Baychimo: Arctic Ghost Ship

By Anthony Dalton

No vessel that sailed the Arctic seas has raised so much speculation or triggered imaginations as has the legendary Hudson's Bay Company ship Baychimo.

In the 1920s, Baychimo set up trading posts in eastern Canada, sailed on fur-trading expeditions to Siberia during the turbulent years of the Russian civil war and made dangerous annual voyages around Alaska to Canada's western Arctic coast, shouldering her way through ice floes to resupply the HBC's remote trading posts. Anthony Dalton digs deep to unveil the incredible tale of the hardy ship and her sometimes irascible captain, Sydney Cornwell, bringing to life the larger story of the community of northern traders, hunters and sailors of which Baychimo was a part.

This ship's story had a remarkable twist. Caught in 1931 in an ice floe that refused to let go, her crew expected her to sink at any moment, and abandoned ship. But Baychimo was as stubborn as the ice, and she floated away unharmed to begin what would prove to be the longest phase of her seemingly charmed career: for the next four decades she would appear on the horizon at unexpected times and places, always defiantly upright and afloat, becoming the legendary ghost ship of the Arctic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926936772

Anthony Dalton

Anthony Dalton is an adventurer and an author. He has written five non-fiction books and collaborated on two others. Recently, he published River Rough, River Smooth and Adventures with Camera and Pen. His illustrated non-fiction articles have been printed in magazines and newspapers in 20 countries and nine languages. He lives in Delta, British Columbia.

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Introduction

York Factory sits on a crumbling cliff on the north shore of Manitoba’s Hayes River, a short distance upstream from Hudson Bay. Where once there was a thriving trading post and major transshipment centre for Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) goods and furs, there is now only a cavernous museum building, a small cemetery and a couple of dwellings for park rangers. In winter the site is a playground for polar bears. In summer it plays host to a few million mosquitoes. Harbour seals and occasional beluga whales inhabit the estuary. Wolves, singly and in small packs, trot purposefully along the river’s shoreline.

I have known about York Factory since I was a boy growing up in Gravesend, England, on the south side of the estuary of the Thames, from whence many HBC ships sailed for Hudson Bay. Always fascinated by history and adventure, I devoured the exciting tales of author R.M. Ballantyne’s life with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Sitting on the seawall watching ocean-going ships steaming up and down the river, I used to dream of seeing the great bay for myself and of exploring the fur-trading site on its western shore.

Decades later I arrived at York Factory with five companions at the end of a summer canoe trip down the cascading rapids of the mighty Hayes River—once an important wilderness highway for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Wandering through the museum later with my sometime paddling partner and fellow author Barbara J. Scot, from Portland, Oregon, we came across a photograph of a two-masted sailing ship with sails furled, standing at anchor in the middle of the Hayes River off York Factory. The caption told us the ship was the HBC’s Ocean Nymph. I’ll bet there are some interesting stories in that old square-rigger’s logbooks, I said. For the next few minutes I rambled on passionately about the ships and boats of the Hudson’s Bay Company, while Barb listened politely. When I paused for breath she suggested, with a smile, that I should write a book on the subject.

The historic scene in the photograph, and our rather one-sided conversation, sent me on a mission to learn as much as I could about the valiant ocean-going HBC sailing ships such as Ocean Nymph, and the hundreds of other vessels—large and small—that the company employed in its service through more than 300 years. I soon discovered there were many fascinating stories about the HBC fleet, but it was not a tale of adventure in a square-rigged sailing ship that stood out for me—although there are many wonderful narratives to be told from that era. The story that drew me most strongly, rather, was that of a 20th-century cargo and passenger ship. Baychimo was a little over 1,300 tons, really not much more than a coastal steamer—the kind of scruffy little tramp that used to be so common in my youth, calling in at tiny ports along the world’s coastlines. Baychimo was different, however. Her trading domain was the Arctic: remote settlements from Siberia to northern Alaska and across the top of Canada. She was a ship that fought the enormous dangers of ice each summer, far from her home port of London, England. And she was a ship that had become a legend: the ghost ship of the Arctic. Baychimo’s story was one I could not pass by. It was a story I knew I had to write.

The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, now housed in Winnipeg, are a gold mine for a researcher. Peaceful and spacious, staffed by dedicated archivists, the building contains written and photographic records of the company’s more than three centuries of history from its genesis in 1668—when the two exploratory ships, Nonsuch and Eaglet set sail from Gravesend—to modern times. Much of Baychimo’s story is here. Stored safely in strong utilitarian cardboard boxes and files can be found innumerable pages of correspondence, telegrams, ship’s logbooks, voyage reports and personal journals of the crew members and company servants. A comprehensive photographic library complements the textual records. Sitting at a desk in the archives, reading documents and letters hour after hour, learning more and more of Baychimo’s arduous Arctic adventures as each day went by, my decision to write her rich story was vindicated.

During her 11 years with the Hudson’s Bay Company, Baychimo was a temporary home to many sailors. The able seamen, deckhands and stokers changed regularly, many signing on for only a single voyage and a few even jumping ship before the voyage was more than half over. Likewise her engineers and deck officers changed, although much less often. The only continuity was the ship’s master. Captain Sydney Cornwell took command in February 1923 and served her diligently until her loss in the dying months of 1931. For this reason, the officers and crews remain, to a great extent, anonymous, so this story is really that of the ship and, to a lesser degree, her captain.

Not everyone is familiar with the terminology of Arctic navigation, so as explanation I have included at the end of the book a short glossary of terms in general use. Also, while it is customary today to refer to the indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic as Inuit or Inuvialuit (in Canada) and Inupiats (in Alaska), in the 1920s and ’30s it was different. Many letters and reports written by HBC employees and quoted here refer to Eskimos and natives. Readers should also note that where distances are given in miles, these refer to statute miles (1.61 kilometres) for distances on land, and nautical miles (1.85 kilometres) for distances over water or sea ice.

Alaska Coastline Map

This detail map of the Alaska coastline shows the location of Baychimo when she was found by the crew of the schooner Trader in 1933. For a complete view of Alaska, see this map.

Chapter 1

An Arctic Ghost Ship

The wind, which has been blowing steadily for days and is laden with particles of ice, shifts suddenly, arcing across the compass from NE to NW. It gusts hard, blowing stronger with every passing minute: a harsh, malevolent wind. A polar bear and her cub lower their heads, screw their eyes to slits and turn into that same vicious wind. With the sow in the lead and the cub close to her right flank, the yellowish-white Arctic bears move steadily across the wind-formed sastrugi, heading away from the shore—away from the imminent danger.

Where a short time before there had been an impression of silence—except for the wind’s mournful song—there now come tormented sounds of grinding and screeching as great floes of multi-year ice crash into each other, raft over each other, rear up and pile upon each other: building blocks of solid ice reaching 25 metres (80 feet) in the air. Thunderous roars echo across the frozen sea and reverberate across the land, giving a cacophonous voice to jagged mountains of blue and white. Natural violence takes on a new meaning as the polar ice pack, responding urgently to the growing storm’s restless energy, slams into the low-lying, snow-covered north Alaskan shoreline.

Far out on the Arctic Ocean, moaning softly at the early summer storm while sitting almost upright in the middle of a giant ice floe, a ship—more like an elongated iceberg—drifts slowly and steadily toward that same distant Alaskan shore. Every part of her, from her tall slim funnel to her deck, from forepeak to stern, is coated with a solid layer of ice, around a metre (three to four feet) thick in places. Atop her foremast the crow’s nest has grown to twice its normal size. The foremast, and its twin aft, stand rigid with their supporting rigging, unable to flex under the glacial wrapping. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the floe revolves, responding to the wind and current, turning the ghostly ship in a lazy pirouette, displaying her once-proud lines from all angles. No sounds, other than the screeching of ice pinching her hull, emanate from her. No lights show aboard. No warmth radiates from within the hull. No sailors walk hesitantly across her icy wooden decks. No master mariner stands on the bridge to guide her. No calloused hands caress the oaken wheel. The ship is deserted: a plaything for the Arctic winds, ocean currents and the ever-present ice.

As the giant ice floe drives up against more ice crowding the shoreline—the floes pushing and shoving, jostling each other in their apparent haste to cover the last few kilometres to land—it grinds its rough edges smooth against others of its kind, as its gentle rotation comes to a temporary stop. The ghostly ship trembles for a while as the vibrations from all around settle down. For a few days the floe and the captive ship in its centre stay put, held there by the northwest wind.

Trader and Baychimo

The 10-ton schooner Trader and her crew in the ice close to Baychimo in August 1933.

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives/Archives of Manitoba (1934-2-4)

When the storm abates, the wind velocity decreases to a moderate breeze. It veers to blow from east-northeast and the ice begins to crack again. Long dark lines run across the floes, zigzagging in all directions. The ice beyond the shore-bound and grounded floes slowly separates into individual hard pans, with narrow leads of open water between them. The ship’s huge floe rocks slightly as smaller ice drifts away. Hesitantly at first, then with more determination, the floe responds to the wind’s pressure and turns to the west. The ship trapped in the middle, with no alternative, goes with it. Winter briefly retreats from the Arctic. As the temperature climbs above freezing point the fresh summer sun’s warm rays finally find their way to the ship. A few rivulets of meltwater begin to trickle slowly from her masts and funnel, from the bridge and down her glistening black sides. As summer blooms and advances, it bestows a modicum of warmth on the Arctic. Responding to the welcome rise in temperature, the derelict ship’s icy cloak gradually trickles away, leaving her bare and rusting, though still trapped on her floe—and still alone.

~

Trader, an impossibly small 10-ton wooden schooner, sailed from Nome, Alaska, each year on trading voyages to settlements on Alaska’s west and north coasts, sailing as far as Point Barrow and, when ice conditions permitted, even farther east to Herschel Island in the Yukon. On her July 1933 voyage she carried her owner, Nome merchant Ira Rank, Icelandic skipper Kari Palsson and his brother Pete (the engineer), plus one passenger: Isobel Wylie Hutchison, an adventurous botanist from Scotland, on an expedition to collect Alaskan and Arctic wildflowers. With its limited deck space heavily laden with drums of oil and gasoline, plus containers of fresh fruit and vegetables, Trader was an unlikely vessel to carry a passenger—especially a foreign woman travelling alone—in those days. Moreover, the botanist travelled with her own heavy baggage—a full 300 pounds of it.

For much of that year’s voyage to the Arctic, Trader had to fight hard for every nautical mile of northing. She was held up for a few days by a strong northerly gale, sheltering at anchor behind the great bulk of Cape Prince of Wales, gateway to the Bering Strait. Hutchison made good use of the delay by climbing the hills behind the settlement above the beach and adding to her flower collection. When the wind and seas lessened, Trader called briefly at Point Hope—on the extreme western tip of the dagger-like Tigara Peninsula—to deliver mail, some of which was transferred directly to the United States Coast Guard cutter Northland for onward delivery. While members of the crew bartered tobacco for skins, furs and ivory in the village, Hutchison visited the cemetery. There, in a burial ground ringed by an imposing barrier made from the upright jaw bones of bowhead whales, she studied dwarf flowers, commenting in her journal on the deep blue of the forget- me-nots, the tiny pink polygonium, the white cerastium and the grey artemisia.

With a steady offshore wind to help her northerly track, and ice not far off, Trader only stayed at Point Hope a few hours. Northland left before her, steaming north to the ice, hoping to push on to Point Barrow without delay. Trader passed close to the sheer 275-metre (900-foot) eminence of Cape Lisburne, where a varied assortment of sea birds delighted Hutchison. Murres, guillemots, puffins and gulls wheeled above the schooner, dived in front of her, and scooted across the sea’s surface. Cape Lisburne is just about the northwesternmost tip of the mountains that stretch in an almost unbroken chain 17,500 kilometres (11,000 miles) south along the western side of the Americas, through the Rockies and the Andes to Tierra del Fuego at the southern extremity of South America. Crossing the broad expanse of shoal water now known as Ledyard Bay (this long curved bay was unnamed until the late 1970s), Trader reached the loose edge of the ice barrier west of Point Lay. From there she suffered a rough onward ride through big waves, with the added danger of loose surface ice, until a westerly gale forced her to move closer inshore. His advance blocked by the polar pack, Captain Kari Palsson drove his anchor into a large pan of solid ice to wait out the storm. His sterling efforts to maintain position went unrewarded, however: during the night Trader and her frozen dock drifted 22 kilometres (12 miles) back southwest, toward Point Lay.

A long chain of narrow, low-lying islets, or sandspits, have created a natural barrier of sorts that protects this part of the west Alaskan coast from the effects of ice floes and waves. Beginning two-thirds of the way up Ledyard Bay, the chain extends northeast for 190 kilometres (120 miles), rounding Icy Cape and petering out at a point southwest of Wainwright. In contrast to the sheer cliffs of the Lisburne Peninsula, which gradually decrease in height as the land curves east and north along Ledyard Bay, the mainland tucked away behind the offshore islets is relatively flat and uninteresting. Between the islets and the shore is Kasegaluk Lagoon, which is nowhere more than a couple of fathoms deep and mostly considerably less. It does, however, offer a sheltered anchorage for boats of shallow draft.

Captain Palsson secured Trader behind a sandspit in Kasegaluk Lagoon until the wind dropped. Farther out, the stately four-masted schooner C.S. Holmes, one of the last traditional sailing ships to serve the Seattle–Vancouver–Barrow–Herschel Island run, also rode to her anchor while her skipper, Captain John Backland Jr., waited for a break in the ice. At 409 tons C.S. Holmes was much too big to venture into the lagoon.

The following night, as a mist descended over the Arctic sea, some of Trader’s crew saw Northland passing far off—a ghostly presence sailing silently north beyond the white glow of the pack ice—while Trader and C.S. Holmes remained at anchor in their respective positions.

"I wonder if we shall meet Baychimo this year?" Captain Palsson asked as he and the other three stood on deck watching Northland’s progress. Ira Rank said she would probably have drifted to somewhere in Siberian waters by then. Baychimo had last been seen in the ice, well to the west of Point Barrow the previous year, so his assumption had merit, but Ira was wrong. Although she could not be seen, Baychimo—ghost ship of the Arctic—was closer than any aboard Trader could have imagined.

Abandoned after she was trapped in heavy ice a few kilometres south of Point Barrow in October 1931, the Hudson’s Bay Company steamer Baychimo had already become the stuff of legend. Instead of quickly sinking under the crushing pressure of the ice, as everyone expected, her 1,322 tons of steel hull and wooden fittings, wedged in a huge pan of ice, had drifted apparently aimlessly at the whim of uncharted ocean currents and Arctic winds for many months—as far as anyone knew. Although she had not been seen for more than a year, other ships’ crews often wondered about her fate. It was generally felt that she had either gone to her grave off the Alaskan coast during the winter of 1932–33, or wandered west to a similar fate in Siberian waters.

Trader had been close to Baychimo in the early summer of 1931, before her abandonment, as the two ships—one large and one small—fought their way north through loose ice to round Point Barrow. Regular crews of both ships knew each other and could identify most ships serving western Arctic waters by their profiles on the horizon. Certainly, Trader’s crew would have recognized Baychimo’s distinctive outline quite easily in reasonable weather conditions.

When the worst of the storm blew out, Trader slipped out of the lagoon through a narrow passage between the sandspits and struggled north for three hours to Icy Cape, where she again took shelter in the lagoon and dropped anchor in front of the village. Icy Cape had been named by Captain James Cook, and was the farthest north he reached in 1778 while searching for a western entrance to the Northwest Passage. There Cook’s progress, like so many after him, was blocked by impenetrable pack ice—standing a full 3.5 metres (12 feet) above the waterline on its southern edge where it met the sea, and thicker to the north.

Blossom Shoals, a treacherous patch of underwater mounds, runs due north of Icy Cape for about 22 kilometres (12 miles). Densely packed ice floes had piled up on the shoals and against the lagoon’s barrier of sandy islets. There was no way forward. Trader was effectively trapped until the wind changed. Clearly visible in the sunshine for a while, Northland, likewise unable to make headway, also lay at anchor some distance to the southwest. There were no obvious northerly leads—open water channels—in sight. On the Alaskan coast, navigation conditions are dictated by the winds: when it blows onshore (from the sea toward the land) the ice piles up with it, closing all leads. For the ships to continue, they needed an easterly or offshore wind to move the ice and produce open water.

As far as the eye could see, far beyond the low, flat sandy spits of land, the sea had been transformed into irregular sculptures of ice. Great ridges, spiked with jagged peaks, scored the horizon under an increasingly leaden sky. Close in, cracked and broken blocks of polar ice lay in haphazard abandon, their once-pristine whiteness scarred and sullied by contact with the sea bed and the land. On the shore a handful of houses clustered together where a narrow sward of green bordered the beach. No faces turned seaward. Icy Cape was deserted, except for one old Inuk resting in his home. All the others were away in Wainwright, 80 kilometres (50 miles) to the northeast, eagerly waiting for the annual supply ship to arrive from the south—the most important event of their year.

As soon as a lead opened, Trader and Northland pushed north against high winds and an outgoing tide for a few more hours, eventually reaching Wainwright. Arriving there on August 11, Trader’s progress was again impeded by fields of fractured ice. She could go no farther north until another change in the wind.

Captain Palsson had just navigated through the narrow Wainwright Inlet and anchored in the village’s circular bay when a small boat carrying three men cast off from shore. They carried startling news relayed to them from the schooner Patterson, which was heading for Point Barrow from San Francisco.

"Baychimo’s out there in the ice, 12 miles off shore! Can you get to her, boys?" Dick Hall, a trader accompanied by two Inupiat, called up to the surprised crew. Twelve miles (22 kilometres) off shore put the derelict somewhere to the northeast of the outer limits of Blossom Shoals. Hall and his men clambered aboard Trader as Captain Palsson ordered the anchor raised again. Palsson then hurriedly climbed to the crow’s nest at the top of the mast to guide his ship through the ice. Between Trader and Baychimo lay immense danger. A shift in the wind could easily trap Trader in the ice, where she could be crushed like a matchbox, or carried far out to sea to an equally inevitable doom.

Derelict Baychimo

The derelict Baychimo as she looked when found in a large pan of ice off Alaska’s northwest coast in 1933.

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives/Archives of Manitoba (1934-2-2)

From his aerie Palsson scanned the panorama of ice. In the distance, a dim black object interrupted the stark polar white. Shouting instructions from the masthead, Palsson carefully guided his charge past floating ice pans considerably large, heavier and stronger than Trader itself. Constantly his powerful voice bellowed changes of course down to the helmsman: Port, ten degrees! Starboard, five degrees! Steady as she goes! His practised eyes picked out narrow lanes of open water, as his mind calculated the possibilities—and dangers—of following each potential route. Each change of direction took the schooner a little closer to her goal. Trader muscled her way between smaller floes, responding to every abrasive contact with a tremor through her timbers. She stopped at one giant, frozen emerald-green platform while her crew filled a water barrel from a fresh sapphire pool before cautiously pushing forward again. Most ships working in the Arctic in those days replenished fresh water supplies from melt pools in the ice. Although sea water is salty, when it freezes the salt slowly leeches downwards through the ice, eventually leaving the upper levels salt-free. As this ice begins to melt, freshwater pools are left on the surface.

Trader passed a couple of umiaks (Inupiat open boats), left on the ice when the slim lead of open water they had been travelling in closed. Their owners had covered the final leg of the journey to Baychimo on foot across the precarious shifting pack, risking all in an attempt to find riches aboard the ship.

Trader with salvaged goods

The schooner Trader, her decks piled high with items salvaged from Baychimo in the summer of 1933.

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives/Archives of Manitoba (1934-2-5)

Palsson continued his search for a reasonably safe channel until no more than a few boat lengths separated Trader from Baychimo. Hutchison reported the schooner’s arrival at the ghost ship:

At last, when success seemed about to desert us, Kari [Captain Palsson] spied a lead turning towards the very cake upon which Baychimo was poised, her giant hull, rust-stained and battered by the frozen seas, looming tower-like above the little Trader. She was riding upon a pan of ice which looked already almost on the verge of breaking up, though it might be that the winter freeze-up would set the stranded ship upon yet another year’s wandering.

Palsson had his crew set Trader’s anchor solidly into the ice. Once she was safe and secure, they stepped down onto the floe and crossed the final few yards to Baychimo. A broken wooden ladder and a rope dangling from a rail offered access to her decks. One by one, Hutchison and Trader’s crew boarded the