By Staff Writer: Jerri Clewis
With Halloween fast approaching, it’s a good time to reflect on some of the spookier stories in history, and few are as frightening as some of the legends surrounding ghost ships. Maritime lore is full of stories of disturbing ships found at sea, and the Octavius is one of the more notorious.
An old maritime legend claims the Octavius docked in London to pick up cargo destined for China in 1761. The crew successfully completed the job in China sometime later and set out for British shores. The weather was warm, and the captain decided to risk a trip through the Northwest Passage, a sea lane from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the Arctic Ocean. Only the ship never reached its destination.
The story explains the ship was declared lost until 1775 when the whaling ship Herald spotted an unknown ship sailing off the coast of Greenland, according to The Archaeologist.
The captain of the Herald ordered a party to board the ship, and the crew began to explore the interior. That’s when they discovered the entire crew, 28 men large, frozen to death as if caught in the grasp of some curse. The frozen captain was still seated at his desk, pen in hand, with the logbook before him. Everything was seemingly untouched.
The crew ran for their lives but not before snatching up the logbook, which recounted the story of the captain’s folly.
The ship had become imprisoned in the ice of the Arctic, hundreds of miles north of Alaska, and the crew perished from the cold. Later, the ship broke free of the ice and sailed to Greenland on its own accord. The Herald abandoned the ship, believing it cursed after learning of its fate. It was never sighted again, and it remains a mystery to this day if it ever truly existed.
Author David Meyer made headway in solving the mystery when he discovered that the Octavius shares remarkable similarities to another story from John Warrens, captain of the ship Try Again—there is probably a story behind that name—who encountered a ghost ship named the Gloriana in 1775. The Glorina crew died 13 years previously and were frozen when Warrens found them. A logbook was also found, stating the same date as the Octavius.
His research yielded multiple articles from 1828-1829 that tell a similar story to the Octavius and the Gloriana, but none yet from the year of the legend. The truth is still unknown, but the legend still lives on, adopting new forms through the generations. Besides finding a place in literature, the Octavius has appeared in the video game Assassin’s Creed III. There is also a band called “Ghost Ship Octavius,” which uses “ghostly frozen imagery,” according to their bio.