Welcome to Terrors of the Sea — Bootstrap Ginny’s October Spooky Series! Step aboard, if you dare. Ghost ships, sea serpents, pirate phantoms, wicked mermaids, and the yawning mouth of Davy Jones’ Locker all wait in the mist for you. The lantern’s lit… the tide is rising… and the stories are hungry.

The Octavius

On October 11, 1775, while sailing just west of Greenland, a whaler named the Herald came upon an eerie sight: a slow-moving ship, completely white from bow to stern, covered in thick ice and snow, its sails tattered and torn. A boarding party was sent, but once on board, what they found spooked them so badly that they quickly left, failing to search the entire ship.

Everyone on board was dead and frozen solid. The boarding party discovered their corpses littered throughout the ghost ship in various poses. Enduring the freezing ice and snow, (and at some point realizing that death was inevitable), was probably more brutal and terrifying than the end itself. Their deaths were most likely peaceful and very quiet, (freezing to death is not a painful experience per the experts; more like simply going to sleep).

What seems to have especially spooked the whalers was what they found in the captain’s cabin: the body of a woman, a young boy (who was unclothed), a sailor, and the captain himself – all covered in ice crystals and very dead. The captain was sitting at his desk, pen in hand, recording a last log entry.

The log revealed the ship to be the Octavius; the last log entry was from November 11, 1762. She had left the Orient in 1761 and had been sailing home for England. The captain made the decision to take the very new and very dangerous Northwest Passage, through the Arctic, probably in an effort to get home more quickly

Per the last log entry, the Octavius had been aimlessly sailing the arctic north for an incredible thirteen years. The details of the doomed voyage remain a mystery: When the boarding crew took the ship’s log from the captain’s desk, the fragile papers disentegrated, leaving only a few pages that were readable.

The Herald’s crew was terribly unnerved by the ghost ship and did not linger; instead, they left the Octavius and its motionless crew and passengers to continue their silent and cold voyage. There have been no reported sightings of the Octavius since 1776.

Til next time, Remember to keep a lantern lit during spooky season!

To the ghosts that guide us, the storms that test us, and the gold that waits for those who dare — may our ink never run dry and our courage never fade. Raise your tankards, mates… for the sea still remembers our names.