As a rule, the names of travelers who left and did not return are known. Only their further fate is unknown. In this case, everything was the other way around: the missing travelers were found. Only who they were remained forever unknown …
On August 11, 1775, the American whaling ship "Herald" fell into a calm near a huge ice field west of Greenland. At night, a violent storm suddenly arose, breaking the ice, and the Herald's crew saw a strange ship freed from the ice captivity and approaching them, the masts and yards of which were covered with sparkling ice.
The captain and several of the Herald's sailors boarded the unfamiliar ship and read its name: Octavius. There seemed to be no people on the ship. But when the sailors went down to the living deck, they were horrified to find that all the bunks in the forward cockpit were filled with the dead, whose bodies were perfectly preserved due to the cold.
The captain of the Octavius was found frozen at the table in his cabin, the log of the ship open in front of him. On the bunk lay the body of a woman - probably the captain's wife. Opposite her, on the floor of the cabin, sat a dead sailor. Before him lay flint and shavings: he was obviously going to start a fire at the moment of sudden death. Beside him, on the floor, under a sailor's jacket, was the dead body of a little boy.
The Herald's captain took the logbook and handed it over to one of his men. He then examined the galley, but found no food. When he tried to inspect the hold, the sailors, frightened and tired of the nightmare, refused to go down inside this hearse-ship.
They returned to the launch and then it turned out that a sailor who had a ship's log in a hurry dropped it, trying to get out of the dead ship as soon as possible: the book became fragile from the frost, and all the pages, except for the first few and the last, broke off from the binding and fell into sea.
The next night, the Octavius drifted out of sight and was never heard from again …
Three pages remain from the logbook at the beginning and one at the end. The first pages listed the names of the crew, including the captain, his wife and their ten-year-old son, and spoke of their sailing from England to China on September 10, 1761. These pages ended with a note of the beautiful weather and that September 19 was in sight the ship was in the Canary Islands.
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The last page contained the only entry that must have been made by one of the team members. It said that the ship had been in ice captivity for seventeen days, that people were suffering severely from the cold, that the captain's son had died, and his wife said that she no longer felt the cold (the first sign of approaching death when freezing), that the mate was unsuccessfully trying to dissolve fire, and that the ship's approximate location is latitude 75 ° N, longitude 160 ° W (about a hundred miles north of Cape Barrow, Alaska).
Apparently the captain of the Octavius decided on his way back from China to try to cross the Northwest Passage instead of returning home by the long journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Whether this is really so, we will never know. Well, it is likely that he succeeded, and the first to cross the Northwest Passage from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean was the Octavius - the ship of the dead who made this journey for fourteen long years …
