrying a badly stowed cargo of oil of vitriol, and that most of the crew perished because of the poisonous fumes escaping from broken containers. According to the story, the Ourang Medan was sailing from an unnamed small Chinese port to Costa Rica, and deliberately avoided the authorities. ==Hypotheses==

Unsecured hazardous materials cargo Bainton and others hypothesize that Ourang Medan might have been involved in smuggling operations of chemical substances such as a combination of potassium cyanide and nitroglycerin or even wartime stocks of nerve agents. According to these theories, sea water would have entered the ship's hold, reacting with the cargo to release toxic gases, which then caused the crew to succumb to asphyxia or poisoning. Later, the sea water would have reacted with the nitroglycerin, causing the reported fire and explosion. Another theory is that the ship was transporting tabun, a nerve gas which the Japanese military had been storing in China during the war, and which was handed over to the U.S. military at the end of the war. No U.S. ship could transport it as it would leave a paper trail. It was therefore loaded onto a non-registered ship for transport to the U.S. or an island in the Pacific. Carbon monoxide poisoning Gaddis puts forward the theory that an undetected smouldering fire or malfunction in the ship's boiler system might have been responsible for the shipwreck. Escaping carbon monoxide (CO) would have caused the deaths of all aboard, with the fire slowly spreading out of control, leading to the vessel's ultimate destruction. ==Contemporaneous coverage==

The earliest iteration of the story occurs in Il Piccolo, the local newspaper of Trieste, in a series of ('dramas of the sea') written by Silvio Scherli in October 1940. February 28, 1948; and March 13, 1948. The source for these stories is given as Silvio Scherli of Trieste. They introduce details of the incident not previously reported in the 1940s versions, including: significantly altered SOS messages; and the addition of the surviving sailor who, on his deathbed, tells a missionary about the eventswho subsequently recounted them to Scherli. The Dutch newspaper concludes with a disclaimer: The story was repeated in the May 1952 issue of the Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council, published by the United States Coast Guard. Silvio Scherli is said to have produced a report on Trieste "Export Trade" on September 28, 1959. ==Skepticism==

Several authors note their inability to find any mention of the case in Lloyd's Register of American and Foreign Shipping. Furthermore, no registration records for a ship by the name of Ourang Medan could be located in various countries, including the Netherlands. While author Roy Bainton states that the identity of the Silver Star, reported to have been involved in the failed rescue attempt, has been established with a high probability, the complete lack of information on the sunken ship itself has given rise to suspicion about the origins and credibility of the account. Ships logs for the Silver Star did not show a record of any such rescue attempt. Bainton and others have put forward the possibility that accounts of, among others, the date, location, names of the ships involved, and circumstances of the accident might have been inaccurate or exaggerated, or that the story might be completely fictitious. ==References==