She sails like a lost soul on the Arctic Seas – the ghost ship they call the Baychimo. She floats wraith-like among the icebergs and flees, creaking in the teeth of turbulent gales. She always survives, to become once again the fleeting entry in the logbook of a passing ship. Yet she has no man’s hand to guide her. The Baychimo was abandoned by her crew 42 years ago – left to be crushed like a walnut in the jaws of a merciless icefloe,” reads an evocative article that was published in the Leicester Mercury on 13 May 1974.
When former research engineer Peter Day began uncovering his genealogy 20 years ago, he had no idea that his family was inextricably linked with the of the Arctic”, to quote the article’s headline. But as he scaled the branches of his family tree, Peter’s attention was drawn to three brothers whose lives read like something – and one of them had been on the ship’s last voyage.
