The Baker vanishes at the end of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
In the poem’s eighth and final section, “The Vanishing,” the Baker rushes ahead of the hunting party and appears to have found a Snark. He begins to announce that it is a “Boo—,” but disappears before completing the word. The poem explains the mystery with its final line: the Snark was a Boojum.
Earlier, the Baker recounts a warning from his uncle: if the creature they find is a Boojum, the hunter will “softly and suddenly vanish away” and never be seen again. The ending fulfills that warning literally. The crew searches the place where the Baker met the Snark but finds no trace—not even a button or feather.
The Baker is one of a crew whose members are identified mainly by occupations beginning with B, including the Bellman, Butcher, Banker, Beaver, Boots, and Bonnet-maker. The Banker has an alarming encounter with a Bandersnatch earlier in the poem, but it is the Baker who disappears. Carroll’s nonsense poem was published in 1876.