The Lyubov Orlova: They Lost a Cruise Ship in the Atlantic and It Has Never Been Found

In January of twenty thirteen, a derelict Soviet cruise ship was towed out of St. John's, Newfoundland, bound for the scrap yard in the Dominican Republic. The tow line snapped less than three hours into the voyage. The ship began to drift toward Canada's offshore oil platforms. After two failed attempts to bring her under control, Transport Canada towed the Lyubov Orlova into international waters and cut her loose. The cruise ship had been built in Yugoslavia in nineteen seventy-six for Antarctic and Arctic expeditions. She spent thirty years carrying passengers to the frozen edges of the world before her owner abandoned her in St. John's in twenty ten, leaving fifty-one unpaid crew stranded aboard. She sat impounded in the harbour for over two years before a shell company in the British Virgin Islands bought her for scrap. The tow was attempted by a crew with no towing experience using salvaged equipment in the middle of a North Atlantic winter. It failed almost immediately. After being cut loose, the Lyubov Orlova drifted east across the Atlantic. Her emergency beacon transmitted distress signals on February twenty-third and March twelfth, each from a position further east and presumably lower in the water. After the second signal, nothing. No more transmissions. No sightings. No wreckage. No debris on any shore. In twenty fourteen, British tabloids reported that the ship was still afloat and heading for Britain, infested with cannibal rats that had been eating each other to survive. The story went viral. It was largely debunked, but the legend stuck. A Twitter account was created in the ship's voice. A Canadian rock band wrote a song about it. Reported sightings near Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland have never been confirmed. As of twenty twenty-six, the MV Lyubov Orlova has never been found. She is officially listed as missing, not sunk. In an age of satellites and GPS, a one-hundred-metre cruise ship vanished from the North Atlantic and no one knows where it is.