On August 11 , 1775 , lookouts on the whaling vesselHeraldspotted something foreign in the waters off the coast of Greenland . A three - masted schooner , named theOctavius , ostensibly sparkling with ice and snow , was drifting towards them – with no crew in deal .
companion by four of his men , theHerald ’s maitre d' , Warren , boarded the mystic ship to investigate . What they found was the stuff of horror stories : 28 idle seamen , huddle in their bunks as if to protect themselves from the cold ; a adult female and tiddler , perfectly conserve together ; a boater , forever frozen in a futile endeavor to work up a fire on the deck . And , in the captain ’s quarter , the superior of the ship – still sitting at his desk , writing his last journal entranceway for this doomed voyage .
It was dated November 11 , 1762 . The crew had been dead for 13 years .
Most intriguing of all , though , was the last recorded location of the ship : 75 ° N 160 ° W , about 402 klick ( 250 mile ) compass north of the billet we now know as Utqiagvik , Alaska . TheOctavius , it seemed , had done the inconceivable : it had successfully voyage across theNorthwest Passage , nearly a century before any other ship would do the same . And it had done so without a single living somebody on board .
At least , so the fable conk . But is there any truth to this narrative ? Or is it just another ghost news report , like Davy Jones or theFlying Dutchmanbefore it , told to fright the untested and impressionable off from the cruel and capricious sea ?
The irksome truth is , it ’s almost certainly nothing more than caption . The earliest reference to theOctaviusseems tocome from around 1828 , more than half a century after its supposed discovery , in the American literary gazette The Ariel .
Yet earlier versionscan be rule , with the ship renamed theGloriana , or even given no name at all , and the ship ’s journeying delight from the Northwest Passage to the Baltic Sea . Later retellings have the ship christenedThe Jenny , and her destiny sealed on the other side of the planet entirely – but all other point remain the same . In other words , it always was just a sailor ’ ghost story .
But the 19th and 20th one C ’ enthrallment with wraith ship , languidly haunt the edges of the planet in search of a doom delegacy , did n’t come up from nowhere – and there are one or two cases from history where so - forebode “ ghost ships ” turn out to be as real as you and me .
Take , for object lesson , the aptly - namedHMS Terror . This , too , was a ship that seemingly fly during an ill - fated search for the Northwest Passage , make with it more than 120 lives and its sister ship , theHMS Erebus .
As the icy ocean block around the ships , they became stuck fast , and the gang vacate ship in the promise of walk south to safety . But with only piteous - calibre ration to sustain them , and thousands of km of frozen barren between them and their rescue , they all pall . Subsequent search parties found only their frame , anddiariesrecording their demise .
in the beginning wrecked by the Arctic weather in 1848 , theErebusand theTerrorbecame the subjects of one of the cosmos ’s with child maritime whodunit until their eventual find in 2014 and 2016 , respectively . Like theOctavius , the ships were ostensibly frozen in time : theTerrorwas in suchpristine condition , Arctic Research Foundation spokesman Adrian Schimnowskitold CNNat the meter , that “ if you could nobble [ it ] out of the piddle , and pump the water system out , it would probably float . ”
Then there ’s theSS Baychimo , a ghost ship with the eminence of having actual photographic evidence supporting it . After nearly two decades of successful navigation around the Arctic oceans , the ship was surprised by a blizzard at the Sea Horse Islands , not far from where theOctaviussupposedly recorded her last emplacement . Again , the crew and rider abandoned ship – some were taken to Alaska and Vancouver , while a few crew member overwintered nearby until the ship was ready to start moving again .
But in November of that year , another storm hit . When it cleared , theBaychimowas gone .
“ The skipper and crew assumed the vessel had sunk , ” explained Cortney Pachet , Collections Registration Associate at the Manitoba Museumback in 2020 . “ But they soon receive word that an Inuk huntsman had make out theBaychimo , once again packed in ice , roughly 72 km south of their campground . ”
The crew tracked down the ship once again , recovered anything valuable still on add-in , and abandoned her to the crank . But that would n’t be the last of theBaychimo : between that stage and 1969 , the crewless ship would be seen sailing through the Arctic seas at least seven times , with some onlookers even board the mysterious ship .
TheSS Baychimohas not been seen in more than 50 eld now , but that has n’t stopped masses from face for her – along with the gauge 4,000 other ships wrecked along the Arctic coast . And while she’smost likelyended up , like so many before her , on the bottom of the sea by now , one thing ’s for certain : ifHMS Terrorcan bend up after nearly 170 years under the arctic depths , maybeSS Baychimostands a hazard too .
