The Salty Salty Cold Salty Sea

Aye, lsea-lads and sea-lassies, gather ye 'round.

I spied in the Anchorage Daily News a reference to the story of the S.S. Baychimo, the "Phantom of the Arctic.

Them sciencey coves be trying to find her again. And here be parts of the tale, on an extremely salty Scots sea site.

....she became imprisoned in the pack ice near Seahorse Reef in Alaska. Finlay and his shipmates spent much of their time on the icefield, searching for driftwood ’to save the Baychimo’s coal for when they got moving again, and transporting fresh water from an inland lake.

They also built an igloo-style hut, banked up with snow, and one day emerged from it to find the Baychimo had disappeared! [**] She had been lifted by the pack ice, which had moved, and taken her towards the North Pole on an Arctic sea where the icebergs reached a height of 70 feet. It took three days and nights for Finlay and a young trapper who had been a passenger on the Baychimo to travel over the ice for 22 miles in a blinding blizzard and get help at an Eskimo village, but fortunately everyone lived to tell the astounding tale.

And what of the Baychimo? She was sighted many times from 1932 until 1969 roaming over 100 square miles of Arctic seas, and became known to the Eskimos as the ....“the phantom of the Arctic”.

Here be the news-type story.

After 1939 the Baychimo was seen scores of times, mostly by Eskimos but occasionally by explorers, traders and pilots. Each time she eluded whatever pursuit was possible, and over the intervening years she has sailed on crewless and alone.

In March 1962 a small party of Eskimos discovered the ship again while fishing from their kayaks. This time she was floating serenely in the Beaufort Sea near a desolate strip of coastline. Once again there was no means of capturing her, so they left the desolate, rusting, but still uncrushed hulk to drift away into the unknown once more. The last recorded sighting, again by Eskimos, was in 1969-thirty-eight years after she was abandoned. But this time she was once more fast in the pack-ice of the Beaufort Sea between Icy Cape and Point Barrow.

From the same Scots site, this salty anecdote steeped in salt water, and barreled in brine, and then dipped in crunchy salt:

“I sailed on her during the 1930s and saw the cook treating meat which had gone off with permanganate of potash to make it edible,” he told me. “And when that was finished we got the Board of Trade whack (ration) called salt horse which had to be boiled for four to five hours. That and cracker hash made with maggoty biscuits. We got two ounces of tea each per week, a tin of condensed milk had to last three weeks, and half a Archie Murchie and Jim McGregor looking ships. at the original map of Ardrossan Harbour. Ardrossan was a verv important sea pound of sugar a week. But the Board of Trade regulations also ensured that we got an issue of lime juice to protect us from scurvy. We also had to provide our own bedding, including the chaff mattresses known as ‘donkeys’ breakfasts’.”

Another shipping line, which had better remain nameless, had very religious owners who gave to charity but were exceedingly mean to their seamen, and of this line it is said that you got a sausage and a tract for breakfast!

Yet despite the harsh conditions, there was never any shortage of pierhead jumps! These were men who loitered on the piers in the hope that a ship would be short of a crew member at sailing time – for pierhead jumps took place in both directions!

“I told you not to trust that pierhead jump! When he was washed overboard he took that new bucket with him,” it was once said of an unknown hapless amateur deck hand. Aye! Be no pier jumping whack, hearties!