![ghost ship ghost ship](https://sailorinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/THE-OCTAVIUS.jpg)
Even then, the ship needed to be towed backward toward the open water. An especially cold winter necessitated the assistance of an advance crew of ice-chopping local residents just to get the ship out of New Haven Harbor and into Long Island Sound. The voyage did not meet with an auspicious start. They arranged for the construction in Rhode Island of what later chroniclers referred to as a “Great Shippe.” This vessel would carry with it across the Atlantic Ocean every kind of marketable merchandise that could be rounded up in Connecticut. As Mather put it, “they found their estates sink so fast, that they must quickly do something.” Colony Pins Its Hopes on New VesselĪ group of the settlement’s most prominent merchants set to work. The voyage had been necessitated by the colony’s long string of failed attempts to engage in remunerative commerce to the West Indies. In January of 1647, a mere eight years after the city’s founding, a large vessel set sail for England. Several versions of the story were recorded in print, including one recorded by Reverend Cotton Mather in his 1702 book Magnalia Christi Americana, a history of the religious development of early New England.
![ghost ship ghost ship](https://coolinterestingstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ghost-ship-3.jpg)
English settlers in New Haven Colony witnessed one of the strangest apparitions in the history of New England, and the retelling of this spectral event has gone down in folk tradition as the Ghost or Phantom Ship of New Haven.