Various - Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 686

Has the idea ever occurred to any one that at all times there are ships of one kind or other floating about at sea without a living creature on board? They have been abandoned by their officers and crew in what seemed a hopeless condition. Some are dismantled and mere hulks. Some are swimming keel upwards. Some are water-logged, but being laden with timber will not sink. There they are driving hither and thither on the ocean, as wind and waves direct, a dread to the mariner, who may unawares come against them in the dark. We remember seeing an account of one of these derelicts, as they are called, being fallen in with after having been abandoned for weeks. It was water-logged up to the very deck, and sitting on a scrap of the exposed bulwarks was a poor cat, still alive, in the last degree of attenuation. We have often with commiseration thought of that accidentally deserted cat, its hunger, its misery, its hopelessness night and day in the midst of the dreary and spacious ocean. How the creature must have been delighted when rescued from its floating prison! Occasionally derelicts are taken in tow and brought into port, where they are broken up, or if of any value, are reclaimed by owners, to whom they are delivered on a payment of 'salvage.'

We are going to speak of a kind of derelicts out of ordinary experience.

On the 17th of September 1855, while sailing in the American whaler George Henry , in Davis's Strait, and when about forty miles from Cape Mercy, Captain Buddington descried a vessel having something peculiar in her appearance. No signals were hoisted, none answered, and no crew visible when he approached. Going on board, he found no living being in the ship; but in the best cabin were documents declaring the abandonment of the ship, and explaining the circumstances under which it had taken place. The wastrel, the treasure-trove, the lost-found, was the famous Resolute , whose story we shall tell presently.

Jurists and legislators have had to determine the ownership of property that seems for the time to belong to no one. Derelict is the lawyers' name for such property, so far at anyrate as regards abandoned ships. Where a crew merely quit their ship to obtain assistance, or for any other temporary purpose, it is not derelict: they intend to return; but when the master and crew abandon her without hope of recovery, she becomes ownerless for a time, and then falls to the lot of the finder. Not necessarily to keep, however, but, as has been said, to hold as a claim for salvage from the crown, the owners, or the under-writers. If the solitary ship is found near any coast, there is generally some claim put forth by the owner of the sea-shore, whether the owner be government or a private individual; but when out in the open sea, far distant from land, international maritime law may have to settle the matter. In practice, however, very little of this takes place; a ship really abandoned out in mid-ocean is seldom worth the expense of repair; the finders and salvors regard it chiefly in the light of saleable old materials; and the derelict, if it be taken in tow or otherwise navigated to port by its discoverers, usually finds its way into the hands of the ship-breaker.

A curious inquiry it would be, How many abandoned ships are at this moment locked up in densely packed ice? No great difficulty will be felt in understanding that derelicts have a peculiar history in the Arctic regions. When a ship is left forlorn in any sea or ocean, the probability is that fire or leakage has rendered the abandonment necessary as the only chance of escape for passengers and crew. Or it may be that the ship has been cast upon some coast or outlying rock, and so become tenantless. In the intricate channels of the frozen regions, on the contrary, a ship may be in a sound condition, but so hopelessly hemmed in on all sides with huge floes and fields of ice, that the crew would have exhausted all their food and necessaries of life before liberation comes; they quit the luckless vessel, and wend their way by sledge or by boat to regions of civilisation.

Many of the illustrative instances of this kind of derelict are exceedingly interesting. In 1821 Lieutenants Parry and Lyon, in the Fury and Hecla , encountered such terrible difficulties that the first-named ship was nipped and then wrecked; the crew fortunately were able to reach the Hecla , which after a time returned home with a double company of officers and men. The Fury was derelict, but not the stores, as we shall presently see. In 1829 Captains John and James Ross started on the expedition which was destined to last till 1833. What they suffered during four successive winters, their narrative told in moving terms. They lost their ship, and would in all probability have perished from starvation, had it not been that they were able to reach Fury Beach, and there avail themselves of the provisions which the wrecked Fury had on board. This ship, as well as that which had been under the Rosses, probably fell to pieces by degrees, in a grave of ice or water or both.

Poor Sir John Franklin's fate will always be bound up in our recollection with that of the Erebus and Terror . It is pretty generally known to our readers that those two ships left England in 1845, under Captains Crozier and Fitzjames, with Franklin in supreme command over both; that they wintered near the south-east entrance of Wellington Channel; and that when the summer heat of 1846 had sufficiently melted the ice, they proceeded south through Regent Inlet to the west side of King William Land. They were hopelessly and helplessly iced in for the remainder of that year, all through 1847, and on into 1848. Poor Franklin succumbed to illness, anxiety, cold, and disease, and died on the 11th of June 1847. Seeing no hope of extricating the ships, and worn down by every kind of privation, Crozier and Fitzjames abandoned the Erebus and Terror on the 26th of April 1848, accompanied by the remainder of both crews – numbering in all somewhat over one hundred souls. How many of them reached King William Land and Montreal Island, in sledges or on foot, we shall probably never know; but certain it is that not one of the hapless men was ever again seen by Europeans; whether any of the Eskimo met them or saw them, is doubtful. There were the two deserted ships, left to fate to decide whether they would ever again be liberated from their icy home, and enabled to render useful service. Rumours were communicated in later years by the Eskimo to some whaling crews that two ships had been iced up for several winters: supposed to have been the Erebus and Terror .

In 185 °Captain M'Clure commenced the famous voyage which, though it led to the abandonment of the good ship Investigator , enabled him to be the first commander who really effected the North-west Passage. (Whether he was the first to discover it, is a question on which much controversy has arisen.) Sailing down the Atlantic to Cape Horn, up the Pacific to Behring's Strait, and through the Frozen Sea to Banks Land, he there passed three frightfully severe winters, from the autumn of 1850 to the spring of 1853. There he quitted his trusty but ice-bound ship; and there, so far as human testimony goes, the Investigator still is, in Mercy Bay. In imminent peril of starvation, M'Clure and his gallant crew were compelled to this abandonment; they sledged over the ice to Melville Island, where fortunately they met with another expedition, and safety was insured. This other expedition, the most remarkable of all for derelict, comes next for notice.