The Carroll A. Deering was an American five-masted commercial schooner launched in 1919 and found run aground without its crew off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in January 1921.

One of the last large commercial sailing vessels, the ship was designed to carry cargo and had been in service for a year when it began its final voyage to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

On July 19, 1920, the Deering sailed from Puerto Rico, and arrived at Newport News to pick up a cargo of coal for delivery to Rio de Janeiro.

The ship was captained by William H. Merritt, a hero of World War I who had been cited for bravery under fire for saving his entire crew when his previous command, the Deering-built five-masted schooner Dorothy B. Barrett, was sunk by the German submarine U-117 off Cape May, New Jersey in 1918.

The lightship's keeper, Captain Jacobson, reported that a tall thin man with reddish hair and a foreign accent speaking through a megaphone told him the vessel had lost its anchors in a storm off Cape Fear and asked that the ship's owners, the G.G.

[7][better source needed] On January 31, 1921, the Deering was sighted at dawn by surfman C. P. Brady who was on lookout duty at the Coast Guard station at Cape Hatteras.

These shoals that extend offshore from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina have been notorious as a common site of shipwrecks for centuries and are known as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic."

[8] On April 11, 1921, a local fisherman named Christopher Columbus Gray claimed to have found a message in a bottle floating in the waters off the beach of Buxton, North Carolina;[9] he swiftly turned it over to the authorities.

[11] The message also raised skepticism: if a crew member did manage to get hold of paper, pen, and bottle and write a letter, why would he request that the company be notified, as opposed to the police or Coast Guard?

Ritchey tried to chart what happened to the vessel between its last sighting at Cape Lookout and its running aground at Diamond Shoals by reading the log books of the Coast Guard lightships stationed in those areas.

When an Italian inquiry into the disappearance of the vessel Monte San Michele confirmed that there had been strong hurricanes in the vicinity, mutiny was then accepted as the explanation for the Deering incident.