Case file · Folklore / legend
The 'sea of lost ships' legend
Thomas Janvier's novel 'In the Sargasso Sea' (1898) and William Hope Hodgson's tales fixed the image of the Sargasso as a weed-choked graveyard where rotting ships, and their ghosts, are trapped forever.
1898 CE · 30.00, -50.00 · status: legend
The account
The image was repeated in films and later in Bermuda Triangle books.
The sceptical view
The weed floats in loose patches; it cannot hold a ship. Calms in the subtropical high did slow sailing ships.