Board Can't Explain Sulphur Ship's Loss
A special Coast Guard board of inquiry said yesterday it could make no final conclusions as to the exact cause of the disappearance last February of the tanker Marine Sulphur Queen.
The board ended its session with an announcement by Rear Adm. James D. Craik that "the Marine Sulphur Queen and her entire crew of 39 persons must be presumed lost. The ship went down in the vicinity of the Florida Straits on Feb. 3, while on a trip from Beaumont, Tex., to Norfolk, Va., with a load of molten sulphur.
Admiral Craik observed that "it would be very difficult" to say whether a single possible mishap or a "chain of possibilities" had doomed the tanker.
He expressed the hope that what had been learned, together with Coast Guard recommendations, would "so make it that the personnel on this vessel will not have died in vain." He called the inquiry one of the longest in recent years.
New York Times, 28 May 1963