page_title: Ghost ship
section_title: Unsubstantiated
hierarchical_section_title: Ghost ship / Chronology / Unsubstantiated
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Illustration de la découverte de l'épave du Marlborough en 1913. Vaisseau fantôme
context_page_description: A ghost ship, also known as a phantom ship, is a vessel with no living crew aboard; it may be a ghostly vessel, such as the Flying Dutchman, or a physical derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, like the Mary Celeste. The term is sometimes used for ships that have been decommissioned but not yet scrapped, as well as drifting boats that have been found after breaking loose of their ropes and becoming carried away by the wind or the waves.
context_section_description: 1775: The Octavius, an English trading ship returning from China, was supposedly found drifting off the coast of Greenland. The captain's log showed that the ship had attempted the Northwest Passage, which had never been successfully traversed. The ship and the bodies of her frozen crew apparently completed the passage after drifting amongst the pack ice for 13 years.
  1811 — 1813: Napoléon Gallois reported that a French frigate had found the French privateer Duc de Dantzig drifting, covered in blood, with the decaying corpses of the crew hacked and crucified to her masts and in the battery. Bloody papers identified Duc de Dantzig and her master, François Aregnaudeau. More soberly, the ships register of the maritime archives states "Duc de Dantzig, unheard of as of 1813, presumed lost with all hands".
  1840: The schooner Jenny was supposedly discovered after spending 17 years frozen in an ice-barrier of the Drake Passage. Found by Captain Brighton of the whaler Hope, it had been locked in the ice since 1823, the last port of call having been Lima, Peru. The bodies of the seven people aboard, including one woman and a dog, preserved by the Antarctic cold, were buried at sea by the crew of the Hope, and Brighton passed the account on to the Admiralty in London. The Jenny is commemorated by the Jenny Buttress, a feature on King George Island near Melville Peak, named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee in 1960.
  27 October 1913, the Singapore newspaper The Straits Times published a story according to which the Marlborough had been discovered near Cape Horn with the skeletons of her crew on board. The Straits Times attributed the story to one published the London paper the Evening Standard of 3 October 1913. The 'Evening Standard mentioned that the story was based on an "account cabled from New Zealand" which was yet to be confirmed. The ship that sighted the Marlborough in 1913 was said to be the sailing ship Johnson.
  1947: The Ourang Medan is said to have been found adrift off Indonesia with all of its crew dead. The boarding party found the entire crew "frozen, teeth baring, gaping at the sun." Before the ship could be towed to a home port, it exploded and sank.
caption: The discovery of the Marlborough, as depicted by Le Petit Journal in 1913
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