SS Baychimo
ship
SS Baychimo was a steel-hulled, 1,322 ton cargo steamer built in 1914 in Sweden and owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, used to trade provisions for pelts in Inuit settlements along the Victoria Island coast of the Northwest Territories of Canada. She became a notable ghost ship along the Alaska coast, being abandoned in 1931 and seen numerous times since then until her last sighting in 1969.
Early history
Baychimo was launched in 1914 as Ångermanelfven by the Lindholmens shipyard (Lindholmens Mekaniska Verkstad A/B) in Gothenburg, Sweden, for the Baltische Reederei GmbH of Hamburg. She was 230 ft (70 m) long, powered by a triple-expansion steam engine and had a speed of 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph). Ångermanelfven was used on trade routes between Hamburg and Sweden until the First World War. After the war, she was passed to the United Kingdom as part of the First World War reparations by Germany for shipping losses and acquired by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1921. Renamed Baychimo and based in Ardrossan, Scotland, she completed nine successful voyages along the north coast of Canada, visiting trading posts and collecting pelts.
Abandonment
On October 1, 1931, at the end of a trading run and loaded with a cargo of fur, Baychimo became trapped in pack ice. The crew briefly abandoned the ship, travelling over a 1⁄2 mi (0.80 km) of ice to the town of Barrow, Alaska (now Utqiagvik) to take shelter for two days, but the ship had broken free of the ice by the time the crew returned. The ship became mired again on October 8, more thoroughly this time, and on October 15, the Hudson's Bay Company sent aircraft to retrieve 22 of the crew.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Baychimo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.