A quick note: I will be publishing a short post tomorrow for Halloween.
She was born in Sweden in 1914. Her first name was Ångermanelfven. She hauled cargo between Hamburg and Sweden during World War I. After the war, Britain took her as reparations from Germany. The Hudson’s Bay Company later bought her and renamed her the SS Baychimo.
Her new job was hauling goods between Vancouver and Hudson’s Bay Company posts in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. She sometimes carried furs and other Arctic cargo. She made this run for years without much trouble. Then, in late September 1931, disaster struck. She was sailing back to Vancouver when a blizzard hit near Point Barrow, Alaska. Pack ice closed in around her. She was trapped.
The Hudson’s Bay Company flew 22 members of the crew out, but Captain John Cornwell and 14 others stayed behind. They built a wooden shelter nearby and prepared to wait through the winter. On November 24, another blizzard swept through the area. When it cleared, the ship was gone. The men assumed she had broken apart and sunk.
A few days later, an Inuk seal hunter told them he had seen her about 72 kilometers (around 45 miles) south. The men tracked her down and found her still floating. They removed the most valuable furs from her hold, but decided she would never survive the winter. They left her behind and went home. They were wrong. You can’t get much more wrong, as we will see.
That was the beginning of something strange. The Baychimo didn’t sink. She didn’t stay put either. Instead, she drifted through Arctic waters without a care, captain, or crew.
In March 1933, a group of Iñupiat hunters found her and climbed aboard. A storm arrived and trapped them on the wandering ship. Some accounts say they remained aboard for a week, while others say ten days. For that brief time, the abandoned Baychimo became a shelter again. Even without her own crew, she was still protecting people from the Arctic.
Others tried to claim her. Explorers boarded her in 1934. In 1939, Captain Hugh Polson attempted to salvage her, but the moving ice forced him to leave. Every time someone thought they had caught the Baychimo, the weather or the ice seemed to take her back.
The last confirmed sighting was in 1969, once again locked in ice. After that, nothing. No wreckage. No trace. In 2006, Alaska’s government talked about searching for her. The search never happened. Most people now believe she finally sank somewhere in the Arctic.
The Baychimo seemed willing to accept visitors. The Iñupiat hunters even found shelter aboard her during a storm. But whenever someone tried to claim her and bring her home, the ice and weather interfered. It was almost as if she were saying, “You can stay for a little while, but don’t try to take me.”
But no one has ever found her bones. So the mystery holds. Somewhere beneath the Arctic ice, the Baychimo’s story may finally have ended. Then again, perhaps she is still out there, looking for sailors or hunters who need a temporary home. So if you happen to be near the Alaskan coast, keep an eye on the ice.
Tomorrow, for Halloween, we will look at another kind of maritime ghost story, one that may have left its image behind.
