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