Dead Reckoning
In 1775, the whaler Herald came across a derelict ship near Greenland. The Octavius had been an English trading ship, but now she was dead: The crew's frozen bodies were found below decks, and the lifeless captain sat over the ship's log in his cabin. The last entry was dated 1762, which meant that the ghost ship had been drifting through the arctic for 13 years.
As it turned out, the Octavius had been trying to sail from Asia to England via Canada's arctic archipelago — the storied Northwest Passage. She was trapped in sea ice north of Alaska, but the Herald had found her in the Atlantic.
That means the first Western sailing ship to make the Northwest Passage … carried a crew of corpses.
