CAUGHT IN THE ICE-PACK

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22354, 30 August 1934, Page 16

CAUGHT IN THE ICE-PACK

SECRETS OF THE ARCTIC With the opening of navigation in the Arctic Ocean shipping men who go north to the fur trade turn their thoughts to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s lost ship, the “Baycliimo. Caught by the ice off Point Barrow nearly four years ago, she was abandoned by her crew, says the Vancouver correspondent of the New Zealand Herald. Each year since she has been seen, either in Behring Strait or the Arctic Sea. Eskimos have boarded her. Aeroplane expeditions, fitted out in American ports, have sought to land near her on the ice, lux - cd by tales of half a million dollars’ worth of Arctic furs still aboard —despite the company’s assurance that her cargo was taken out by air. Last, summer the phantom ship of the Arctic loomed up, to the amazement of the officers and crew of a United States coastguard cutter. Shoals and drifting floes made approach impossible. She was seen later by the trading schooner C. S. Holmes, whose crew watched spellbound as, with all the appearance of being manned, her prow erect, she drifted off before the Arctic current that took her again into the pack. Other ships have been caught in rhe Arctic ice pack. Strange . tales arc brought out of ghostly vessels locked far within the Polar Sea. It is recalled how, in one sweep of the ice, ‘lO whaling ships disappeared. Of their crews the majority took the chance of retreating to safety on the long, rough trail over hummock ice. But 70 men refused to desert them. Their fate is still an Arctic secret.

A vast portion of the Polar Sea has never yet been navigated. It is cocovercd, and becomes ice-bound, but is sometimes canalised by channels that open and close. By such means the North-west Passage was completed fo" the first and only time nine years ago, when a trading vessel from Vancouver met the Dominion Government vessel that had gone from Montreal to relieve police and other personnel. A veteran Arctic trader. Captain Morrissey, holds to the belief that many of these ships are still above the ice. He hopes, some day, to enter the Arctic current with one of his vessels, and to occupy two years in drifting from west to cast at its regular pace of five miles an hour, to test the stories brought back by Eskimos of ghost ships, set on vov-. ages without ports, mayhap with their (crews aboard, sleeping in eternal peace.