The Baychimo began in 1914 at Gothenburg, Sweden as the Ångermanelfven, a 230 foot, 1,300 ton steel cargo steamer with a triple expansion engine that made a steady 10 knots on Baltic runs between Hamburg and Sweden. After World War I it went to Britain as German reparations, and in 1921 the Hudson’s Bay Company bought it, renamed it Baychimo, and based it at Ardrossan, Scotland to supply trading posts along Canada’s Victoria Island coast. Though not an icebreaker, it made nine successful voyages trading provisions for furs. In 1931 it pushed too late into the season, and on October 1, loaded with furs, it was caught in the pack ice. The crew walked half a mile to Barrow, Alaska, now Utqiagvik, returned when the ice briefly freed the ship, and were trapped again by October 8.

On October 15 the company flew out 22 crew, while 15 men built a wooden shelter onshore to guard the cargo, fearing an ice squeeze could crush the hull. After a blizzard on November 24 the ship was gone, and they assumed it sank, until an Inuit seal hunter reported it about 45 miles away. The crew removed the most valuable furs by air and abandoned it. Its rounded hull likely let the ice lift it rather than crush it, and the empty ship drifted for decades: Leslie Melvin saw it in January 1932, Inupiat were trapped aboard for ten days by a storm in March 1933, and botanist Isobel Wylie Hutchison boarded it that August. It was last seen in 1969, frozen in the Chukchi Sea, 38 years after its crew left.

• In November 1939 Captain Hugh Poulsen began rigging a tow but fled when ice floes closed in.
• Prospectors spotted it in spring 1932, and Inuit saw it on the Beaufort Sea coast in 1962.
• The leading theory is that decades of freeze and thaw fatigued the steel until it sank.
• A 2006 Alaskan effort with sonar and satellite imaging never found a trace of it.
• A 1971 textbook called Galaxies featured it as Alaska’s Phantom Ship.