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Dec 23, 2019

Lore Episode 131: Sea of Change (Transcript) - 9th December, 2019

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Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

They call it the Wild Coast. It’s a stretch of land on the eastern side of Africa, starting around the coastal city of Durban and ending 900 miles later at Cape Town, and as for as long as ships have been sailing there, there has been tragedy. They call it the Wild Coast because of the frequency of shipwrecks that have taken place over the years – the Santo Alberto in 1593, the Good Hope in 1685, and the Bonaventura a year after that. Even today, ships occasionally fall victim to the rocky coast and stormy waves, like the Greek cruise liner, the Oceanos, which went down in August of 1991. Thankfully, there were no casualties, but one ship wasn’t so lucky. The S. S. Waratah was also a passenger liner, built and launched in 1908, and measured over 500ft long with a weight of 10,000 tonnes. It was a big ship, and as a passenger liner, it was designed to hold a lot of people in relative luxury. On its fateful journey, there were over 200 passengers on board, as well as dozens of crew members who served them and operated the ship. In July of 1909, the Waratah approached the southern tip of Africa after a long journey from Australia, and it came within sight of the Wild Coast. It made a routine stop at Durban and then continued south with the new destination of Cape Town, but a storm caused ocean swells as high as 60ft, and in conditions like that few ships stand a chance. Somewhere on the way to Cape Town, the Waratah disappeared. There were no survivors.

Ships vanish. It’s one of the risks that humans accepted when they began to venture out into the dark, mysterious waters that separated them from the undiscovered. Because, if we’re honest, there are simply too many opportunities for tragedy on the open water, and sadly some ships don’t make it home. But if you read enough of the stories about lost ocean liners and missing schooners, you’ll start to notice an exception to the rule. Yes, sometimes ships vanish from sight, but every now and then, the unthinkable happens – they return. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

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Our love affair with the sea is thousands of years old. All you have to do is read the histories and mythology of ancient cultures and you’ll notice right away just how central the open water was to their world view. Homer’s Odyssey, written around the 8th century B.C., tells the tale of Odysseus and his decade of travels around the ancient world, and he does much of that travel by sea. Countless other ancient stories are connected to the ocean as well. 400 years after Homer, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the Egyptian tale of a pharaoh named Necho II, who had lived and ruled two centuries earlier. Necho was said to have assembled an expedition that left Egypt through the Red Sea on the north-eastern corner and then slowly circumnavigated Africa. They arrived at the mouth of the Nile three years later. But sailing wasn’t a new thing, even back then. Most historians think that humans first jumped into small sailing ships, similar to catamarans, all the way back in 3000BC. They began their migration from the island of Taiwan and slowly spread out south and east. 1000 years later, they were firmly established in what is now Indonesia, and soon after that they spread as far as Vanuatu and Fiji. By the 10th century, they had reached more remote places of the Pacific like Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and some even made it all the way to the west coast of South America, now settling in what is now Chile. 4000 years of expansion, giving birth to dozens of culture, and all of it thanks to sailing.

Of course, it wasn’t always about migration. For many cultures, the ocean represented the unknown, and each of them had a deep desire to go out, to explore and discover and learn – oh, and to get rich, of course, because nothing kickstarts a new industry like the promise of massive wealth, does it? But as more and more ships set sail for uncharted lands or even simply became part of growing naval fleets and merchant routes, the odds that tragedy could strike began to rise. Most of what we know today about ancient sea-faring cultures was born from that tragedy, too, in the form of shipwrecks, and every year, it seems, older and older wrecks are being discovered. Just last year, in October of 2018, researchers announced the oldest yet, a 2,400-year-old Greek merchant vessel that was discovered at the bottom of the Black Sea. It’s so well preserved that researchers were able to recognise its design from images painted on ancient wine jars, which is crazy to think about. But of course, the shipwreck is real, and that means we can learn so much more about it than a wine jar could ever have taught us.

Shipwrecks were a tragic necessity in an age when humanity was spreading out and taking risks, so much so that shipping companies just sort of assumed they would lose some of their ships in the course of doing business. And that, of course, helped give rise to commercial insurance, where companies could hedge their bets and avoid going bankrupt when random chance got in the way of the bottom line. In London, many local sailors and ship owners would gather in a coffee house owned by a man named Edward Lloyd. By the late 1680s, he had so many customers who were connected to the shipping industry that he posted daily shipping news to keep them informed. But his café also became the place to buy insurance for ships, and even when all those insurance underwriters left the café and set up shop on their own, they remembered his influence by naming their group after him. Today, it’s still around, and known as Lloyds of London.

So many ships have sunk to the bottom of the ocean over the past few thousand years that we’ve even created stories about them, stories that hint at our regret and longing, at the loss we’ve suffered through, and the deepest desire of our hearts – namely, that those long-lost vessels might one day return. They even have a name – ghost ships – and folklore is filled with them. One example is a schooner known as the Young Teazer. It was active during the war of 1812 and worked as a privateer, a government approved pirate ship, in an effort to torment and hamper the British ships off the coast of Nova Scotia, and things went according to plan for a while – until June of 1813, that is. After an encounter with a British naval vessel, the crew of the Young Teazer found themselves trapped in Mahone Bay on the eastern coast of Nova Scotia. Fearing that his capture might lead to execution, one of the crewmen was said to have ignited the powder magazine below deck. The resulting explosion left 30 men dead and the ship nearly destroyed, while the survivors were all captured and thrown in prison by the British, but it also began a new chapter in the ship’s story. Over the past two centuries, stories have been whispered about a flaming ship that has appeared in Mahone Bay. Locals refer to it as “Teazer Light”, and even though many sceptics have pointed out that the sightings could be nothing more than the reflection of the full moon on the water, it hasn’t stopped folks from hoping for the alternative.

Another ghost ship found in folklore is also the most famous: The Flying Dutchman. As far as early modern ghost ships go, the Dutchman is one of the oldest, most likely dating back to the late 1600s. All of the sightings seem to repeat the same, frightening details, too – a mysterious ship, spotted off in the distance, glowing with an eerie luminescence and devoid of all human life. But these stories are all just legends, yarn that’s been spun on the wheel of fantasy, sometimes stitching together real events and people, but never fully true, and folklore is full of stories about ghosts for a very good reason. We like to think that, however dangerous the seas might be, that against all odds those lost ships might somehow come back. Amazingly, though, life has managed to imitate art. Over the last few centuries, some lost ships have pulled off the impossible, and in doing so they’ve put themselves into a whole new category – real ships that were once thought to be lost, only to return to the land of the living.

They’d been expecting its arrival in Newport, Rhode Island, but it never sailed into the harbour. The SV Seabird was a merchant ship that had departed weeks earlier from Honduras, where it made regular trips. The ship’s captain, John Huxham, knew the route well and shouldn’t have had any trouble. But it’s never safe to assume, is it? When the ship was later found on nearby Easton’s Beach, it was clear it had experienced trouble, and when those that discovered it stepped on board, they entered into a mysterious scene. Coffee was boiling on the stove in the galley, a pair of pets were walking on the deck, but other than that the ship was completely and utterly empty. No crew were onboard. Most people think that Captain Huxham and the others must have exited the vessel while it was still a way off from shore. The missing lifeboat seemed to confirm that idea, and with a bit more time to investigate, there’s a good chance the authorities might have solved the riddle, but a week later they travelled back to the beach, only to discover that the ship was gone, and it was never seen again.

A century later, in 1884, another merchant ship was found drifting through the Atlantic. The SV Resolven was sighted just outside of Catalina Harbour on the east coast of Newfoundland. Like the Seabird, the Resolven was also missing its lifeboat and had been completely abandoned. The only sign of damage was a broken yard, that horizontal beam at the top of the mast that the sails hang from. The ship that found the Resolven was the HMS Mallard, and they did their best to put the pieces together. They’d sighted a tall iceberg in the region and assumed the Resolven had come a bit too close to it, which would explain the damage, but it wasn’t enough to justify abandoning ship, which struck them as odd. Even more mysterious were the signs of normal life inside the ship. All of the lanterns were still lit and below deck, the stove in the galley was hot with a fire still burning inside it, and most mysterious of all was the ship’s log, which contained records of all the activities onboard. The most recent item on the page had been written down just six hours prior to the Mallard’s arrival.

But if we’re going to talk about actual ships that have turned up empty, we simply can’t ignore one particular story, because it’s quite possibly the one that introduced the idea of ghost ships to American culture, giving us our own version of those old-world legends. The Amazon was built in 1860, first sliding into the water at the shipyard owned and operated by Joshua Dewis up in Nova Scotia. It was a wooden brigantine, a two-masted sailing ship, and it was of average size, measuring just shy of 100ft long. But life didn’t start out smooth for the Amazon. On the ship’s maiden voyage, which began in June of 1861, the captain became ill. Before they could even begin to transport their cargo across the Atlantic, the Amazon was forced to return to its home port, where the captain died a few days later. The next captain didn’t fair any better. Under the supervision of John Parker, the Amazon had a number of accidents, including crashing into a brig in the English Channel. Somehow, though, the ship survived. When Captain William Thompson took over command in 1863, he ushered in a period of peace for the ship and it travelled all over, performing the duties it had been designed to do. But four years later, in October of 1867, an ill wind blew the Amazon off course, where it ran aground at Cape Breton Island at the northern tip of Nova Scotia. The extensive damage led the crew to abandon ship, and four days later the wreckage was hauled off by a salvager.

But the Amazon wasn’t finished just yet. After being sold to a local businessman and restored to sailing condition, it was moved to New York City, where it became part of a merchant fleet owned by a man named James Winchester. Oh, and they changed the ship’s name, too. No longer would it be called the Amazon. Instead, it would be the Mary Celeste. The first job for the newly-restored ship was to carry a cargo of over 17,000 barrels of denatured alcohol, a type of ethanol that’s been coloured and made toxic to discourage consumption. The ship’s owners brought on a man named Benjamin Briggs as captain and allowed him to hire a crew of seven experienced sailors, and then they began to plan the route to Genoa on the north-western coast of Italy. Captain Briggs was so confident in his ship and crew that he brought his wife, Sarah, along, as well as his son Arthur and daughter Sophia. Together with the crew, they all settled in to the Mary Celeste, and left port on November 7th of 1872. It was the last time any of them were seen alive.

A week later, on November 15th, another ship left the same harbour in New York. The Dei Gratia was captained by a man named David Morehouse, and depending on the sources you accept as reliable, he was a casual acquaintance of Benjamin Briggs. Their destination was Gibraltar, located at the southern tip of Spain, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic, and it was route that placed them on roughly the same line as the Mary Celeste. A month later, on December 4th, the Dei Gratia was off the coast of Portugal, when someone spotted a ship about six miles away. As they drew closer to it, everyone could make out the name on its stern. It was the Mary Celeste. From a distance, they noticed a few key details – the sails were in poor condition, some of the deck hatches were wide open, and the lifeboat was missing. Morehouse ordered two of his crew to row over and investigate. They found the interior cabins to be wet and disorderly, as if a storm had blown through, and Captain Briggs’ sword was discovered beneath a bed. The ship’s compass was damaged, and the cargo hold was filled with about 3ft of water. It was chaos and disorder – but not entirely.

While the hold had taken on water, all of the valuable cargo was still onboard, ruling out pirates, and the ship’s kitchen was neat and orderly, too, with no signs that anyone rushed out unprepared. After searching the whole ship, nothing else alarming could be found. The crew and passengers had simply vanished. In the end, Morehouse decided to bring the ship with him to Gibraltar, where he might be able to earn a potion of its salvage price. It took another week, but eventually the Mary Celeste arrived in port, bringing its mysterious journey to an end. But at least one abandoned ship in the past managed to evade capture entirely. It slipped from their grasp and drifted away, leaving its owners wondering if they would ever see it again, and in doing so, they taught everyone involved a valuable lesson: the only thing more mysterious than a ghost ship is one that keeps coming back.

When it comes to abandoned ships, few have drifted into the minds of sailors like the story of the SS Baychimo. It was a 1300-ton steamer built in 1914, and for many years it served in the merchant fleet of the Hudson Bay Company, but that’s not where it started out. It seems the Baychimo had actually been a German vessel for its first few months in the water, running the trade route between Germany and Sweden, where the company that operated it was located. But when World War I ended, part of Germany’s reparation agreement included making amends for the loss of ships suffered by other countries, and the Baychimo was given to the United Kingdom. It was there in western Scotland that the Hudson Bay Company took ownership, and because the Baychimo was equipped with a powerful steam engine and a thick, steel hull, it was assigned a route between Scotland and northern Canada, where it picked up animal pelts in exchange for goods that were unavailable to the Inuit communities who lived there.

It wasn’t always an easy trip, though. In 1928, the ship ran aground in Camden Bay in northern Alaska. Thankfully, it was undamaged and moved back into the water, keeping the Hudson Bay Company from losing the cargo. But when it comes to the constant barrage of dangers from the sea, it’s impossible to dodge all the bullets. Three years later, in October of 1931, the Baychimo got caught in heavy ice in the waters north of Alaska, bringing the massive steamer to a halt. The crew initially abandoned ship, but when the ice began to break up, they happily returned. A week later, though, it happened again, this time further out from land. To save the crew, the Hudson Bay Company sent an aeroplane out to rescue them. When the plane arrived, all 37 crew members exited the ship for the last time. Only 22 were able to fit on the aircraft, so the other 15 stayed between to wait for a second flight. A few days later, a powerful snow storm brought whiteout conditions, and when it was over, the ship was gone, sunk by the heavy ice, no doubt. But it hadn’t. A few days later, the ship was spotted in a new location, and the remaining crew were able to board it and remove the valuable cargo in case tragedy finally did catch up with it. And then they left, abandoning the Baychimo to the ice and harsh conditions and kicking off a string of sightings that earnt it a powerful reputation as an Alaskan ghost ship.

In March of 1932, a man named Leslie Melvin was guiding his dog sled team along the coast on his way back to the city of Nome in western Alaska. As he looked up from the sled at the scenery around him, his eye was drawn to the ocean, and he spotted something. It was the Baychimo, floating peacefully without power up the coast. Later that summer, a trading party spotted the ghost ship further north, off the coast of Wainwright, and they actually managed to board the vessel. When they discovered it was empty, though, they exited and went on their way. In March of 1933, a group of Athabaskans, part of the indigenous community in Alaska, also boarded the ghost ship, only to be trapped inside it for ten days while the winter storm cut them off from land. I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to be inside in the dark with all the unidentifiable sounds that come with being aboard a ship trapped in the ice and wind. As the months went on, more and more rumours spread out, trickling through each of the nearby Hudson Bay Company outposts like water through a network of pipes.

There was a July, 1934 sighting by a team of scientific explorers, as well as multiple reports in September of 1935 from further up north. It was clear that the Baychimo had not gone away for good, and it was out there, haunting the shores and waiting for someone to capture it. The last time the ship was boarded was in November of 1939, eight years after it had first disappeared. A captain by the name of Hugh Polson brought his whole crew onboard, hoping to either be able to get the ship running again, or at least tow it to port, where it could be salvaged for its valuable materials. But the longer they stayed on the ship, the more ominous and oppressive it felt. When the ice began to build up around them, they panicked and headed back to their own vessel, leaving the ghost ship to fend for itself. No one boarded the Baychimo ever again.

The idea of ghost ships is one that we’ve held onto for a very long time, whether it’s the ancient tales of ships like the Caleuche of Chiloé Island or the Flying Dutchman of Europe, or newer ones such as the Valencia of Vancouver Island and the Governor Parr, near Nova Scotia. It seems no matter what we do, we can’t escape the stories. Ghost ships, it seems, are here to stay, and they’ve become one of the most popular bits of folklore too, drifting their way into film, television and books over the past couple of centuries. We see glimpses of those legends in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an epic poem from 1798 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Pirates of the Caribbean films have their own interpretation. It’s impossible to say how long we’ve been telling their stories, but it’s clear that we’ll never really stop. The Mary Celeste has had quite an impact all on its own, too. Since the events surrounding its abandonment in 1872, whispered versions of the story have spread all throughout pop culture. It’s been subject of multiple films, novels and television episodes. It’s even appeared in the British sci-fi series Doctor Who.

Ghost ships have proven themselves to be a thing that simply won’t go away. They may drift off into the fog for a little while, but eventually, when we least expect it, they will make their return, appearing in some new context or location. And no legend backs up that dependability like the SS Baychimo. The ship was spotted off and on over the years that followed its abandonment, making the first eight years of its story something of a mystery, and that’s how it went, decade after decade, until one final sighting was reported in 1969, almost 40 years after the original crew had been rescued. After that, the authorities lost track of the ship once more, and to this day no one is quite sure where it might be. Perhaps the ice finally won, and its resting on the ocean floor, or maybe it’s just drifting a bit too far outside normal shipping routes to be spotted. In our modern world of satellite imagery and commercial air travel, one would think it would be easy to find, but so far, we’ve had no luck. Like many of the ghost ships found in folklore, the Baychimo had come to represent equal parts hope and despair. It shows us just how much is possible when it comes to abandoned ships and their longevity, making it clear that not all that is lost is gone forever. But it also reminds us that real life can sometimes be a bit more frustrating than we’d like. Just because we want the answers, doesn’t mean we’ll always get them.

Tales of ghostly ships that never seem to go away are one of the most attractive and popular stories for lovers of the strange and the unusual, and I hope you enjoyed your voyage onboard many of the better-known ones today. But there’s one more story that doesn’t get told enough, and it adds a new twist to a classic legend. I’ll tell you all about it right after this short sponsor break.

[Sponsor break from The Great Courses Plus, Audible and Squarespace]

The Ellen Austin was a three-mast schooner. It slid off the shipyard and into the cold Atlantic waters, way back in 1854 under the ownership of one Captain Tucker. Back then, Maine was the place to be if you wanted timber for building, and it had been for centuries. Prior to the Revolutionary War, there was a constant flow of resources headed back to England, but now, local ship builders up on the coast of Maine were getting rich making new vessels for wealthy owners, and the Tuckers were one such group. I could tell you about how large the ship was, how it was over 200ft long and weighed in at 1800 tons, and I could tell you how it was sold a few years later, in 1857, but the most important thing to know about the Ellen Austin is that it was very good at making the trip between London and America. Actually, 1857 really wasn’t a good year for the crew of that ship. In February of that year, a report was published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that claimed the current captain, William Garrick, had been using violence to abuse and control his men. It seemed he had a temper and tended to take his anger out on anyone near him.

A few months later, in July of 1857, the ship left Liverpool full of passengers and began headed towards New York City. But along the way, a wave of smallpox broke out on the ship, and it had to be quarantined so that the sick could be taken care of. Five months later, it happened again. The Ellen Austin didn’t just travel to New York City, though. In the late 1860s, it was making trips to San Francisco, although after a number of accidents that involved running into other ships, it was eventually repaired and brought back to the east coast. Through most of the 1870s, it was back to that standard London-New York route. And then something changed in December of 1880. The ship had been sold to new owners some time that year, and had been sent on a journey further south, toward Florida and the Caribbean, which is where something rather strange happened to them. Off in the distance, they spotted another ship, but it wasn’t moving. The captain at the time was a bright fellow who was very aware that pirates often used tactics like this to their advantage – pretend the ship was empty, wait for another ship to come closer, and then pounce. So, instead of approaching the mysterious vessel, they lowered their sails and set a watch on it.

After two days of vigilant observation, the captain of the Ellen Austin decided that it was safe to approach. Once on board, they discovered that the vessel had, in fact, been abandoned. The cargo was still intact and safe, and there seemed to be a full supply of food rations, but if the former crew had left because of some emergency, there didn’t seem to be any sign of it onboard. They were just… gone. So, the captain assigned a small party of his crew to get the ship ready to sail, and then the pair of vessels left the area together, headed for London to cash in on their newly salvaged prize. Only, the weather had other ideas. A storm blew in three days later and the two ships became separated. Looking back, we now know that it was a large hurricane that was headed towards the southern portion of the United States, but to the crew of the Ellen Austin, it was just frustration. They had lost sight of the other ship.

The captain ordered the ship to turn around and search the area. It took them days, but finally they spotted the missing ship off in the distance. Relieved that they would be reunited with their prize and the fellow crew members who were operating it, they sailed toward it. But even from a distance, things didn’t look right. The captain of the Ellen Austin hailed the other ship, hoping his men had safely weathered the storm, but surprisingly, no one replied. So, they approached the lifeless vessel and boarded it, guns drawn in case of pirates. What they found, though, defied explanation. Everything seemed just as they had found it days earlier. The valuable cargo was still in the hold, safe and sound, the store of food was still untouched, and the beds all seemed to have been unused. And yet nowhere on the ship could they find any sign of the small crew they had transferred over. The men were gone.

Over the years, new details have been added to this story. Some claim that the captain ordered a second team to pilot the ship home, only to have fog separate them again, resulting in yet another lost crew, but that story comes to use from a naval officer who wrote about it in the 1930s, and there doesn’t seem to be much proof of it outside of that. Still, it’s a fantastic tale that takes the notion of a ghost ship and turns it around in a way that defies explanation, and it also reminds us of just how unpredictable and mysterious life on the open sea really can be. We humans love the predictable, we love consistency and dependability and being able to count on life going a certain way. We build our sense of security and safety around the notion that everything will be okay. But once we set our oars in the ocean or raise our sails and travel to distant lands over treacherous waves, it becomes clear that we’ve stepped into a whole new world that is outside of our control. We might fight it or try and plan against it, but in the end, we are completely at its mercy, because we can never be fully prepared for a sea of change.

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