A White Star Line ship charges through the dark heading for North America from Europe. Suddenly a shape looms in the darkness and there’s a terrible crash and shutter. They’ve struck an iceberg and despite the best efforts of modern technology, they’re sinking in the North Atlantic. They never reach their destination, and the loss of life is great.
It’s a familiar story but what I described above is the fate of the SS Naronic, not the Titanic. At least we think it is, as Naronic is famous for going missing without a trace. The only possible hint to its fate was a series of messages in bottles reportedly from those on board. Their authenticity is questionable and at the end of the day no one can really say what happened for certain.
The Naronic lacked key a piece of equipment when compared with the Titanic, a radio, or more specifically a wireless telegraph. Sadly, the Naronic sank in 1893 and the first wireless sets didn’t start appearing onboard ships until the early 1900s. With the first reported use of the famous SOS signal sent in 1909, three years before the Titanic Disaster.
Wireless telegraphy used a lot of acronyms, not unlike Geocaching, to get messages across quickly using Morse code. Messages were typed using dits and dahs, also called dots and dashes. A short dit/dot or a slightly longer dah/dash with a consistent unit of time between each entry and each word sent. Getting the timing down could be the hardest part of sending or receiving a message in Morse.
Hopefully you’ve a code book handy as you’ll need to decode a word transmitted in Morse code to open this cache. You’ll also need to bring a fully charged USB battery pack to fire up the transmitter. From there you’ll be able to claim a share of the cargo for salvage and sign the passenger manifest before setting the cache back out to sea.