S.S. Baychimo, a Hudson's Bay cargo steamer, is shown imprisoned in the pack ice near Seahorse Reef in Alaska
The Vancouver Sun, Thursday, May 4, 2006
Reappearing Ghost
Artic: Project hopes to locate abandoned freighter that drifted for almost 40 years
by Randy Boswell
S.S. Baychimo, a Hudson's Bay cargo steamer,
is shown imprisoned in the pack ice near Seahorse Reef in Alaska
An Alaskan government project to locate and protect historic shipwrecks is raising fresh hopes of solving one of the most enduring mysteries of the North: the whereabouts of the fabled Hudson Bay Co. cargo steamer known as "the ghost ship of the Artic."
The S.S. Baychimo, which played a key role in opening the North in the 1920s, was abandoned in 1931 after becoming trapped in ice in the Beaufort Sea, forcing the air rescue of its crew.
But the ship somehow became free and drifted back and forth for decades across hundreds of kilometres in the western Artic Ocean, occasionally boarded by a curious Inuit hunter but always scuttling the aims of would-be salvagers.
Remarkably, the deserted ship remained afloat for at least 38 years. The last recorded sighting was in 1969 near Point Barrow, Alaska.
Now, 75 years after the Baychimo was left to the whims of nature by its ice-bound crew, University of Alaska marine scientist John Kelley is hoping a new seafloor survey of the state's shipwrecks could identify the final resting place of the legendary vessel -- if indeed the 73-metre ship has finally succumbed to the waves.
"Maybe it'll show up," said Kelley, part of a team charting the estimated 4,000 sunken ships along the Alaskan shore for a new marine heritage preservation program.
"I think by now we all feel it's at the bottom somewhere along the coast."
Baychimo had already secured a measure of fame in the years before her spooky, unmanned appearances between the 1930s and '60s.
Built in Sweden in 1914 and acquired by the Hudson Bay Co. in 1919, the 1,300-tonne steel steamer set several distance records during its annual 3,000-kilometre runs between Vancouver and the Northwest Territories in the 1920s.
The ship carried supplies to several Inuit communities and returned each year to its southern port with a load of furs and other goods.
But the voyages were treacherous with the return trip posing a yearly risk of the ship being caught and crushed by the polar pack-ice.
One seaman who wrote about his 1927 summer of adventure aboard the Baychimo recalled being "lost in impenetrable blankets of fog, stuck on shoals, cornered by bergs and forced to retrace our course over many miles to find a more promising lead of 'open water.'"
The Baychimo finally ran out of open water in 1931, when the Artic ice drifted south earlier and heavier than it had in decades.
By August -- when the Baychimo's crew watched aviator Charles Lindberg and his wife Anne soar overhead on a pioneering Artic flight -- the ship had already encountered huge ice floes on its eastward leg toward Coppermine.
The voyage was cut short, but to no avail. Westbound off the coast of Alaska in late September, the Baychimo was pinched by walls of ice and brought to a halt. Dynamite was used to open a channel, but the floes closed in again on 8 Oct, just west of Point Barrow.
Capt. John Cornwell called for rescue and a makeshift runway was cleared on a nearby ice island for the first ever Artic airlift.
About 20 crew were flown out in two planes, with Cornwell and a dozen other essential personnel intending to winter at a coastal shelter before returning to the Baychimo in the spring to free it from the ice.
But on Nov 24, after a severe storm with fierce winds, the ship disappeared. Cornwell and his men, assuming the Baychimo had broken up and been sunk by the ice, were flown south to safety.
Then, in 1932, explorer Leslie Melvin caught sight of the Baychimo floating along the coast as he was trekking by dog-sled from Herschel Island in the Yukon to Alaska.
The next year a group of Inuit hunters saw the ship and briefly boarded it before a storm forced them to leave. A botanist from Scotland who was conducting research in the Artic also reported seeing the Baychimo adrift, but severe weather stopped her from fully exploring the ship.
"Some sentimental observers claim these storms to be Baychimo's way of ridding herself of humans and regaining her icy freedom," marine historian Ron Armstrong has written.
The ship was seen again in September 1935 and November 1939 near Wainwright, Alaska.
Explorers, scientists and Inuit inhabitants of the western Artic reported "scores" of sightings in the post-war era.
In March 1962, a group of Inuit kayaking in the Beaufort Sea once again glimpsed the ship.
"With every disappearance, people figured that was the end of it," Kelley told CanWest News Service. "But it kept showing up."
Finally, in 1969, as the U.S. oil tanker Manhattan was making its controversial crossing of the Northwest Passage, a party of Inuit said they saw the Baychimo floating between Point Barrow and Icy Cape, Alaska.
It was the last time anyone claimed to have seen the deserted vessel.
CanWest News Service
