The Ghost Ship Sailed Alone for 38 Years. It Wasn't Empty.

The SS Baychimo was a cargo steamship owned by the Hudson's Bay Company. Her job was to sail along the Arctic coast of Canada and Alaska, trading supplies for furs.¹

In late 1931, on her way home, she got trapped in thick pack ice off the coast of Alaska, near what is now Utqiaġvik.² The crew left the ship and built a wooden shelter on the shore to wait for the ice to free her. They stayed close, so they could keep an eye on her.

In November, a huge blizzard struck. When it cleared, the Baychimo was gone.³

The crew assumed she had sunk. Some of them went home. Then, days later, a seal hunter told them he had seen the ship, about forty-five miles away, drifting free.⁴ The crew went out and found her. They took what valuable furs they could carry. Then they left her, sure she would sink before winter was over.

She did not sink.

For the next thirty-eight years, people kept seeing her.⁵ Sailors. Hunters. Explorers. A drifting steamship with no one aboard, rusting, appearing and disappearing in the fog and the ice of the Arctic Ocean. Some people tried to board her. Some succeeded, then had to leave when the weather turned.

The last reported sighting was in 1969, by a group of Inuit hunters. The ship was stuck in ice in the Beaufort Sea.⁶

She has never been found.

Aaliyah Okpik's great-grandfather was a carver. He worked in walrus ivory and whalebone, small and beautiful things he sold to tourists and gave to family. When he turned a hundred and moved into a care home, the family cleared out his house. They found one piece he had never sold and never shown to anyone. It was wrapped in sealskin at the bottom of a wooden box.

It was a ship. A steamship, carved in perfect detail. Every rail. Every porthole. A single smokestack. On the side of the hull, in tiny letters scratched into the ivory: BAYCHIMO.

There was something inside it. Aaliyah could see it through the tiny portholes. Something small and dark, carved into the cabin. When she held the ship up to the light, she saw that it was a figure. A person. Sitting at a table. Waiting.

Wrapped around the ship, on a strip of paper, in her great-grandfather's careful English, there was a note.

I saw her in 1969. We all did. We went close in the ice. She was not empty.

Old rule from the hunters. If a ship with no people comes close, do not go aboard. Do not call to it. Do not look in the windows. A ship that is still looking for its crew will take whoever answers.

I looked in the window.