Well, I don't know. But I'd be very surprized if a death had occurred and wasn't documented, or known. For an account of how gossip of a fatal illness travels around a ship, read Somerset Maugham's short story P & O. Who knew? Everybody knew, that's who.
Transport crew tend to be superstitious about such things. When I was in my 20s I worked in the travel industry and we had very specific (and not very nice) instructions in the [almost inevitable] case of a death on our patch. Middle-aged men, in particular, were (are?) particularly prone to roasting themselves in the sun all day, drinking far too much at lunchtime, and then diving into the pool afterwards - only to suffer cardiac arrest. After such an event, the company would fly out the weeping relatives for free, and our job was to persuade them to have the deceased buried where he dropped, so to speak. The reason for this was the protocols surrounding the transport of a corpse back to the UK. You had to have the permission of every country over which the aircraft would fly; the coffin had to be extremely airtight; and the airline had to agree. This was difficult, as airlines did not like to do this and it had to be loaded surreptitiously, as the passengers didn't like it either. Not easy to do with turn-around tourist flights, unless in the dead of night. The airline crews, particularly, hated it even if it was in the hold. Mercifully, I worked for a company targeting the young, and it never happened to me. But it did to my friend, and she said it was simply ghastly the number of obstacles put in the way of grieving relatives, wanting their loved one to be buried at home.
