A cargo ship was abandoned as a lost cause in Arctic ice in 1931 — then kept drifting past sailors, empty and intact, for the next 38 years.
The Baychimo was a steel-hulled cargo steamer built in Sweden in 1914, acquired by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1921 and used to trade supplies for furs along the Arctic coast of Canada's Northwest Territories. It completed nine successful voyages before its final trip.
On October 1, 1931, the ship got trapped in pack ice near Barrow, Alaska. It broke free, then got trapped again a week later. On October 15, the Hudson's Bay Company flew out 22 crew members, leaving 15 behind to guard the valuable fur cargo through the winter if needed.
After a violent blizzard on November 24, the remaining crew assumed the ship had been crushed and sunk. An Inuit seal hunter soon reported spotting it 45 miles away, fully intact. The crew tracked it down, retrieved the furs, and left it behind for good — assuming it would sink on its own eventually.
It never did. Over the next several years, the empty Baychimo was spotted drifting along the Alaska coast again and again: boarded by Alaska Natives in 1933 who got trapped aboard for ten days by a storm, salvaged for furniture by a passing ship's crew later that same year, and boarded again by explorers and would-be salvagers in 1934 and 1939 — each time driven off before they could tow it anywhere.
Sightings kept coming for decades: spotted drifting the Beaufort Sea coast in 1962, and one final confirmed sighting by Inuit observers in 1969 — 38 years after it was abandoned — still frozen in the pack ice near Point Barrow.
Nobody has seen the Baychimo since. It is presumed to have finally sunk from decades of metal fatigue, but its exact fate is unknown. The state of Alaska launched an official search for the wreck in 2006 and never found it.