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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

The Ghost Ship Octavius

The vast oceans of our planet are equally wondrous and dangerous. There are so many unknowns out there on the endless horizon where the sea and sky meet. Even today, the ocean is a mysterious place. It is no wonder sailors are a superstitious lot, especially mariners of the past. And why not? Phenomena and strange sightings were not easily dismissed as they are now with our scientific knowledge and understanding. Still, there are inexplicable occurrences that happen routinely. Just in the last few decades there have been missing air and sea crafts in the Bermuda Triangle, the discovery of underwater crop circles and temple-like structures, and strange aquatic sounds loud enough to be heard on hydrophones between Greenland and the United Kingdom. The ocean is shrouded in secrets we have yet to unlock and fuels our imagination.

Visualize how scary it might be to come upon a ghost ship floating in the middle of nowhere. Now imagine finding something even more terrifying on board.

That is what happened in 1775 when the crew of a whaling ship discovered the Octavius.

The story begins fourteen years earlier. The Octavius left London, England bound for the Orient with a belly full of trade cargo, more than two dozen crewmen, the captain, and his wife and son. The trip was a success, landing on the Far Eastern shores the following year. With new freight, the three-masted schooner set out to return to England. But this time the captain made a fateful decision based on unseasonably warm. He plotted a course through the brutal, relatively uncharted Northern Passage. That was the last anyone had heard of the Octavius, the ship was declared lost at sea.

That is until the whaling ship Herald happened upon the vessel west of Greenland. No one was on the deck which prompted a boarding party to search the ship. Below deck, the found all twenty-eight crewmen frozen to death. In the captain’s quarters, the captain sat at his desk with his logbook in front of him, pen still in his hand. He was not alone. A woman and a young boy were wrapped in blankets upon the bunk.

The spooked boarding party high-tailed it off the schooner, but not before grabbing the logbook. Because the book was frozen solid, parts of the middle broke away from its binding as they fled. What pages were left was enough for the captain of the Herald to piece together the crew’s probable fate. The last position recorded in the book placed Octavius roughly 250 miles north of Alaska’s northernmost point. And the last entry was November 11, 1762—thirteen years earlier. It is speculated that Octavius had become trapped in the sea ice. At some point, the ice broke and the ship continued on its journey successfully through the passage, but without her passengers.

Fearing Octavius cursed, the Herald left her to drift, never to been seen again.


About the Author      


Jennifer is the award-winning author of the Romancing the Pirate series. Visit her at www.jbrayweber.com or join her mailing list for sneak peeks, excerpts, and giveaways.

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