The Bermuda Triangle holds nothing over the high arctic when it comes to mysteries at sea. In fact, two of Wintergreen’s favorite arctic adventure haunts, Russia’s Barents Sea and Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands are sites of those mysteries.

Sir Hugh Willoughby

The first involved Sir Hugh Willoughby, a British sea captain who set sail on the Bona Esperanza in 1553 in hopes of finding a trade route to tap the riches of the Orient. His goal was to be the first to negotiate the Northeast Passage, the fabled waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans over the top of Russia. His company was presciently called the “Mysterie of Merchant Adventurers for Discoverie of Regions Unknowen.”

The journey came to an abrupt halt that fall when his ship became locked in the pack ice of the Barents Sea, just east of the Svalbard Islands where Wintergreen’s Norwegian Arctic trips take place. Willoughby’s crew was short of food and fuel and their clothing was woefully inadequate for the brutal cold. Come January, they were still alive, but just barely and then…all was silent.

Two years later, Russian fisherman found the ship helplessly adrift in the polar sea. Going aboard they found Sir Hugh, frozen solid, seated at his table with journal open and pen grasped in his rigid fingers. Scattered about the vessel were the forms of all 40 crew members. Russia’s sailors attempted to tow the vessel with bodies in place, a vast floating coffin, back to England. But it foundered at sea and all was lost — except for the eye-witness accounts of the Russian fisherman which are contained in a report that somehow ended up in the archives of the Venetian embassy in London.

Ship Becomes Locked in the Pack Ice

The report concludes the men were killed by carbon monoxide fumes from the sooty sea coal they furiously shoveled into their stoves to keep the cold at bay. Or at least that theory would account for the bizarre observations of the fisherman who boarded the ghost ship. In addition to finding Sir Hugh fast frozen to his writing desk, they found “others frozen in place on the mess desk, platter in hand, spoon in mouth; others opening a locker, and others in various postures like statues, as if they had been adjusted and placed in those attitudes.” Sir Hugh’s last diary entry concerned an island he discovered northeast of Svalbard. But “Willoughby Land” has never since been found.

JFK Jr Under President’s Desk

The second ghost ship resulted from a British Naval attempt exactly 300 years later to negotiate the Northwest Passage, the fabled waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans over the top of Canada. When it too became locked in the pack ice, the HMS Resolute under Captain Edward Belcher was abandoned in spring 1854. Two years later the crew-less ship was found by an American whaling crew — drifting along some 1200 miles eastwards of where it had been abandoned.

The Americans towed the ghost ship to Connecticut. They happened to arrive in the states at a time when Britain and America were at the brink of war over trade issues. To forestall altercations, a US Senator proposed that the Resolute be refurbished and sent back to Britain as a gesture of peace and goodwill. The ploy worked, the tensions eased and the HMS Resolute saw service again for another 20 years.

When it was retired in 1879, Queen Victoria returned the favor of the gift by having a desk made from the ship’s timbers that she presented to President Hayes. That desk has been in the White House ever since. In 1960 Jackie Kennedy selected it as her husband’s desk for the Oval Office, where it sits to this day.

The Resolute desk shares its name with the high arctic village, Resolute Bay, that now exists in the cove where the ship was abandoned. This village, the northernmost community in Canada, has served as the base for many of Wintergreen’s high arctic adventures, including our treks to the geographic North Pole, the magnetic North Pole and our dogsled adventures across Ellesmere Island.

The 500 residents of Resolute Bay take pride in the fact that the village’s namesake desk serves the American presidency. And with a tart twist of humor, they note wryly that since this very desk was the scene of Pres. Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky, it has indeed served many ‘heads’ of state.

Related posts:

1. A Tragic Arctic Love Story
2. The Wacky Side of Polar Adventure Travel