December 16, 1735: Shrouded in Mystery to this Very Day the Haunting Fate of the Ghost Ship Baltimore

 Famous for its unpredictable high tides and majestic cliffs, Canada’s Bay of Fundy straddles the border between the two northeastern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  The world’s fifth largest bay in terms of  square miles, the Bay of Fundy also shares a border with the American state of Maine.

The shifting tides in the Bay of Fundy are considered fierce and treacherous by even the most experienced mariners in the world.  And the weather in Nova Scotia, particularly along the shoreline can be fickle and in the winter downright frigid, with large floes and pack ice a not uncommon sight in the open waters of the Bay of Fundy throughout much of the year.

On December 16, 1735 residents of the tiny rural fishing village of Chebogue, located along the northern shoreline of the Bay of Fundy, awoke on a cold winter’s morning to see a most unusual, even a haunting sight meet their eyes.

Docked in the small harbor of their village that December morning was a twin-masted ship, a brigantine used for transporting small loads of cargo or groups of passengers, not unlike many that frequently passed that way.  But strangely, no one in Chebogue had ever seen this ship before, nor was anyone there expecting a ship to arrive in port that week, let alone that day, being as it was, less than ten days before Christmas.

          Though apparently seaworthy, the ship’s sails were in tatters, and its hull seemed to be in a state of some disrepair.  No name was visible on the side of the brigantine and it flew no national colors nor did it have any markings which might hint at its purpose or place of origin.

The Inlet at Chebogue

For an entire day the townspeople of Chebogue stood onshore and watched this mysterious ghost ship for signs of life.  No one appeared.

Eventually, the townspeople of Chebogue sent out two boats to meet the strange vessel docked in their harbor.  The boarding party was led by Mr. Charles D’Entremont, an experienced local sea captain, and Mr. George Mitchell, a surveyor staying in Chebogue who was employed by the British crown.

The men aboard called out, “Hallo!  Is anyone there?”

“Do you need help?”

But no one answered.  As they rowed alongside the ship there still was no sound.  When the local men boarded the ship, to their horror, they saw a deck splattered with blood; they saw torn rigging hanging from the masts of the ship; hatches thrown open with cargo and supplies haphazardly thrown about as if having been ransacked.  Apparent signs of a violent and bloody struggle.

As the men from Chebogue continued their search, they still found no one and no bodies.  It was as if every crewmember had simply vanished into thin air and taken everything of value with them.

Finally, when the search party headed below decks they heard moaning coming from the main cabin.  The men attempted to  pull open the door to the cabin but it had been barricaded shut.  They were forced to break down the door with axes and crowbars and burst into the cabin.   Lying there in a fetal position on the floor, moaning in hysterics and dressed in rags, smeared in blood, the men found a woman--the ship’s only survivor.

She was rowed back to shore and nursed back to health in Chebogue.  Eventually, when questioned as to who she was, the woman said that her name was Susannah Buckler and that she had been the wife of the late Captain and owner of the ship Baltimore Andrew Buckler.

It took her weeks to be restored to health.  She muttered that, “Natives have killed everyone and carried away everything,” as she slipped in and out of fever and consciousness on her sickbed in Chebogue.

Eventually, in May of 1736 the woman claiming to be Mrs. Buckler was taken to Port Royal, now known as Annapolis Royal, the provincial capital of Nova Scotia to be interviewed about the fate of the cargo ship Baltimore by the province’s Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Armstrong.

Colonial Era Fort at Port Royal in Nova Scotia

Mrs. Buckler recounted a tear filled and believable tale of woe to the Lieutenant Governor.  She said that she was the wife of the Baltimore’s owner Andrew Buckler.  She claimed that the brigantine Baltimore had set sail from Dublin, Ireland on October 7, 1735 destined with a shipment of cargo for delivery to Annapolis, Maryland in the American colonies, but that foul and stormy weather had driven the ship off course and forced it northward and into the Bay of Fundy.

She said that after having been thrown off course, most of the crew perished for lack of freshwater, and that while drifting about in the frigid waters of the Bay, the survivors were set upon by natives of the Mi’kmaq peoples, who were indigenous to the Canadian woodlands, and who either murdered all of the remaining survivors, or carried them off into the desolate forests of Nova Scotia as slaves--except for the supposed Mrs. Buckler, that is, who apparently was able to hide out from the indigenous Mi’kmaq marauders by pretending to be dead.

Lieutenant Governor Armstrong not only believed her story, in fact, he bought the whole thing hook, line and sinker.  He not only paid for her passage to the American city of Boston where the woman said she had acquaintances and distant relatives, but he also gave her letters of introduction to important people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and wrote her out quite a sizeable cheque on behalf of His Majesty’s British government for the pain and suffering that the poor woman had endured at the hands of those rapacious Native Americans.

Governor Armstrong also immediately launched a full investigation into the fate of the Baltimore and its crew and he dispatched a Royal Navy search party on behalf of the British government in Canada led by Ensign Charles Vane to scour the Nova Scotian woodlands to try and locate survivors being held by indigenous peoples in captivity from the cargo ship Baltimore. 

Mi'kmaq People of Nova Scotia Bay of Fundy in Background

         The only problem was…none of Susannah Buckler’s story was even remotely true.

Within days of paying for Susannah Buckler’s passage to Boston, Nova Scotia’s Governor Lawrence Armstrong began to quickly realize he had been duped.

In the middle of 1736 Armstrong received a letter from a woman in Barbadoes asking about the fate of her husband--Andrew Buckler, whose ship she feared had been lost at sea.  As it turned out, this letter was from the real Susannah Buckler.

When Governor Armstrong realized that he might have been tricked it was said that he flew into a fit of rage and ordered an immediate search for the imposter who had claimed to be Susannah Buckler.  But, unfortunately, armed with her money on behalf of the British crown, and letters of introduction into New England society, that Susannah Buckler had long since disappeared and no one had heard anything of her, or her whereabouts, since she had left Nova Scotia.

Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Armstrong’s investigation never did find out who that mystery woman claiming to be the sole survivor left aboard the wreck of the brigantine Baltimore actually was.  He never recovered any of the money that he had given away on behalf of the Royal Government after having been taken in by the woman’s tale, but he did learn some of the truth behind the fate of the mystery ship known as the Baltimore, that had suddenly appeared overnight in the Bay of Fundy in December of 1735.

As it turned out, the Baltimore was not a cargo vessel as originally claimed, but rather a prison ship, and that it had indeed set sail from Dublin, Ireland sometime in October 1735 carrying approximately 70 convicts in chains who were set to serve out their sentences in Britain’s fledgling American colonies.

It is thought that at some point during the ship’s passage across the Atlantic the convicts broke free of their chains and attempted to take over the ship, murdering the ship’s owner Andrew Buckler and the ship’s entire crew in cold blood.  It is believed that the convicts threw the bodies of all those that they murdered overboard.

With little or no navigational skills, it is thought that the convicts were able to run the ship aground in the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia where many of them ran off into the woods to continue their life of crime or to die from exposure and starvation in the harsh winter climate of the Canadian wilderness.

Eventually, six surviving convicts from the mutiny aboard the prison ship Baltimore, all bedraggled and starving, would be dragged from the forests of New England and brought to trial, where they each would be executed for murder, in Salem, Massachusetts, of all places, ironically enough.

The Hulk of the Baltimore Being Burned in the Bay of Fundy

As it was, the woman who claimed to be Susannah Buckler, wife to the ship’s owner was never heard from again.  It is thought that she may have been a Boston area thief and prostitute known locally in the 1730’s and 40’s as Mrs. Mathews, though there is no concrete proof to verify any of these claims, and how she ever came to be aboard the fateful prison ship known as the Baltimore or even knew that the owner had a wife named Susannah in the first place, much like the true fate of that eerie ghost ship which washed ashore along the frigid coast of the Bay of Fundy way back in December of 1735, remains shrouded in mystery to this very day…