Ship of Lost Souls - The Tragic Wreck of the Steamship Valencia by Rod Scher
by Rod Scher 10 Aug 01:52 BST
Of all the stories of ships lost in what has come to be called the “Graveyard of the Pacific,” that of the steamship Valencia is among the saddest. In January 1906, the Valencia set out from San Francisco, bound for Seattle with 108 passengers and some sixty-five crew members aboard. Owing to bad weather and the captain’s mistakes, the ship struck a reef eleven miles off Cape Beale on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. Rocks gashed open the ship’s hull, and a series of further missteps soon compounded the tragedy a hundredfold. Only thirty-seven people survived, largely because of a lack of lifesaving infrastructure in the rugged area where the Valencia ran aground.
The wreck of the Valencia was an especially tragic one. To begin with, most on board perished, including every woman and child, many of whom had been lashed to the rigging high above the deck in an attempt to save them from the crashing waves. Additionally, the wreck itself was almost certainly avoidable, due almost entirely to navigational errors the captain made. Finally, rescue efforts—such as they were—were hampered by not just the sea and weather but by the mistakes (and some say the cowardice) of the would-be rescuers.
This book pieces together the story of the Valencia and her tragic end, weaving together not just the threads of the ill-fated voyage itself but also relevant contextual history, including the development of radio technologies and lifesaving equipment and services that simply came too late to help the doomed voyagers.
About the Author:
Rod Scher received his MEd from the University of Oregon. He is a longtime boating enthusiast and former English teacher, as well as an experienced writer and editor with multiple books and dozens of magazine articles to his credit. The former editor of Smart Computing magazine, he is also the author of Sailing by Starlight: The Remarkable Voyage of Globe Star and Leveling the Playing Field: The Democratization of Technology, and the editor/annotator of editions of Joshua Slocum’s masterly nautical memoir Sailing Alone Around the World and Richard Henry Dana's classic Two Years Before the Mast.
Rod began his career teaching high school English and journalism in Oregon and California. After several years in the classroom, he left teaching to become an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in San Diego, California, where he edited a variety of humanities texts and participated in the development of computerized test preparation and textbook management products. Now semi-retired, Rod travels the country in a small motorhome with his wife, Lesley, writing and editing as the opportunity arises. When not on the road, Rod lives in Depoe Bay, Oregon.
Excerpt
Chapter 17 - Chaos
When the Valencia struck the rocks, Captain Johnson’s initial reaction was to shout, “My God! Where are we?!” This sounds like an odd thing to say, but it made sense, because he literally did not know the ship’s location; after all, if she were where he had thought she was, she would not have hit a reef. He must have been astounded that his ship had run aground out here in what he had thought was “the middle of the ocean.” In reality, he must have had some inkling that they were off course enough to have been almost anywhere, especially with the fog obscuring everyone’s vision, because the ship’s forward speed had been reduced to dead slow.
As it turns out, where they were was easy enough: they were stuck on a reef only yards offshore of the west coast of Vancouver Island. How they were to get off the reef, if that was at all possible, was the question. Johnson then pivoted the ship such that her stern was only yards from the cliffs. This placed salvation, in the form of land, temptingly close; if it had been daylight, the passengers and crew could easily have seen the rocks that formed a sort of beach, and the cliffs that loomed overhead.
But that salvation was an illusion. There was no safe way to get the people left on the ship to the shore while the storm raged, even though it was so near. In the meantime, the ship itself was becoming more dangerous and less stable as the minutes passed. The crew checked the bilge and noted that water was rising there at the rate of about one foot per minute. As the water reached the ship’s generators, the lights failed, and huge waves continued to batter the stranded vessel.
It was time to lower the lifeboats, this time officially and completely, but first the crew had to convince the remaining passengers, some of them reluctant to leave the perceived safety of the ship. The captain, of course, knew that any supposed safety was an illusion; the passengers— and especially a group of women who were insistent about staying with the ship—would be much safer on the lifeboats. The ship, he knew, was being torn apart by the sea and the storm.
This is the first appearance of an issue that we’ll encounter repeatedly over the next several hours, as the sea whittled away at the ship: some passengers, especially the women, were reluctant to board the lifeboats, at first because the ship seemed fairly stable—or at least less threatening than the wild, tumultuous ocean—and later because they thought that the ships they could see in the distance would soon arrive to rescue them. Both assumptions were incorrect.
Valencia was unsafe and becoming more so as the minutes passed. When ships finally did appear on the horizon to attempt a rescue, many of the women would again insist on staying aboard to wait for help to arrive. But the ships, as we will see, would never approach closely enough to mount a rescue attempt, and the women who insisted on staying with the ship thereby condemned themselves and their children to death.
As it happens, in 1906, few women knew how to swim, so that may have played a role in their decision. (And really, not that many men were competent swimmers at the time; ironically, even many sailors did not know how to swim.) There were many reasons for this. According to the social norms of the day, women were expected to be modest and demure; swimming was seen as a physically demanding—and somewhat revealing—activity that was not, according to some, appropriate for females.1 As a result, not many women knew how to swim in the early 1900s.2 All of this would change over the next few decades, but in 1906, it was quite likely that few of the female passengers were good swimmers.
They would naturally be reluctant to enter the water, especially in the middle of the night during a storm, and certainly when the ship itself felt safer than the lifeboats, many of which had capsized or been crushed before their eyes.
Second Officer Peter Peterson was frustrated by this reluctance to leave the stricken ship. He testified that, even after convincing five women to get into a lifeboat, two of them demurred, saying that they’d rather “stay by the ship.”3 This reluctance to board the lifeboats, and the three life rafts the ship carried, even when urged to do so by crewmembers, would result in the deaths of every woman and child that had not already died in the sea or on the rocks. (Then again, every woman who did enter a lifeboat also died, so who’s to say which choice was wiser?)
After she struck the rocks, chaos reigned on Valencia. Most of the lifeboats were inundated by passengers who did not wait for instructions from the crew or for orders to board; they clambered aboard the boats that, instead of being lowered correctly, were simply dropped into the sea. Few survived, and most of those who did were soon drowned or pounded to death on the rocks lining the shore. Children, abandoned in the tumult, cried for their mothers, many of whom had been lost in the lifeboats or swept overboard by the towering, crushing waves. One mother handed her child to her husband in a lifeboat, but the child was immediately swept away and fell into the sea; moments later, the husband drowned when the lifeboat overturned. A miner who had struck it rich in Alaska offered all of his money, $1,800 in gold, to anyone who could take him ashore. There were no takers, and the gold simply disappeared, trampled underfoot by the terrified crowd on deck. Money, even a small fortune such as that offered by the miner, was not worth dying for.
The people on board, especially the passengers, had to have been terrified. It was dark and cold, and the ship was being torn apart even as they sought shelter on deck or in the rigging. The ship’s cargo—vegetables, wine, and more—was strewn about the deck, which was awash in cold water and broken spars, lengths of line, and tangles of rigging, all of it making footing treacherous; tripping could mean falling headfirst over the side or sustaining a serious injury. The deck of the SS Valencia was not a safe place to be, and it was becoming more unsafe by the minute.
The terrible irony—among many terrible ironies—was that if the boats had been launched correctly, and especially if people had waited and launched them the following day, many more passengers and crew could have been saved. Of the three lifeboats launched early on, only nine people—all men—survived. In fact, one boat that was left after the debacle did launch on Tuesday morning, making it to shore with little difficulty, the storm having calmed somewhat and visibility being much better in the daylight. The seven occupants of this boat would make up the so-called McCarthy party, which traversed the trail above the bluff to the east, looking for help.
One of the nine who survived the early lifeboat launchings was Frank Bunker. He and his group, which would become known as the Bunker party, struggled and scraped their way to the top of the bluff. They decided that their best course of action was to head west on a narrow, poorly maintained trail at the top of the bluff, in order to seek help. They turned left, a decision that may have doomed those on the ship who were still awaiting rescue.4