Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: it's Christian saga. While it would be really cool if
Speaker 1: there were tons of legitimate historical reports of faintly glowing
Speaker 1: apparitions of ships and sailors, there are many more stories
Speaker 1: about something less metaphysical but still pretty creepy, ships that
Speaker 1: were abandoned without an apparent cause or trace. Recently, my
Speaker 1: colleagues on the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast
Speaker 1: told us a few tales of the Bottomless Blue and
Speaker 1: the ships that sailed them and washed up on some
Speaker 1: shore entirely deserted. Now, if that sounds like a fairly
Speaker 1: routine course of events for ships of yore, you might
Speaker 1: be surprised to learn how weird the circumstances of these
Speaker 1: incidents were. Take the Resolving, a cargo ship that traveled
Speaker 1: between Canada and Wales in the late nineteenth century. In
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty four, some sailors spotted off the coast of
Speaker 1: what is now Newfoundland and Labrador. The ship was moving
Speaker 1: haphazardly through the water, and when sailors boarded the Resolving,
Speaker 1: they saw why. While the sails were set, there wasn't
Speaker 1: a single person aboard, but there was plenty of reason
Speaker 1: to believe that the ship's abandonment was both sudden and
Speaker 1: very recent. We're talking fires in the galley, food set
Speaker 1: on the table, nothing to indicate that days or even
Speaker 1: many hours had passed since the crew was shuttled. A
Speaker 1: log book's last entry was mundane and from a mirror,
Speaker 1: six hours before the sailors who discovered the empty ship arrived. Now,
Speaker 1: while theories abounded, perhaps the ship hit or lodged on
Speaker 1: an iceberg, or maybe the crew mutinied, there wasn't much
Speaker 1: evidence to back anything up. The captain's personal money was missing,
Speaker 1: but the gold coins that were stored in the ship's
Speaker 1: purse were still there. The mystery only deepened in when
Speaker 1: the great grandson of the captain of the ship started
Speaker 1: digging into the story. A Canadian woman contacted him and
Speaker 1: said that her family had a strange tale in its
Speaker 1: past as well. Soon after the discovery of the resolving,
Speaker 1: her grandfather and his brother found the body of a
Speaker 1: uniformed captain on the coast of Newfoundland. They buried the
Speaker 1: body and a gold pocket watch. The deceased captain carried
Speaker 1: his only identifying accessory, and they haven't been seen since.
Speaker 1: But wait, the story didn't end there. The resolving was
Speaker 1: in such good shape even after being left at the
Speaker 1: mercy of the Ocean, that it was put back out
Speaker 1: to sea to work again. Today's episode was written by
Speaker 1: Kate Kirshner, produced by Dylan Fagin, and For more on
Speaker 1: this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com.