Octavius (ship)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Octavius was a ghost ship, probably legendary and not actual. The story goes that the vessel was found west of Greenland by the whaler Herald on October 11, 1775. Boarded as a derelict, the boarding party found the entire crew below deck: dead, frozen, and almost perfectly preserved. The captain''s body was supposedly still at the table in his cabin, pen in hand (exactly as in the Schooner Jenny legend) with the captain''s log in front of him. In his cabin there was also a dead woman, a dead boy covered with a blanket and a dead sailor with a tinderbox. The boarding party took only the captain''s log before leaving the vessel, because they were unwilling to search it. The last entry in the log was from 1762, which meant that the ship had been lost in the Arctic for 13 years. As the log was frozen, it slipped from the binding, leaving only the first and the last few pages in. The story''s supposed background is that the Octavius had left England for the Orient in 1761, and successfully arrived at its destination the following year.... Mehr