I know not if this was just a glitch or if this was something that's actually supposed to happen when you get the item in question, but if it's the former then I say that the devs ought to make it the latter.
A few days ago I was sailing with a buddy of mine and two randoms that wound up becoming friends after the fact. The four of us together in a galleon took down a Skull Fort. Among the items item inside the fort's vault was a Peculiar Relic. One of the randoms told me and my friend that the item was actually dangerous to have on a ship, because it greatly increases the likelihood of an encounter with the Kraken. Given that it was well past Midnight for all of us, and we weren't really looking to do any quests, we decided "what the hell" and brought the thing aboard along with the rest of our plunder.
We manage to make it back to the nearest outpost and offload everything without incident. However, by this point we were growing a bit restless. We were thinking that a scrap with the Kraken was sounding like it'd be awfully fun. So we kept the Peculiar Relic right where we left it, on the Voyage Table in the galleon's captain's quarters, and set course for the opposite side of the map. Ten minutes pass... Then twenty... No Kraken. It got to a point where we decided to propose a voyage. We go in to vote for it -- and discover that the relic's gone.
At first we thought that maybe one of us had sold by accident, and that we simply hadn't been notified by the transaction. But thirty minutes later, as we're patching up some holes that we received while running over some rocks, we found it sitting atop the front-most barrel on the lowest deck! And this bizarre phenomena occurred several more times over the next 2 - 3 hours. We'd replace it in the Captain's Quarters, and it'd move to a different part of the ship as soon as there was nobody looking at it. It showed up on top of the banana crate, the wheel used to raise and lower the anchor, the crow's nest, and once on the small slat that juts out from the side of the ship like a fin!
Sufficed to say, at the end of our run we couldn't bring ourselves to sell it. Instead we left it sitting at the counter of Teri's tavern at Dagger Tooth Outpost, in the hope that maybe someone else would spawn in, grab it, and have similar adventures with it!
