Mystery AtlasSydney Cornwell
The Hudson's Bay Company captain who commanded the Baychimo on her final 1931 voyage and remained at a shore camp near Barrow with part of the crew after the ship was abandoned, hoping to salvage her once the ice cleared.
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Organisations & Programmes
Sydney Cornwell was a member of Hudson's Bay Company.
Objects & Artifacts
Sydney Cornwell led SS Baychimo — Commanded the ship on its final 1931 voyage and remained at the shore camp near Barrow after the crew abandoned her.
The Baychimo: From Icebound Steamer to 38-Year Ghost Ship
The Hudson's Bay Company steamer's 1931 abandonment near Barrow, Alaska and the decades of sporadic sightings and boardings that followed, ending with her last confirmed appearance in 1969 and the unsuccessful 2006 state search for her wreck.
1914
Built as Ã…ngermanelfven at Lindholmens shipyard, Gothenburg, Sweden
A 230-foot, steel-hulled steam cargo vessel later transferred to Britain as WWI reparations.
1921
Hudson's Bay Company acquires and renames her Baychimo
Based at Ardrossan, Scotland, and put to work supplying Arctic trading posts in exchange for furs.
1 October 1931
Baychimo becomes trapped in pack ice near Barrow, Alaska
Heading south with a cargo of furs when heavy ice closed in on the Alaskan Arctic coast.
15 October 1931
Hudson's Bay Company airlifts 22 crew members out
Captain Cornwell and 14 others make camp on the ice nearby, expecting to salvage the ship once the ice cleared in spring.
24 November 1931
A blizzard strikes; the ship vanishes from her mooring
The camp assumes she has been crushed and sunk. Within days an Inuk seal hunter reports her still afloat roughly 45 miles away; the crew retrieves the valuable furs and finally abandons the intact ship for good.
January 1932
First reported sighting: boarded by a trapper near Nome
A dog-sledding trapper finds the unmanned, drifting Baychimo and goes aboard.
March 1933
Iñupiat hunters shelter aboard the ship for about ten days
Caught by a storm, a group takes refuge in the abandoned vessel until the weather clears.
August 1933
Isobel Wylie Hutchison boards the ship near Wainwright
The Scottish botanist and Arctic traveller later wrote about the encounter.
November 1939
Captain Hugh Polson attempts a salvage tow
Advancing ice floes force him to abandon the attempt before the ship can be brought to port.
March 1962
Sighted adrift in the Beaufort Sea
Reported by Inuit hunters, still afloat more than thirty years after her abandonment.
1969
Last confirmed sighting, refrozen in pack ice off Alaska
Spotted between Icy Cape and Point Barrow, 38 years after the crew first abandoned her. No confirmed sighting has been reported since.
2006
The State of Alaska searches for the wreck
Part of a broader project cataloguing thousands of vessels lost along the Alaskan coast; the search found no trace of the Baychimo.