The Ship That Would Not
Die
S.S. Baychimo
Editor's Note: We do not know who originally wrote this story, but we do have updated information from Brian Gallagher, grandson of Alexander Frank Jamieson, radiotelegraph officer on the Baychimo when it was lost. Links to this information is at the bottom of this page.
Photo credits belong to Alexander Frank Jamieson, used with permission by Brian Gallagher, and most likely the Vancouver Maritime Museum, used without permission.
Adrift on the icy northern seas, the ice closed in and sealed the fate of the Baychimo, causing her to elude the tolling bell and salvagers for more than 60 years!
The Baychimo was a fine, trim, solid steel cargo steamer of 1,322 tons, built in Sweden in 1914 and owned by the Hudson's Bay Company. Her single tall funnel, curved bridge and long high prow were well suited to withstand the floes and pack-ice of the dangerous northern waters.
She
was originally used to collect furs from Eskimo trappers along the Victoria
Island coast of the North West Territory of Canada. She pioneered fur
trading with the Eskimo settlements around the Beaufort sea [shown at left
moored at Herschel island], forging her way many times through some of the most
treacherous seas in the world on her 2,000 mile round-trip. Each year she
set out on a regular voyage, always a tough and difficult one, delivering food,
fuel, and other supplies in exchange for pelts at eight of the Hudson's Bay
Company's lonely outposts.
On 6 July 1931, she left Vancouver, British Columbia, with skipper John Cornwell and his crew of 36. They expected a hard trip, for all their runs were hard. Day and night, under the misty glow of the never-setting sun, the Baychimo steamed on eastward. At each port of call, her crew labored long and hard unloading supplies and loading up valuable furs. Eventually they reached the end of their normal eastward run by the shores of Victoria Island. With the hold crammed with cargo, the Baychimo was turned about for Vancouver by a relieved captain.
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 little remained open for the ship to steam through and on 1 October, the ice closed in and sealed the fate of the Baychimo forever.
Her
engines at stop, she could only move as the creaking, numbing ice willed [crew
clearing ice from the rudder and propeller, a daily chore, left, in case she
broke free]. 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 half-mile or so of
ice to shelter in these huts, where they stayed for two days, half-frozen and
unable to venture out.
Then the first extraordinary thing in the Baychimo's strange story happened. Without warning, the pack ice loosened and moved away from the vessel's sides, leaving her movable again. The crew rushed aboard and for three solid hours, the ship steamed away to the west at full speed. Disaster seemed narrowly to have been averted.
But once more, the ice gripped the little cargo steamer. This time it did not let go 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 pitch where some of the crew were playing football, while waiting for the chance to move southwards and home once more.
Now the ice that held the ship had broken away, it began to move slowly back toward the shore. To Cornwell, it seemed only a matter of hours before his rugged little vessel would be crushed like an eggshell. Radio SOS messages were sent out, and 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's Bay Company sent two aircraft from the base at Nome, 600 miles away. They rescued 22 of the Baychimo's crew, leaving her skipper and 14 men behind to await the time when the melting ice would release their ship and its precious cargo. Knowing that they might have to wait as long as a year, this skeleton crew built a small shelter on the pack ice about one mile from the shore.
Their sojourn proved to be short and startling. On the pitch-black night of 24 November, a hellish blizzard trapped the men inside their wooden shelter. When the storm abated, they emerged into the wintry gloom to find that the Baychimo had completely vanished beneath grotesque mountains of ice 70ft high. They searched as much as they could, before concluding that she had been broken to pieces in the blizzard and had sunk.
The men reached the safety of the mainland and prepared to get home before the worst winter weather set in. In a few days, however, an Eskimo seal hunter brought the astonishing news that he had seen their ship some 45 miles away to the southwest. Already the Baychimo had been turned willy-nilly by the inexorable forces of nature into a ghost ship, a polar puppet pushed this way and that by the power of ice, wind and water. The 15 men trudged to where the Eskimo told them......and there was their ship!
It was now obvious to Captain Cornwell that the chances of salvaging his vessel were nil. The ice simply was not going to let him. So they rescued the more valuable furs from the hold and reluctantly left the Baychimo forever. In due course, they were flown back home, thankful to be alive.
As
the months went by, the Company's base in Vancouver received strange reports
from the Eskimos that their long-lost ship had again been sighted, this time
several hundred miles to the east. On 12 March 1932, a young trapper and
explorer named Leslie Melvin found her on a journey from Herschel Island to Nome
by dog-team. She was floating inshore peacefully enough. He boarded
her and found many of the furs in her hold still intact. Unfortunately, as
he was alone and without much equipment many hundred of miles away from his base
in Alaska, he could do nothing.
Some months went by and a group of wandering prospectors saw her and also managed to get on board, reporting everything in perfect order. In March 1933, the Baychimo had apparently drifted back roughly to where her captain had deserted her, floating idly in the freezing waters. Some 30 Eskimos reached her by kayak, but no sooner had they clambered aboard than another terrific storm blew up. Those petrified natives were to be trapped on the ghost ship without food for 10 days before they could get away. By August 1933, the Hudson's Bay Company knew that the Baychimo was now moving calmly in a northerly direction, but she was still much too far from civilization to make salvage operations possible. The Baychimo's next visitors were an exploring party on a schooner, among whom was Miss Isobel Hutchinson, a Scottish botanist. That was in July 1934, and they boarded her for a few hours.
By now, the legend of the little, gray, tall-funneled ghost ship was well-known among the Artic Eskimos, many of them spotting her from time to time on their nomadic travels. By September 1935, she had reached the Alaskan coast. Always, she evaded the crushing grip of the pack ice and survived the worst polar storms. Nature seemed unable to destroy her, but man was equally unable to rescue her.
One man, however, was intent on salvaging the wandering ship. He was Captain Hugh Polson, who in November 1939 spotted her at a considerable distance from his ship. He managed to board her, but in the end was prevented from salvaging her by the creeping ice floes.
After 1939, the Baychimo was seen several scores of times, mostly by Eskimos, but occasionally by white explorers, traders and fliers. Every time, she eluded whatever pursuit was possible, and over the intervening years, she has sailed, crewless and alone, many thousands of ice-girt miles.
In March 1962, a small party of Eskimos discovered her again while fishing from their kayaks. This time, she was floating serenely off a desolate strip of coastline on the Beaufort Sea.
Once again, there was no means of capturing her, so they left the desolate, rusting, but still uncrushed hulk to drift away into the unknown once more. The last recorded sighting was in 1969, 38 years after she was abandoned. Eskimos found her once more, stuck fast in the pack ice of the Beaufort Sea between icy Cape and Point Barrow.
In the early 1990's, a representative of the Hudson's Bay Company, at their headquarters in Winnipeg, said they cannot say definitely whether or not the Baychimo is still afloat. So, it seems likely that the Baychimo will sail on, a fabulous gray ghost that refuses to enter the limbo of lost ships or return to the control of man.
Vancouver Sun, Thursday, May 4, 2006
The
Last Voyage of the Baychimo
written by A. F. Jamieson, radiotelegraph officer of the Baychimo