and towed to Australia. Waratah had enough provisions on board to last for a year, however as she lacked any radio equipment, she would have been unable to communicate with any ships beyond visual range. In September 1909, the Blue Anchor Line chartered the Union Castle cargo ship Sabine to search for the Waratah. The Sabine was specially fitted out with search lights and other equipment. Its search covered , and zig-zagged across the drift path of the aforementioned Waikato but yielded no result. With no sighting of the ship for over four months, Waratah was officially posted as missing at Lloyd's of London on 15 December 1909. However, in early 1910, relatives of Waratah passengers made one further attempt to locate the ship, and chartered the Wakefield which conducted a search for four months covering , this again proved unsuccessful. No confirmed wreckage or bodies from the Waratah have ever been found, although there were a number of unconfirmed reports: Wreckage was reported to have been found at Mossel Bay in March 1910. A life preserver reportedly marked with the name 'Waratah' washed up on the coast of New Zealand in February 1912. In 1925 Lt. D. J. Roos of the South African Air Force reported that he had spotted a wreck while he was flying over the Transkei coast. It was his opinion that this was the wreck of the Waratah. Pieces of cork and timber, possibly from the Waratah, were washed up near East London, South Africa in 1939. Later search attempts A number of attempts at locating a wreck have taken place, in particular under the leadership of Emlyn Brown. Attempts to locate the Waratah took place in 1983, 1989, 1991, 1995 and 1997. In 1999 reports reached the newspapers that the Waratah had been found 10 km off the eastern coast of South Africa. A sonar scan conducted by Emlyn Brown's team had indeed located a wreck whose outline seemed to match that of the Waratah. In 2001, however, a dive to the site revealed that the wreck was in fact that of the Nailsea Meadow, a merchant cargo ship that had fallen victim to a German U-boat during the Second World War. In 2004 Emlyn Brown, who had by then spent 22 years looking for the Waratah, declared that he was giving up the search: "I've exhausted all the options. I now have no