The ghost ship of the Arctic

ONE of the world's strangest sea stories is still unfinished, and looks like remaining so for a long time, perhaps for ever. This is the story of the Baychimo, the deserted ghost ship that refuses to die and still haunts human memory and curiosity.

A fine, trim, solid steel 1,322-ton cargo steamer owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, the Baychimo was built in Sweden in 1914. She was originally used to collect furs from Eskimo trappers along the Victoria Island coast of Canada's North-West Territory. With her single tall funnel, curved bridge and long high prow, the Baychimo was sturdily built to withstand the floes and pack-ice of the dangerous northern waters in which she operated.

She actually pioneered fur trading with the Eskimo settlements around the Beaufort Sea, forging her way many times on her 3,200-kilometre round trip through some of the most treacherous shipping lanes in the world. Each year she set out on a regular voyage, always a tough and difficult one, delivering food, fuel and other supplies to, and loading pelts from, eight of the Hudson Bay Company's lonely outposts.

On 6 july 1931 she left Vancouver, British Columbia, on such a journey, with skipper john Cornwell and his crew of thirty-six men. They expected a hard trip, for all their runs were hard, but what they did not know was that this was to be the Baychimo's last manned voyage.

PRISONERS OF THE PACK-ICE

Day and night, under the misty glow of the never-setting sun, the Baychimo steamed on eastward. Eventually they reached the end of their normal eastward run by the shores of Victoria Island. With the hold crammed with cargo, the relieved captain turned the Baychimo about for Vancouver.

Unfortunately winter came early that year to this bleak northern wasteland. Ferocious winds and deep-freezing conditions brought the dreaded pack-ice south much quicker than usual. By 30 September only a narrow stretch of open water remained for the ship to steam through, and on 1 October the ice closed in.

Her engines at stop, she could only move as the creaking ice willed. She was not far from the Alaskan village of Barrow, where the company had permanent huts built ashore. Seeing that a terrible blizzard was imminent, Cornwell ordered his men to trudge across the kilometre or so of ice to shelter in these huts, where they remained for two days, half-frozen and unable to venture out.

Then the first extraordinary thing in the Bay chimo's strange story happened. Without warning the pack-ice loosened and moved away from the Baychimo's sides, leaving her free to move again. The crew rushed aboard and for three solid hours the ship steamed away to the west at full speed. Disaster seemed to have been narrowly averted.

But once more the ice gripped the little cargo steamer, and on 8 October a sickening crack heralded the sudden appearance of a deadly black fault-line in the ice. It actually cracked right across the patch where some of the crew were playing football.

Now the ice that had held the ship had broken away, it began to move slowly but surely towards the shore. To Cornwell it seemed only a matter of hours before his rugged little vessel would be crushed like an empty eggshell. Radio SOS messages were sent out but these doughty men hung on in the hope that they and their ship might be saved. By 15 October their plight seemed so desperate that the Hudson Bay Company sent two aircraft from the base at Nome, almost 700 kilometres away. Twenty-two of the Baychimo's crew were rescued, and her skipper and fourteen men were left behind to wait until the melting ice released the ship and its precious cargo. They knew they might have to wait as long as a year, so they built a small shelter on the pack-ice a short distance from the shore.

Their sojourn proved to be short and startling, for on the pitch black night of 24 November a hellish blizzard descended, trapping the men inside their wooden shelter. When at last the storm abated, they emerged into the wintry gloom to find that the Baychimo had completely vanished beneath mountains of ice over 20 metres high. They searched around as much as they could, but on failing to find their doomed ship they came to the conclusion that she had been broken to pieces in the blizzard and had sunk.

A GHOST SHIP

They reached the safety of the mainland and prepared to return home. In a few days, however, an Eskimo seal-hunter brought the astonishing news that he had seen their ship some 70 kilometres away to the south-west. Already the Baychimo had been turned into a ghost ship, a polar puppet pushed this way and that by the power of ice, wind and water. The fifteen men trudged to where the Eskimo led them and, sure enough, there was the ship.

It was obvious to the captain that the chances of salvaging his vessel were nil. The ice was not going to allow it. So the men rescued the more valuable furs from the hold and reluctantly left the Baychimo for ever. In due course they were flown back home.

As the months went by, the Company's base in Vancouver received strange reports from Eskimo sources that their ship had again been sighted, this time hundreds of kilometres to the east. On 12 March 1932, a young trapper and explorer named Leslie Melvin discovered her while on a journey from Herschel Island to Nome by dog-team. She was floating inshore peacefully enough. He managed to board her and found that many of the furs were still intact in the hold. Unfortunately, as he was alone and without much equipment, far from his base in Alaska, he could do nothing.