In the icy waters of the Arctic, where the sea is as unpredictable as the sky is vast, one ship’s story has become legend both for its endurance and its mysterious fate. The SS Baychimo was no ordinary cargo steamer. Built in 1914 in Gothenburg, Sweden, named initially Ångermanelfven, she was a sturdy vessel designed to brave cold northern seas. She measured about 230 feet in length and displaced over 1,300 tons. Powered by a triple-expansion steam engine, Baychimo was capable of pushing her way through the thickest pack ice at speeds up to 10 knots. This strength and resilience made her an ideal ship for northern trade routes, where ice and extreme weather constantly tested the limits of men and machines alike.
After World War I, ownership of the ship passed from Germany to the United Kingdom as part of reparations, and by 1921, she was acquired by the Hudson’s Bay Company, one of the most storied trading enterprises in North America. Under the company’s banner, the ship was renamed Baychimo, after a small inlet on the northern coast of Alaska. Her new role was to sail the challenging and often treacherous routes of the Canadian Arctic, bringing supplies such as steel and food to remote Inuit communities and carrying back precious furs to southern markets. The Baychimo’s journeys were long and arduous, navigating narrow channels, dodging ice floes, and enduring frigid temperatures. Yet for nearly a decade, she completed each mission with remarkable reliability, becoming a familiar sight to the Inuit people and traders who lived along the coast.
In the fall of 1931, Baychimo was returning from a successful trading voyage when fate intervened. Near the Alaskan town of Barrow, today known as Utqiaġvik, the ship became trapped by rapidly advancing pack ice. The ice was relentless, closing in tightly and threatening to crush the hull. The Hudson’s Bay Company, mindful of the safety of its crew, ordered the men to evacuate and seek refuge on land while attempts were made to free the ship. After two days ashore, some of the crew returned to Baychimo only to find that she had briefly broken free. But the reprieve was short-lived. By early October, the ice trapped her again, this time with even greater force.
The crew faced a grim situation. The ship was stuck, isolated in one of the harshest environments on Earth, as winter approached swiftly. The company arranged an airlift to bring most of the crew to safety, but 15 hardy men chose to remain aboard the Baychimo through the winter. They built a sturdy wooden hut onshore and stocked it with supplies, prepared to wait out the cold months with hope that the ship might survive the brutal conditions. But in late November, a fierce blizzard swept through the area, blanketing the boat and camp in deep snow. When the storm passed and the men returned, they found that the Baychimo had disappeared. Somehow, the ice had shifted and carried the ship away, leaving nothing but a trail in the snow. The men salvaged what they could from the shore but had to accept that the boat was lost.
What followed would become one of the most extraordinary maritime mysteries of the 20th century. Over the next four decades, the Baychimo appeared and disappeared repeatedly, drifting along the northern coasts of Alaska and Canada like a ghost. Inuit hunters and local traders reported seeing the ship several times, sometimes frozen fast in the ice, other times floating free and abandoned. In 1933, a group of Iñupiat hunters even boarded the vessel and were caught inside by a storm for ten days, living on the deserted decks as the elements raged around them. The ship seemed to have a strange will to survive. Despite being battered by storms, crushed by ice, and left to the mercy of nature, she refused to sink.
Salvage attempts were made, including one led by Captain Hugh Polson in the mid-1930s, but none were successful in towing the vessel to safety. The ship’s steel hull, built to withstand Arctic conditions, was rigid and remained largely intact through the years. Her decks still held the furniture, tools, and cargo left behind when the crew abandoned her. These artifacts gave the Baychimo a haunting presence, as though she were a time capsule drifting through frozen waters. Explorers, adventurers, and researchers kept searching, but the ship was elusive, vanishing behind ice floes or disappearing into thick fog.
The final confirmed sighting of the Baychimo came in 1969, nearly forty years after she was first trapped by ice. Inuit observers saw her frozen in place near Point Barrow. After that, the trail went cold. Some speculate she finally succumbed to the crushing ice or sank beneath the waves, swallowed by the Arctic sea. Others hold onto the hope that the Baychimo still drifts somewhere in the polar north, a ghost ship carrying with her stories of resilience and mystery.
The story of the Baychimo is preserved not only in legends but also in museums. Objects recovered from her decks, the whale boat, chairs, and navigation instruments, are housed at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. These relics are a tangible reminder of a vessel that outlived her crew and defied the odds. The Baychimo remains a symbol of human tenacity and the wild, unpredictable power of the Arctic. Her tale continues to captivate all who hear it, a stirring narrative of survival and mystery set against one of the most forbidding environments on Earth.
Bibliography
Amusing Planet. “SS Baychimo: The Unsinkable Ghost Ship.” Amusing Planet, December 16, 2020. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/12/ss-baychimo-unsinkable-ghost-ship.html.
Dalton, Anthony. Baychimo: Arctic Ghost Ship. Vancouver: Heritage House Publishing Co., 2006.
Hutchison, Isobel Wylie. North to the Rime-Ringed Sun. London: Blackie & Son, Ltd., 1934.
Manitoba Museum. “Baychimo: The Adventures of the Ghost Ship of the Arctic.” Manitoba Museum, May 12, 2020. https://manitobamuseums.com/baychimo.
State of Alaska, Department of Natural Resources. “The Ghost Ship SS Baychimo Expedition.” 2006. https://dnr.alaska.gov/expeditions/baychimo.
Time Magazine. “Aeronautics: Flights & Flyers.” Time Magazine, February 29, 1932. https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,XXXXXX,00.html.
University of Alaska Museum of the North. “SS Baychimo Artifacts Collection.” Accessed July 31, 2025. http://www.uaf.edu/museum/baychimo.
“SS Baychimo.” Wikipedia. Last modified July 25, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Baychimo.
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