The Disappearance of Percy Fawcett and Other Famous Vanishings by Jane Clapp

Author:Jane Clapp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631581823
Publisher: Racehorse
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Further reading:

Macarthey, Clarence E. Charley Ross, the unforgettable lost boy Ladies Home Journal 41:7 July 1924

Ross, Christian K. The father’s story of Charley Ross

Smith, Edward H. The Charlie Ross enigma, pages 1 - 22, in Mysteries of the missing

Richard Halliburton

THE DEATH OF THE SEA DRAGON

The report that Richard Halliburton, American author and lecturer, was missing at sea late in March 1939 was at first thought to be another of his press-agent stunts. Sailing from Hong Kong in a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, with a crew of fourteen, his destination was Treasure Island, site of the World’s Fair in San Francisco. There, in its prearranged mooring, the colorful oriental sailing ship was expected to be one of the most popular concessions. An equally important goal of the voyage was the lecture, article and book material such high adventure would provide Halliburton.

Riding a post-war wave of demand for romantic and glamorous exploration, Dick Halliburton became the alter ego of millions of arm-chair travellers. His syndicated articles appeared in fifty newspapers with a combined circulation of over nine million, the first two accounts of his travels were on the best seller list at the same time, and his shy personal manner and boyish good looks had endeared him to thousands of lecture audiences, not all of whom were women’s club members. When such a celebrity dropped from sight on an exciting and publicized venture, immediate speculation as to his fate produced a tangle of rumors. Reports implied that the ship’s vanishing was just another box-office appeal angle to insure interest when it arrived at Treasure Island; that the ship had been captured as a rich prize by pirates thronging the waters out of Hong Kong; the Sea Dragon, with a bright red hull, became the easy target for a Japanese warship; the junk was too frail to ride out the devil’s weather of a tropical typhoon, and was wrecked with all hands.

Only several weeks before on a shake-down cruise of the Sea Dragon, Halliburton had identified himself as the world’s worst sailor, and, although barely out of the sight of land, all he prayed for was anything to end the terrible “oscillation.” What had happened to cause his ship to vanish with no trace when it had gone only a third of its way on the 9,000 mile voyage?

Soon after Richard was born on January 9, 1900 in Brownsville, Texas, the Halliburton’s moved to Memphis, Tennessee. There Wesley Halliburton, Richard’s father, made a comfortable living as a real estate broker, and his mother, Nelle Nance Halliburton, enjoyed an active life of clubwork, and incidental teaching of practical psychology to school and other groups.

Richard early demonstrated his wanderlust. When he was seventeen, his mother saw him off on the train for a weekend visit with a cousin in a nearby town. Four days later, when the family heard from Dick, he was in New Orleans shipping out as a sailor for Europe. This first adventure on the sea, and the excitement and strangeness of Paris, where he lived for a year, set his life course.

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