The Ghost Ship of the Arctic: An Abandoned Steamer Drifted Without a Crew for 38 Years

In March 1962, a group of Inuit traveling along the coast of the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska saw a ship.

It was an old steamer, drifting along the edge of the ice. Nobody was on deck. No smoke came from the funnel. Nobody answered.

The ship was the Baychimo. She had been abandoned more than thirty years earlier.

She was supposed to have sunk in 1931. Instead, she kept turning up. For decades, along one of the most remote coastlines on Earth, people kept seeing her. Hunters. Prospectors. A dog sled traveler. A botanist. Some of them climbed aboard.

She was last seen in 1969. And then she was gone.

From Sweden to the Arctic

The ship began life in 1914 at a shipyard in Gothenburg, Sweden. She was built for a German shipping company, and she was originally called the Ångermanelfven. For a few years, she carried cargo between Hamburg and Sweden.

After the First World War, she was handed over to Britain, as part of reparations for German shipping losses.

In 1921, the Hudson's Bay Company bought her and renamed her Baychimo.

She was a steel cargo steamer, about two hundred and thirty feet long, with a steam engine that could push her along at about ten knots.

The fur trade

The Hudson's Bay Company is one of the oldest companies in the world. For centuries, its business was fur.

The Baychimo's job was to sail along Canada's Arctic coast each summer, carrying supplies to trading posts and Inuit communities, and returning with furs.

She was good at it. She made nine successful voyages along the northern coast.

Trapped

In the fall of 1931, the Baychimo was on her way home from a trading run, her hold full of furs.

On October 1, near Barrow, Alaska, the town now called Utqiagvik, she got stuck in the pack ice.

The crew left the ship and walked about half a mile over the ice to Barrow, where they sheltered for two days. When they went back, the ship had broken free.

But on October 8, she was caught again. This time, more firmly.

On October 15, the Hudson's Bay Company sent planes to fly out twenty-two of the crew.

Fifteen men stayed behind. They were prepared to wait out the whole winter if they had to, so they could sail the ship home when the ice broke up in the spring. They built a wooden shelter on the ice some distance from the ship, where they could keep an eye on her.

November 24, 1931

On November 24, a powerful blizzard hit.

The men stayed in their shelter while it raged. When it finally passed, they went out to check on the ship.

She was gone.

The captain concluded that the storm had broken her apart and she had sunk.

But a few days later, an Inuit seal hunter brought news. He had seen the ship. She was still afloat, about forty-five miles from where the crew had been waiting.

The fifteen men tracked her down. They found her stuck in the ice again. They decided she was not likely to survive the winter. So they took the most valuable furs out of her hold to fly them out.

Then they left her.

She didn't sink

The ship did not sink that winter.

Months later, she was spotted about three hundred miles to the east.

In January 1932, a man named Leslie Melvin, traveling by dog sled toward Nome, saw her floating quietly near the shore.

A few months later, a group of prospectors saw her.

In March 1933, a group of Iñupiat boarded her. A storm came up, and they were trapped aboard for ten days.

In August 1933, the Baychimo was seen about twelve miles off the town of Wainwright, Alaska. People from the town, along with the crew of another ship and a Scottish botanist and author named Isobel Wylie Hutchison, went out and boarded her. They took off a whaleboat, some furniture, and other items.

The Hudson's Bay Company heard she was still afloat. But she was too far out to salvage.

Thirty-eight years

She kept appearing.

In July 1934, explorers from a schooner boarded her.

In September 1935, she was spotted off the Alaskan coast.

In November 1939, a captain named Hugh Polson boarded her, hoping to salvage her. But the ice began closing in, and he had to give up and leave her.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, there were more sightings. Every time, she drifted away before anyone could take her.

In March 1962, the group of Inuit saw her drifting along the Beaufort Sea coast.

And in 1969, she was seen frozen in the pack ice between Point Barrow and Icy Cape.

That was thirty-eight years after her crew abandoned her.

It was the last time anyone reported seeing the Baychimo.

The search

In 2006, the State of Alaska began a project to locate the Baychimo, whether still drifting, frozen somewhere in the ice, or lying on the seafloor.

She has not been found.

Most people assume she finally sank sometime after 1969. Decades of freezing and thawing, of ice pressure and storms, would have taken a toll on her steel hull. But nobody knows when, or where.

What we still don't know

How does a ship drift for nearly forty years without a crew?

Part of the answer is the Arctic itself. For much of the year, the sea there is locked in ice. A ship frozen in pack ice does not sink. It moves with the ice, slowly, for hundreds of miles, until the ice breaks up, and then it drifts in open water until the ice catches it again. The Baychimo was built for cold water, and she was tough.

But that does not make her story any less strange. For thirty-eight years, along one of the emptiest coastlines on Earth, people kept looking up and seeing an old steamer with no one aboard. Some of them climbed on. Some were trapped on her. Nobody could ever bring her in.

She was last seen in 1969. Where is she now? On the bottom of the Beaufort Sea? Crushed somewhere in the ice? Or is there still something out there, waiting to be found?