# Phantom Ships, the vessels that never were

*Draft (Aodhan's voice pass pending). Every entry below was, at some point, a row in this dataset, until source criticism sank it. We publish the wrecks because the **detection methods** are the point: anyone building a registry from manuscript calendars and OCR'd print will meet these same ghosts.*

**The American *Descubierta* (1794).** Born when a harvest matched the word *Descubierta* in a 1794 record, which turned out to be a foreign-**exclusion policy order**, not a ship at anchor. There was no American Descubierta; there was a decree *about* keeping foreigners out. *(Class 1: the policy phantom, a rule about ships is not a ship.)* Meanwhile the real *Descubierta*s multiplied: Malaspina's corvette (1791), Vancouver's *Discovery* rendered into Spanish (1792–95), and a Russian corvette (1819–21), one name, three navies. *(Class 2: era-conflation.)*

**Captain William Shaler, the ship.** The records name the master so often that the cluster looked like a vessel. The actual ship was the *Lelia Byrd*, which Savage's copyists spelled "Lelia Bird." *(Class 3: person-as-ship.)* Companions: "Lázaro," "Thomas Marshall," "Juan José", and the fleet of *Apolonia*, *Cleusa*, and *Ester*, all conjured from vaccination and fund-contribution name-lists.

**The good ship *Californio*.** A padrón demonym, not a hull (though a real goleta *California* exists, the register keeps her). Companions from one bad afternoon of parsing: the port of *Sto Domingo*, the fort *Ross*, the month *Junio*, the pack-train *Recua*, and *Levante*, which is the east wind. *(Class 4: places, months, winds, and mule trains do not float.)*

**The OCR armada.** *Pilrjrim* (= *Pilgrim*), *Wilminfjton* (= *Wilmington*), *Pocahontaa* and *PorahontciJi* (= *Pocahontas*), *Franl'Un* (= *Franklin*)… sixty-three garbled names quarantined from the printed Bancroft lists rather than minted as new vessels; each is fuzzy-matched back to a real ship before any row exists. *(Class 5: the garble fleet.)*

**"El otro Boston."** Not a phantom, the opposite: a pun that proved real. Bancroft records that the Spaniards called the *Otter* of Boston, the first American ship in Alta California (Monterey, 29 October 1796), *el otro Boston*, "the other Boston." The joke survived in the record and briefly looked like a second ship. She was the same one, twice named, and the registry keeps the pun in her variants.

**The moral.** A dataset's credibility lives in its refusals. The full class taxonomy, with detection tests and where each guard lives in the pipeline, is in `FALSE-POSITIVE-REGISTER.md`.