The word “ghost ship” might conjure spectral images of the Victorian era, but a Nova Scotian ghost ship named the Governor Parr was distinctly more modern, dating to a time of cars, radios, and electricity.
The Public Archives of Nova Scotia wrote that “the schooner's reputation was built on serviceability — relatively small, speedy, agile and seaworthy, it was the workhorse of the sea.” By the 1920s, though, the schooner's days were numbered.
The Governor Parr's builders were very much aware that it was the end of an era. She would be the last ever schooner built in Parrsboro, NS.
Knowing this, workers poured their hearts and souls into building the schooner. John P. Parker wrote in his book 'Sails of the Maritimes' that she was the "most handsome schooner built in Atlantic Canada." Painted with “gleaning white paint,” Parker gushed that “she was a masterpiece.”
Her career as a sailing ship, however, was a short one. On October 3rd, 1923, she was sailing towards Buenos Aries carrying lumber Parker described as “a very large cargo with an excessive deck load.”
Then a storm blew in.
The Quebec Chronicle newspaper wrote that two masts snapped off the schooner. The crew fought “a grim battle against death … all suffered severely from their ordeal.” Captain Angus Richards and sailor Vincent Bigh were swept from the deck and lost at sea.
The six remaining crew members, Willard Cevoir, James Bushmen, Morgan Trim, Percy Cleveland, Emanuel Richards (the Captain's brother), and Albert Smith lashed themselves to the masthead. Also lashed to the mast was a canvas sack containing the ship's mascots, a cat and a dog.
For thirty-six hours, they bobbled along in the sea “and resisted storm, hunger and thirst.”
They spotted an American ship, the S.S. Schodack. It failed to notice them at first, but they successfully attracted its attention by lighting their sweaters on fire, and were rescued.
Presumably, the rescued crew thought their abandoned and badly damaged ship would soon sink in the storm. Instead, she would become one of the most remarkable ghost ships of modern times.
For sailors, the phrase “ghost ship” had nothing to do with things that go bump in the night, like the famous Firey Ghost Ship of the Baie Des Chaleurs.
Rather, it meant all-too-real derelict hulks drifting along the seas.
These were a frightening menace for sailors not for spectral reasons but for distinctly practical ones: they would often sit low in the water, half-sunk, drifting along sea lanes, nearly invisible. They could crash into and sink ships easily.
“It is unusual in these days of rapid radio communication and special Coast Guard patrols for a derelict to remain afloat for more than a week,” commented the Virginia Chronicle newspaper. Yet the Governor Parr was spotted “roving the high seas” in January of 1924, three months after she was abandoned.
The American Coast Guard cutter Tampa caught up to and captured the rogue Nova Scotian schooner. She was chained up, and the cutter began towing her towards Halifax to be disposed of.
This task proved to be a difficult one, even for the modern steel-hulled cutter. The Governor Parr was waterlogged and heavy.
Then a storm rolled in. Bad weather made the derelict ship difficult to control. The cutter cut her loose. She disappeared out of sight into the choppy seas.
Everyone assumed that was the end of the Governor Parr.
Six months later, in July of 1924, the Governor Parr was spotted once again, this time by the British steamer Tortuguero. She was by then 800 miles to the northeast of the Virgin Islands.
This meant that she had travelled hundreds of miles from where she was last seen, without any crew. This unexpected development caused a media sensation, with the Nova Scotian press choosing to portray the strange story as a flattering testament to how formidable ships built in their province were.
Authorities took the ghost ship menace more seriously. The British Navy dispatched Zarin to go track down the Governor Parr and destroy her.
The Zarin found her that August. Crew boarded the derelict Nova Scotian schooner, doused her in gasoline, and set her on fire.
“She apparently survived this experience,” wrote the Fayetteville Bulletin newspaper “for later she was reported off the coast of Portugal, and in October … near the Canary Islands.” She had crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
The Governor Parr would drift along the world’s major sea routes for years. Ships from many nations would try to capture — or sink — the renegade ghost schooner, only to have it slip away.
More than two years after it was lost, the Fayetteville Bulletin wrote on October 23rd, 1925 that the Governor Parr had again crossed the Atlantic and had been spotted by an American Navy ship in the West Indies.
That newspaper marvelled that she had been spotted the previous October as she “floated crewless down along the coast of Africa.” This meant that she was “the first derelict on record in the [United States] hydrographic office to cover practically the circulatory drift of the North Atlantic.”
American warships were dispatched to destroy the ghost ship. By the time they got there, she had once again disappeared.
She had escaped the American Navy again in the West Indies, and bulletins were sent out warning sailors she was headed northeast along the trade winds back to the North Atlantic.
For sailors working on the high seas, the continued survival of the Governor Parr against all odds wasn’t anything to cheer. She contained a cargo of a million and a half feet of lumber and was so low in the water she was very difficult to see.
For many Nova Scotians though, the improbable survival of the last schooner built in Parrsboro was seen as a testament to their shipbuilding skills. There was a certain amusement, and perhaps some pride, that this wooden ship they had constructed was causing such a headache to so many modern ships from nations on both sides of the Atlantic.
More Ghost Ship Stories:
The Rock Terrace, a New Brunswick unsinkable ghost ship.
A more ghostly ship: The Firey Ghost Ship of the Baie des Chaleurs.
A very different ghost story, with a most unexpected twist: The Spectre of Rexton
