Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 686 / February 17, 1877

Has the idea ever occurred to any one that at all times there are ships of one kind or other floating about at sea without a living creature on board? They have been abandoned by their officers and crew in what seemed a hopeless condition. Some are dismantled and mere hulks. Some are swimming keel upwards. Some are water-logged, but being laden with timber will not sink. There they are driving hither and thither on the ocean, as wind and waves direct, a dread to the mariner, who may unawares come against them in the dark. We remember seeing an account of one of these derelicts, as they are called, being fallen in with after having been abandoned for weeks. It was water-logged up to the very deck, and sitting on a scrap of the exposed bulwarks was a poor cat, still alive, in the last degree of attenuation. We have often with commiseration thought of that accidentally deserted cat, its hunger, its misery, its hopelessness night and day in the midst of the dreary and spacious ocean. How the creature must have been delighted when rescued from its floating prison! Occasionally derelicts are taken in tow and brought into port, where they are broken up, or if of any value, are reclaimed by owners, to whom they are delivered on a payment of 'salvage.'
We are going to speak of a kind of derelicts out of ordinary experience.
On the 17th of September 1855, while sailing in the American whaler George Henry , in Davis's Strait, and when about forty miles from Cape Mercy, Captain Buddington descried a vessel having something peculiar in her appearance. No signals were hoisted, none answered, and no crew visible when he approached. Going on board, he found no living being in the ship; but in the best cabin were documents declaring the abandonment of the ship, and explaining the circumstances under which it had taken place. The wastrel, the treasure-trove, the lost-found, was the famous Resolute , whose story we shall tell presently.
Jurists and legislators have had to determine the ownership of property that seems for the time to belong to no one. Derelict is the lawyers' name for such property, so far at anyrate as regards abandoned ships. Where a crew merely quit their ship to obtain assistance, or for any other temporary purpose, it is not derelict: they intend to return; but when the master and crew abandon her without hope of recovery, she becomes ownerless for a time, and then falls to the lot of the finder. Not necessarily to keep, however, but, as has been said, to hold as a claim for salvage from the crown, the owners, or the under-writers. If the solitary ship is found near any coast, there is generally some claim put forth by the owner of the sea-shore, whether the owner be government or a private individual; but when out in the open sea, far distant from land, international maritime law may have to settle the matter. In practice, however, very little of this takes place; a ship really abandoned out in mid-ocean is seldom worth the expense of repair; the finders and salvors regard it chiefly in the light of saleable old materials; and the derelict, if it be taken in tow or otherwise navigated to port by its discoverers, usually finds its way into the hands of the ship-breaker.