“The Death Ship” was a one-pager from Toby’s Tales of Terror #1 (1952). The author is not known but the art is by Bill Molno. Tales of derelict ships were part of the Northern genre’s sea and sailing stories. William Hope Hodgson set his in the Sargasso Sea of the Atlantic but others wrote of ships caught in the ice, especially after the doomed Franklin Expedition. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner experiences the frozen wastes of the poles.
The writer of “the Death Ship” may have been thinking of the Octavius, a famous ghost ship of Greenland. Like that ship, those that discovered her found the entire crew preserved in ice. The legend of The Jenny, an Antarctic derelict, also had the captain frozen to his desk, his logue book open. The Octavius was the inspiration for Jacques Tardi’s 1974 graphic novel, The Demon of Ice (available in English from Fantagraphics Books.)The Octavius was featured again in the video game, Assassin’s Creed III (2012).
