The Resolven and the Log of HMS Mallard

A ship with no one aboard

On Friday, 29 August 1884, the Royal Navy gunboat HMS Mallard was patrolling the coast of Newfoundland when her lookouts noticed a brig behaving oddly between Baccalieu Island and Catalina, at the mouth of Trinity Bay. She was under sail but wandering, as if no one had the helm. The Mallard hailed her and got no answer, so her commander, Lieutenant William L. H. Browne, sent a boat across.

The vessel was the Resolven, a Welsh merchant brig. What the boarding party found has kept people arguing for more than a century. The galley fire was still burning. The lamps were lit. The ship was sound, with only a broken yard and some minor damage aloft. Her logbook had been written up only a few hours before. But her boat was gone, and so was everyone who had been aboard her.

Vessel

Resolven, merchant brig, home port Aberystwyth, Wales; named after the village of Resolven in the Vale of Neath

Master

Captain John James, of Cardiganshire

Aboard

Seven crew and four passengers, by most accounts; none was ever seen again

Found

29 August 1884, between Baccalieu Island and Catalina, Newfoundland, by HMS Mallard (Lt. William L. H. Browne)

Afterward

Towed into Catalina, refitted, and sailed again under new owners; wrecked in 1887 carrying lumber from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland

What the Mallard's log records

The most solid evidence is not a newspaper story but the Mallard's own record. Royal Navy ships kept a daily log of position, weather and events, and the log covering the Resolven survives in the UK National Archives. It confirms the core of the story: a brig sighted adrift off the coast, boarded, and found deserted.

Later accounts add more detail, some of it harder to check. The brig is said to have left Harbour Grace, in Conception Bay, at about six on the Wednesday evening and to have passed the Baccalieu light around midnight. Some versions add food laid out on the cabin table. The four passengers are usually described as men from the Conception Bay area, who would have known these waters far better than the Welsh crew.

What might have happened

Nobody knows. These are the explanations that come up most often.

1. Ice and panic. An iceberg was close by. If the brig struck ice, or came close enough to frighten the crew, they may have believed she was sinking, taken to the boat in a hurry, and been swamped in the cold water. It is the simplest explanation and the one most often given, but no bodies and no wreckage of the boat were ever found.
2. A plan ashore. A family story holds that Captain James was carrying a sum in gold coin that was not aboard when the Mallard arrived. One theory is that someone who knew the coast used the confusion to get away with it.
3. The man on Random Island. A Newfoundland family has long told of a man found dead that same month, sitting beneath a tree facing the sea on Random Island in Trinity Bay, in what looked like a captain's coat, and buried in an unmarked grave. Whether he had anything to do with the Resolven has never been shown.
4. Mutiny or piracy. Sometimes suggested, but there is no evidence for either, and mutineers do not usually abandon a sound ship as well.

Because of the lit lamps and the warm galley, the Resolven is often called "the Welsh Mary Celeste," after the American brigantine found deserted near the Azores twelve years earlier.

The family's search

Much of what is known today comes from Will Wain, a great-grandson of Captain James, who heard the story from an elder relative and spent years chasing it. He traced a copy of the Mallard's log in the National Archives, and the family still keeps the captain's Welsh-language New Testament, which was left aboard the brig. His research was reported in the Welsh press in 2015 and has kept the story alive on both sides of the Atlantic.