By The Numbers: 79

...was the number of crew members and passengers on board the state of the art "tri-phibian" steamship "Eudora Banks" when it disappeared near the island of Sumba on or about March 14th, 1898. The disappearance made headlines across the world, mostly due to the fact that her inventor, Professor Hubert Manning, was on board along with his fiancée, Miss Judith Warrington, her father Lord Warrington (at that time, the Minister for Science), the American inventor and financier Seth Parkhust, and the noted photographer Marta Skollings. A search lasting 6 months was undertaken by both the British and United States government, but failed to turn up a trace of the ship or crew.

The last wireless message received from the ship had come at 10:34, local time on March 14th and stated "We are five minutes away from converting to submersible form in order to more closely observe an interesting underwater cave system." The native crewed support boats reported that the "Eudora Banks" submerged successfully, but failed to come up two hours later, which would have been when the onboard air would be running out.

Search submersibles failed to find the cave entrance.

On July 19th, 1903, more than five years after she vanished, the "Eudora Banks" emerged from an undiscovered cave in northern Ontario. Traveling in "landship" mode, she made her way to the nearest river and then to the nearest town.

The scientific world was rocked to find out that the ship and her crew had been inside our hollow world, in a land known as Sengaia. Apparently, a few caves worldwide lead there, although only two or three are large enough for a ship or other large vehicle to pass through.

Despite many thrilling adventure (which made the crew and passengers wealthy from speaking engagements and books), the crew lost only three members and of the passengers, only Miss Skollings assistant, Lars, was lost.

For additional information on the five year journey and Sengaia, we suggest reading Judith Warrington's three volume set "Into the Inner World: Our Journey to and across Sengaia", available online from nile.com.