Commanded by long-distance captain Pedro Veloso da Silveira, she was attacked and disappeared without a trace - with 54 crew members on board - between February 14 and 25, 1942, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Lesser Antilles.
After the vessel was completed on June 14, 1912, at the Flensburger Schiffsbau-Gesellschaft shipyard in Flensburg, Germany, it was launched under the name Prussia, operated by Hamburg Amerika Linie (Hapag) of Hamburg.[2]
The ship was 111m (364feet) long, 15.5m (50.9feet) wide, had a draft of 6.7m (22feet) and a tonnage of 3,557 tons. Made with a steel hull, she was propelled by steam, with a triple-expansion engine allowing her to reach a speed of 12kn.[3]
She was in the service of the Imperial German Navy, as a logistical support ship for the cruiser and the armed merchant ships and . On June 1, 1917, with Brazil's entry into the First World War against Germany, the ship was confiscated by the Brazilian government in the port of Santos, where she had been held since September 1915. She was renamed Dresden and then Cabedelo, being now operated by Lloyd Brasileiro and registered in the port of Rio de Janeiro under the number 270.
On February 14, 1942, the ship set sail from Philadelphia for the Antilles, bound for Rio de Janeiro, carrying a cargo of coal. Despite the war in Europe, at the time neither the convoys nor the voyages of the merchant ships sailing off the east coast of the United States, known as the Pan-American Security Zone, were controlled.[4] The Cabedelo sailed to Rio de Janeiro on February 14, 1942.
After that day, the Cabedelo disappeared without a trace, as did her crew of 13 officers, 3 non-commissioned officers, and 37 sailors, stokers and deckhands, totaling 54 men. She was commanded by Captain Pedro Veloso da Silveira.
Although the ship disappeared without a trace, the authorities considered her to have been lost by enemy action, since the weather was good in the region. European researchers - among them Alberto Santoni, from the Faculty of Political Science in Rome, and Jürgen Rohwer, from the Library of Contemporary Studies in Stuttgart - claim that the Cabedelo
However, these statements were not (and still are not) unanimously accepted, as two factors contribute to fueling the controversy: The Naval Historical Branch has stated that the sinking of the ship is not included in Italian records, an important factor since all the activity of a submarine was meticulously recorded in the logbooks and communicated to the central commands in Europe. The other factor is that, if one considers the date (February 25), the ship had already sailed for 11 days and covered at least 2,000 miles, which put her outside the region reserved for the Leonardo Da Vinci
Another hypothesis suggests that the ship was attacked by another Italian submarine, the, which had attacked two merchant ships off the Guianas on February 19. The - another Italian submarine - is also mentioned.[5]
In any case, there was no categorical proof that any of such Italian submarines had caused the attack. It was also thought that the crew might have been machine-gunned when they were already on board the launches, but as no launch, not even an empty one, was found, the mystery remains to this day.
Despite the uncertainty about the perpetrator, the crew of the Cabedelo were considered victims of the war and therefore had their names inscribed on the Monument to the Dead of World War II in Rio de Janeiro.