A 590‐foot cargo ship with a crew of 37 has been missing since early Friday and is feared sunk in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle, the Coast Guard reported yesterday.

After being directed to the scene 140 miles due west of Bermuda by a United States Navy P‐3, an Argentine freighter recovered an overturned lifeboat froth the vessel, the Sylvia L. Ossa, and detected an oil slick. The missing ship had been bound from Brazil to Philadelphia with a cargo of iron ore.

Hours later, a British ship, the Portland Glenn, picked up a life preserver from the missing vessel with burn marks on it.

“They’re picking up quite a bit of debris in the area now,” said a spokesman for the Coast Guard’s rescue coordination center, Atlantic division, on Governors Island.

The search was called off two hours after dark last night and will resume at daylight today, the spokesman announced.

Thus far, he said, two long‐range Coast Guard planes, one from Elizabeth City, S.C., and the other from St. Peterburgh, Fla., as well as a Navy plane from Bermuda have searched 8,200 square miles, beginning at a point where the ship was last heard from.

Ships in the area have also been alerted.

“It’s not easy to miss a 590‐foot‐long ship on a day with visibility of more than 40 miles and calm seas, so it doesn’t seem too hopeful that it’s still afloat,” the Coast Guard spokesman said.

Triangle a ‘Mysterious Area’

The Bermuda Triangle, an area connecting Norfolk, Va., Puerto Rico and Bermuda, has been the subject of considerable speculation in books and articles because of its reputation as a mysterious graveyard where hundreds of men, ships and planes have supposedly disappeared without any natural explanation.

“We don’t recognize the triangle as having any special qualities over other areas,” the Coast Guard spokesman said, “but it’s in that area where the ship was last heard from.”

The Coast Guard was notified that the ship was missing at 9:30 A.M. Friday by the owner, the Omnium Shipping Company of 42 Broadway. This was 41/, hours after the vessel was due in Philadelphia.

The 15,028‐gross‐ton ship, which has a Panamian registry, was built in 1943 and extensively overhauled in 1962.

The owner of the ship could not be reached for comment.

According to the Coast Guard, the owner said when he called Friday that he had last heard from the ship early Wednesday. The report was that the vessel had run into gale‐force winds and high seas and would be late in its scheduled arrival because of reduced speed.

The ship’s position was given as 340 miles due west of Bermuda, roughly 600 miles out of Philadelphia, in the Wednesday message. This was the last message from the ship.

The Coast Guard spokesman said that, following standard procedure, the service had waited more than 24 hours to see the ship would be heard from or would appear in port. Then a search was started.

The spokesman said a ship in serious trouble was invariably able to get off “mayday” or emergency distress message, which would result in an immediate search and. rescue operation.

Water temperatures in the area were reported last night to be a relatively warm 79 degrees Farenheit. Waves, however, averaged 6 to 12 feet, with strong gusts up to 30 knots.