The Octavius, the legend of the ghost ship that was sailing for 14 years

 

The ghost ship that sailed for 14 years

In the 18th century, the world of navigation began to obsess over a challenge: finding the Northwest Passage . The era of the discovery of continents or lost islands had already come to an end and, at that time, one of the great objectives that remained pending at sea was to find a way that, bordering North America, would connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific by a short route . However, this would require crossing the dreaded Arctic Ocean , where ice and icebergs complicated the mission. Many ships embarked on the adventure without success.

Possibly, the best known case is that of the Terror and the Erebus , two vessels that were trapped in the Arctic ice in 1845 and were not located until 2016. The main problem that this route had was crossing the Strait of Lancaster , a very narrow strip of water that could only be crossed in summer because, at the time when the cold entered , the freezing temperatures turned the water into a block, impeded navigation and ended up causing the ships to be stranded in a desert of icewhere its crew members ended up dying due to the lack of drinking water and food, thousands of kilometers away from any civilized point. It is precisely in this context that the legend of the Octavius ​​appeared.

This schooner would begin its journey on September 10, 1761 , when the ship left London for China . Commanded by Captain Hendrick van der Heul - who was a former general of Captain Kidd - it took several months to reach the Asian country. Once there, he loaded his holdings with the aim of returning to the UK ... but he never did. Several months later, when the ship had not returned to London, inquiries began to try to find out what had happened to it, but no one knew anything at all , only that it had reached its destination and that it had departed back to the British Isles.

In this way, the Octavius ​​disappeared sometime in 1762, but no one had managed to find its trace. In principle, the original route of the ship only proposed a round trip from London to China, with no other objectives than to make a commercial exchange quite common at that time . However, the surprise would come 14 years after the boat had disappeared. It was October 11, 1776, when another vessel, the Herald, was fishing in the North Atlantic when, suddenly, their lookout could observe another boat approaching them.

The lookout told the captain, Alex Warren , what he was seeing, at which point the ship's chief executive tried, unsuccessfully, to discover which ship it was. His surprise came when he observed that it was a schooner, a rather unusual boat for the area, as it was a boat with three masts and numerous sails that it was not very common to see in an area where cold and ice were common. Thus, the general decided that his ship would approach, but when they shouted from the deck, they received no response. It was a bad omen for the crew, as 'National Geographic' says .

Practically beside him, both Warren and the rest of the crew could see that a good part of the deck of the ship was frozen , with the hull badly damaged and with broken sails. Thus, they decided to send a small advance on a barge to see up close what had happened. When they arrived at the ship, those fears came true: the 28 sailors who made up the crew were lying on their bunks , covered by numerous blankets, but all of them died from frostbite. They then went to the pantries, where they saw that all food and water supplies had been depleted.

Before leaving the ship, Warren went to the captain's cabin in search of the log book, where some explanation of what had happened could be given. But in that cabin there were four more bodies: a woman hugging her son, a man with a flint and a metal bar, and the captain himself, sitting in a chair in front of his logbook, still with his pen in hand . In view of what had happened, the captain ordered one of his men to pick up that little book to analyze it more calmly from the Herald itself, setting that advance party towards his ship.

But the surprises were not over. When the captain carefully reviewed the notebook, he discovered that it only had the first and last pages , but there was enough information in them: the ship was making the route between China and the United Kingdom, but then what was it doing lost there? Indeed, it was the Octavius, something confirmed by the dates in the logbook: the first page had been written on September 10, 1761, that is, the day he began his trip to China and the last one was written on November 11, 1762 , in which he claimed that the ship had been stuck in the ice for 17 days and that the situation was catastrophic.

Or, put another way, the ship they had just found, that is, the Octavius, had been missing for 14 years . Perhaps they had decided to try to find the Northwest Passage on their way home and, even if they did not know it, they had actually achieved their goal posthumously . To this day, experts debate whether the story is real or just a legend, but, be that as it may, it encouraged numerous boats to later try to find the Northwest Passage. It would not be until 1906 when Roald Amundsen succeeded, opening a route that until now had been impenetrable. Except for the Octavius, though his crew never found out.