Exy Johnson

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Exy Johnson was an English brigantine operating under the charter of the Royal Geographical Society under the command of Captain Thomas Mayhew. The Exy Johnson disappeared during a stated exploratory mission to discover the then-uncharted Northwest Passage (though contemporary accounts dispute whether this was the crew's true mission). The Exy Johnson set sail on March 17, 1767 from London, England with a crew of 47 men. The last recorded sighting of the Exy Johnson was October 21, 1767. Captain Charles Carter of the American merchant brigantine Evelyn Lily reported seeing the Exy Johnson near sunset the evening of October 21 off the coast of Baffin Island, intact and under full sail, but he couldn't see any figures on deck. Concerned, he attempted to make contact with the vessel but received no response. Since the ship appeared sound, Carter didn't pursue the matter further.

Exy Johnson was built in Nova Scotia and launched under British registration in 1757. She was owned by the London-based Royal Geographical Society, "a learned organization known for the financing of extraordinary voyages of Daring and Discovery, and dedicated to the scientific exploration of the Earth and Heavens for the advancement of Human Knowledge." She was built alongside her "twin" ship, the brigantine Irving Johnson, now on display in the Nova Scotia Maritime Museum.

Historians have posited several possible explanations for the ship's disappearance, including mutiny, piracy, errors in navigation, and the ship becoming trapped in pack ice. After a protracted legal dispute between the Royal Geographical Society, the family of Captain Mayhew, and other parties, a inquest finally ruled the cause of disappearance "misadventure" in 1773. Over the years many people have claimed to have seen the ship throughout the Atlantic and even Pacific Oceans, giving rise to its legendary status as a "ghost ship."

The mystery of the Exy Johnson has inspired dozens of poems, novels, folk songs, and films, including the 2011 documentary Ghost Ship.

Design and Construction

The Exy Johnson was constructed in early 1757 on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. The ship was constructed of American white oak, with two masts, and rigged as a brigantine. She was launched on May 18, 1758 and registered to the Royal Geographical Society. Her registration documents described her as 90 feet (27 m) in length on deck, 21 feet (6 m) broad on beam, with 198.42 gross tonnage. She contained a total of 30 bunks divided between two compartments. In a third compartment were the captain's cabin, an officer's cabin with two bunks, and four additional crew bunks aft. The ship was also outfitted with a naturalist's laboratory and chart room. Two-and-a-half miles of running rigging supported a total of 5,032 square feet (467 m²) of canvas on two masts and 13 sails.

Captain Thomas Mayhew

Thomas Mayhew was born in Norfolk, England, on October 13, 1730, to Roger Mayhew and Theodora Elmsley, a distant relation of Catherine Suckling, the mother of Lord Nelson. In 1755, Thomas Mayhew married Elizabeth Bartridge. They had three sons, Arthur, Charles, and Edward, the youngest dying in infancy.

In January 1767, Benjamin took command of Exy Johnson for her first and final voyage.

Mayhew was considered an experienced and able captain, though mercurial and prone to periods of depression wherein he would withdraw from his crew and stay isolated in his cabin. His wife described him in a 1765 letter as "melancholy and often distracted," adding that he had become obsessed with studying the Bible, particularly the book of Job, sometimes staying up reading the entire night. This would later lead some to blame the captain's mental instability for the loss of the Exy Johnson.[[null citation needed]]

Maiden Voyage

On March 1, 1772, Mayhew began to supervise the loading and outfitting of the ship. The Exy Johnson was loaded with scientific, navigational, and recording equipment of all kinds, as well as enough provisions for the entire crew for three years, though their expedition was scheduled to last only 10 months. Mayhew was joined by a group of naturalists and geographers from the Royal Geographical Society, notably botanist and chemist Sir Roger Banks, a senior member of the Society and descendant of Sir Isaac Newton.

On the morning of March 17, Exy Johnson left the port of London, intending to find a shortcut to China via the Arctic Circle. Curiously, though this was Mayhew's stated goal to his wife, members of the crew, and others, this goal was not formally documented anywhere. The Royal Geographical Society listed the voyage in its records as simply "exploratory." In a 1773 inquest following the ship's disappearance, several of Captain Mayhew's associates disputed the idea that Mayhew was seeking a Northwest Passage, saying that Mayhew had given them various conflicting accounts of his plans.

The Exy Johnson was last seen by Captain Charles Carter on October 21, 1772. No wreckage has ever been recovered. The Royal Geographical Society has never commented publicly on the Exy Johnson, her mission, or her fate.

Purported Sightings

Following the sighting by Captain Carter, no sightings of the Exy Johnson were reported for more than a decade. In May 1779, a French privateer fighting in the American Revolutionary War claimed in his diary that he saw the missing ship while on overnight watch but died in battle before he could be questioned further. He described the ship as whole and intact but apparently deserted, sparkling with crystals of ice, despite the fact that it was too late in the year and too far south for ice.

Thereafter, dozens more sightings have been reported, the most recent in 1999 by Patrick Bent, who claimed to have glimpsed the boat while testing a small sailboat of his own design near Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Bent claims he took a photograph of the ship, but when it was developed, the photograph showed only a bright blue light where the ship should have been. Bent likewise claimed that the ship was whole, intact, deserted, and shimmering as though covered in ice.

Others have claimed to have seen the Exy Johnson as far west as Anchorage and south as South Carolina, far off the ship's original course.

In 2010, the crew of the paranormal reality TV show Fear Hunters launched an investigation into the mystery based on Bent's story, but found nothing conclusive.

Myths and Legends

In the decades that followed, myths, rumors, and legends flourished. Contemporary newspapers added romantic and invented details, including the incorrect story that Captain Mayhew had brought his wife along with him on the voyage (in fact, his wife was safe at home in Norfolk, where she lived until her death in 1820). In 1924, the adventure magazine Perilous Tales published an imagined account of the ship's last days focusing on the supposed madness of Captain Mayhew, which drove his crew to mutiny. Though this story was clearly labelled fiction, it was later reprinted by other newspapers and magazines, and cited as fact even in some encyclopedias.

In May 1977, a pair of amateur SCUBA divers, Paul and Linda Spaulding, were testing new cold-weather dive equipment in Baffin Bay when they radioed the shore to say they had found what looked to be an 18th-century wreck. A coastal safety officer warned them not to attempt wreck diving, an advanced form of diving for which they were untrained and under-equipped. The two agreed to hold off, but neither Paul nor Linda was ever seen again. Their boat was found drifting, empty and without their diving gear, leading rescuers to conclude they had attempted a wreck dive after all. Though neither their remains nor the wreck they reported were ever found, rumors spread that the two had discovered the remains of the Exy Johnson.

Modern conspiracy theorists continue to question the "true" objective of Captain Mayhew's voyage, citing everything from an attempt to forestall the American Revolutionary War to a mission to recover a crashed alien vessel.

Herman Melville alluded to the story of the Exy Johnson in Moby-Dick, Chapter VII, The Chapel: "In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Exy Johnson."

External links

The Fate of the Exy Johnson
Ghost Ship (2011)

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