A Final, Frozen Voyage
The SS Baychimo was a steel-hulled cargo steamer with a gross tonnage of 1,322 tons. Built in a Swedish shipyard in 1914, it was originally named the Ångermanelfven. The ship measured 230 feet (70.1 meters) in length and was powered by a triple-expansion steam engine, giving it a top speed of 10 knots (12 mph). After World War I, the ship was transferred to Great Britain as part of Germany's war reparations and was acquired by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1921. Renamed the SS Baychimo, it served for a decade on the Arctic frontier, trading provisions for valuable furs at Inuit settlements along the coast of Victoria Island.
Its ninth and final commercial voyage began in the summer of 1931. On October 1st, loaded with a cargo of furs and bound for Vancouver, the Baychimo became trapped in early-season pack ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. The crew initially walked half a mile across the ice to the town of Barrow for two days, returning when the ship temporarily broke free. On October 8, the ice closed in again, this time for good. The Hudson's Bay Company decided the situation was too perilous, and on October 15, aircraft evacuated 22 crew members. The captain, Sidney Cornwell, and 14 of his men remained, building a wooden shelter on the ice to wait for the spring thaw.
Thirty-Eight Years Adrift
On November 24, 1931, a severe blizzard struck the area. When the storm subsided, the SS Baychimo was gone. Captain Cornwell and his men assumed the pressure of the ice had finally crushed the hull and sent their ship to the bottom of the Beaufort Sea. Days later, an Iñupiat hunter spotted the ship nearly 45 miles (72 km) south of their position. The remaining crew located the vessel, but judging it to be unseaworthy after the storm, they retrieved the most valuable furs by air and abandoned the Baychimo for the last time.
This was not the end of the Baychimo. For the next 38 years, it became a phantom of the Arctic. It was spotted hundreds of miles from where it was abandoned, drifting silently with the sea ice. Numerous parties managed to board the derelict vessel over the years. In March 1933, a group of Indigenous Alaskans boarded her and were trapped by a storm for 10 days. In July 1934, a team of explorers boarded from their schooner. The last recorded attempt to take control of the ship was in November 1939, when Captain Hugh Polson managed to get aboard but was forced to leave as encroaching ice floes threatened his own vessel. The final confirmed sighting of the SS Baychimo occurred in March 1969. A group of Inuit found it frozen fast within an ice pack in the Chukchi Sea, between Point Barrow and Icy Cape. It has not been seen since.