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The Octavius was a ghost ship, probably legendary and not actual. The story goes that the vessel was found near Greenland by the whaler Herald in 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 with the captain's log in front of him. The boarding party took only the captain's log before leaving the vessel. The last entry in the log was from 1762, which meant that the ship had been lost in the Arctic for 13 years.
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. The captain gambled on a return through the treacherous (and then unconquered) Northwest Passage, with the unfortunate result of trapping the vessel in sea ice north of Alaska; thus, the Octavius had made the Northwest Passage posthumously. The ship was never seen again after its encounter with the Herald.
Current opinion is that the legend is simply a tall tale of unknown origin. See Encyclopedia Titanica, suggesting that the story is fiction.
- This ship and its context is seemingly the inspiration for one of the setting events in Tardi's graphic novel, Le démon des glaces ("The Demon of Ice"), 1974. Set in 1889, a passenger carrying loafer named "L'Anjou" passing the Barents Sea has an (as it turns out) fatal encounter with a strange, ghostly ship which is somehow stranded on the top of a huge iceberg. The ship is called "The Iceland Loafer", and when the crew of L´Anjou enters it by ascending the iceberg, the full crew of the loafer is found as mentioned above, including the captain in his cabin, mysteriously pointing in his frozen state to a certain point on his naval map (where they actually are). Immediately here after, their mother ship, L´Anjou is blown up in front of their eyes, and they're now stranded on the ghost ship... another (yet less) possible inspiration is the strange case of Mary Celeste.
References
- Raybin Emert, Phyllis. Mysteries of Ships and Planes. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1990. ISBN 0-8125-9427-4 (telling traditional story)