And Gargan won't sell me a replacement. Once you lose the deed, the ship is worthless. This happened in BOTH my Exult and vanilla Dosbox playthroughs. It happened early on. Funny that you can rob banks and murder people, but you cannot dare to sail a ship without the deed in hand. I know the magic carpet makes ships obsolete, but I like ships! Did anybody else experience the disappearing ship deed glitch? And is it just the Trinsic deed or all deeds that vanish?

Never happened to me, but in all fairness, the last time I bought the Trinsic-ship was ages ago, in a DOS playthrough.
I don't recall the deed ever disappearing.
Nowadays I just get a deed from Lord British and pick up my free ride from Vesper.

If you can pinpoint when the deed actually disappears, then maybe someone out there can help. Not much to go on here.

There are a few npcs who can actually steal items from your pack, and the game pretty much never informs you this is even possible. Nicodemus is a likely candidate, but you'd have to kill him to get it back.

I dunno what Ultima game has this behaviour, but it's absolutely not the case in Ultima 7.
I know the original game suffers from bugs and items like keys do get lost sometimes (one of the reasons why I like Exult), but it's not NPC's that's taking them.

Edit: People who bought the game from GoG don't need to worry about disappearing items/keys. Apparently the cdrom version had this fixed.

If you hang around them long enough they can and will take things from you. You will find the items on the thief's corpse if you kill him. Besides Nicodemus, other reported pickpockets include Kreg and Blorn.

It must have been Kreg who stole my ship deed. I will gut him and see if he has it. Thanks!!