The Octavius departed London in 1761 with a full crew and arrived safely in China around 1 year later. The vessel then left China to sail back to Great Britain in 1762. The weather was unusually warm that year, so the Captain decided to sail home via the Northwest Passage, although travelling through there had not yet been accomplished at the time. The ship did not make it back to Britain.

Thirteen years later in 1775, a whaling ship named the Herald saw the Octavius off the cost of Greenland. Upon receiving no response from the ship, some of the crew from Herald boarded to investigate. Below deck, they discovered the frozen bodies of the whole crew. The Captain's body was still sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand, writing a logbook entry which was dated 1762. The investigating crew members were immediately troubled by these scenes, what had made the Captain and his crew die in the positions they were in?

They fled the Octavius, only taking part of the Captain’s logbook. The last logged position put the ship at 250 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, which is where the Captain and his crew must have died. The Herald located Octavius off the coast of Greenland. If this is all true, then it means Octavius was the first vessel to ever complete the voyage through the Northwest Passage, but it would have completed this voyage as a ghost ship.

Herald’s crew believed the ghost ship was cursed, so they left it to drift as it was. To this day, there have been no other sightings of the Octavius.