The Octavius ghost ship

A legend of a ship found drifting west of Greenland with its whole crew frozen dead below deck. Frank M. Schuster, writing in Polar Record in 2022, links it to an unnamed-ship story printed by the New York Gazette in 1828 under the headline Awful Discovery.

In the version Wikipedia gives, the whaler Herald came upon the three-masted schooner Octavius west of Greenland on 11 October 1775. Five men went aboard the drifting vessel and found all 28 of its crew below deck, frozen dead and almost perfectly preserved. The dates and the dead belong to the tale; Wikipedia presents the ship as a legend.

Frank M. Schuster, writing in Polar Record in 2022, found an earlier version in print. In 1828 several newspapers carried a piece the New York Gazette had published on 8 December under the headline Awful Discovery. It took place in Arctic waters and gave the ghost ship no name, but otherwise it matches the later tales of the Gloriana and the Octavius. The Philadelphia literary journal Ariel reprinted it on 13 December under a new title. Schuster concludes that the nameless ship of 1828-30 and the Gloriana and Octavius stories are one legend, and that its roots can be followed through the tales it absorbed, though never with complete certainty.

Kenn Harper, in a 2011 Nunatsiaq News column titled The Source of the Octavius Myth, notes that Lubbock doubted one version of the yarn. Lubbock still saw it, Harper writes, as a fair picture of what befell many whaling crews that went missing.