The Ship That Refused to Die: The 38-Year Ghost Voyage of the SS Baychimo

2026-06-23 · Ghost Ships · 8 min read

For three days at the end of November 1931, a blizzard erased the top of the world. Fifteen men - the wintering crew of the Hudson's Bay Company steamer SS Baychimo, under Captain Sydney Cornwell - rode it out in a wooden hut they had thrown together on the shore near Barrow, Alaska, the settlement now known by its Inupiaq name, Utqiagvik. They were close enough to keep an eye on their ship, trapped in the pack ice offshore. On 24 November 1931, when the storm finally spent itself and the men climbed out into the white silence, they turned toward the spot where 1,322 tons of steel had stood frozen fast. The Baychimo was gone. Not sunk before their eyes, not shattered on the beach - simply gone. Captain Cornwell concluded she had broken up and gone down in the storm. He was wrong, and the proof of how wrong would keep surfacing for the next thirty-eight years.

Until that moment she had been an entirely unremarkable ship. Launched in 1914 at the Lindholmens shipyard in Gothenburg, Sweden, under the name Angermanelfven - after a great river of the Swedish north - she was built for the Baltische Reederei of Hamburg, handed to Britain after the First World War as war reparations for shipping losses, and bought in 1921 by the Hudson's Bay Company, which renamed her Baychimo and based her in Ardrossan, Scotland. Two hundred and thirty feet of steel hull, driven by a triple-expansion steam engine at a plodding ten knots, she spent the 1920s working one of the harshest trade routes on earth - carrying provisions out to the Inuit settlements along the Victoria Island coast of Canada's Northwest Territories and coming home each season loaded with furs. Nine voyages she made, and nine times she came back. She was a workhorse, not a legend. Nothing about her suggested she was about to outlive her own crew's memory of her.

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