Standard Oil ordered four tankers in late 1915 to expand its petroleum trade with the Far East. Sylvan Arrow was laid down at the New York Shipbuilding Company's yard in Camden on March 22, 1917, and launched that October. Built on the Isherwood principle of longitudinal framing, she could carry nearly four million gallons of oil in twenty main and ten summer tanks. A quadruple expansion steam engine, fed by three Scotch boilers, pushed her steel hull along at a modest eleven knots.

Before she ever hauled commercial cargo, the Navy came calling. Commissioned as USS Sylvan Arrow in July 1918, she carried fuel oil and seaplanes to Devonport, then made runs to Brest and Sheerness. Her final wartime delivery arrived on November 11, 1918 - Armistice Day. She was decommissioned in January 1919 and returned to Standard Oil the same day, her brief military career complete.

Sylvan Arrow had no fixed route. She went wherever petroleum needed to go: Beaumont to Yokohama, San Pedro to Boston, Texas to the Norwegian port of Thamshavn, Calcutta and back. In a single year she might touch San Francisco, Shanghai, and the American Northeast, each time loaded with roughly eleven thousand tons of petroleum or gasoline.

The work was unglamorous but not without incident. In September 1930, returning from Japan, she lost her propeller 150 miles from Los Angeles. Her sister ship Empire Arrow towed her into port. In January 1932, creeping through fog in the Ambrose Channel at three knots, she collided with the freighter Katrina Luckenbach - a glancing blow that cracked her hull plates at the No. 8 tank and spilled oil into the channel. That November, she spotted distress signals from the British schooner Edith Dawson, sinking in a gale off Jacksonville with a cargo of salt. Her crew lowered a lifeboat and rescued all seven souls aboard before the schooner caught fire and went down.

By 1942, Sylvan Arrow was twenty-five years old. Requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration, she joined Convoy OT-1 departing Curacao for Cape Town on May 18, carrying a full load of Bunker C oil. Her crew numbered thirty-eight, plus six armed Navy guards.

Two days out, a German U-boat fired two stern torpedoes. One missed. The other struck amidships. The explosion ripped the main deck open and covered the ship in oil that immediately caught fire. The guards ran for the gun station, but the submarine never surfaced, and the spreading flames forced them overboard. One guard, blinded by a geyser of spewing oil, ran off the deck and drowned. The others clung to a wooden plank for hours before a British destroyer pulled them from the water.

Salvage crews found the burning hulk three days later on May 26, but when they tried to tow her, she began breaking apart amidships. At five o'clock on the afternoon of May 28, Sylvan Arrow folded in half and sank.

What happened next defies ordinary probability. Captain Beck and eleven crew members were taken to Curacao after the failed salvage attempt. On June 7, they boarded the Dutch steamer Crijnssen. Three days later, another German submarine torpedoed Crijnssen and sank her. Beck and six crewmen reached a lifeboat that eventually made the Mexican coast. The remaining five were picked up by the SS Lebore, bound for Chile.

On June 14, Lebore was torpedoed too. For the third time in less than a month, Sylvan Arrow's crew found themselves in lifeboats on the open Caribbean. A patrol plane spotted them three days later, and a destroyer collected them and landed them safely at Cristobal. The twenty-six crewmen who had been separated earlier fared better - they boarded the steamer Robert E. Lee and reached New Orleans without incident. But for Captain Beck and his group, three ships had gone down beneath them in twenty-four days, a grim illustration of just how lethal the Caribbean had become in the summer of 1942.