sister ship, the Bovic, and showed that the ship was very stable, even when loaded. Captain Thompson, then captain of Bovic, who had also led Naronic during its first three rotations of voyages confirmed that, even in the storm, the ship never seemed to him to be unstable. Two of the letters found in bottles evoked a collision with an iceberg, and certain ships had spotted ice in the North Atlantic in February 1893. This led the commission to also examine this a hypothesis that the ship hit an iceberg. The ship's course, estimated with the help of Captain Thompson, however, passed well south of Newfoundland, and investigation concluded that Naronic was at least 100 miles from the nearest ice. This conclusion was however questionable, with the New York press reporting at the time that several ships reported ice in this region, which was also where Titanic sank nineteen years later. After evaluating the safety of the vessel, the commission recognized its powerlessness, and declared: "Unless new elements are provided, the probable cause of the loss of the vessel remains a matter of speculation and adds to the mysteries of the sea." Naronics cargo list, published in the New York Herald in March 1893, included several chemicals (acids, potassium chlorate, sodium sulphide, calcium hypochlorite). Under certain conditions, these products could have caused an explosion resulting in the sinking of Naronic if the storm had displaced them or freed them from their bottles, which led historians John P. Eaton and Charles A. Haas to evoke a century later this hypothesis which had not been considered by the official inquiry. In October 1893, a newspaper reported the testimony of the captain of the Norwegian ship Emblem, who declared to have spotted in July a lifeboat of Naronic, floating upside down and covered with barnacles. Everything seemed to indicate that the boat was hastily prepared, confirming the hypothesis of a rapid and sudden sinking. Messages in bottles Four bottles with messages inside, which were recovered later, that claimed to have been written while Naronic was sinking. Two of the bottles were found in the US, one on 3 March in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, and one in Ocean View, Virginia, on 30 March. A third bottle was found in June 1893 in the Irish Channel, and the fourth was found on September 18 in the River Mersey near the ship's point of