Stranded

by Aaron Saunders

  Glancing up at the massive hulk resting on Vanderbilt Reef, it became obvious to Miller that nothing could be done to rescue her passengers; at least, not at the moment. Because of the reef, Miller couldn’t bring the King & Winge close enough to the stricken Princess Sophia to be of much help. He thought it might be possible to run a line down from the ship to the King & Winge to help guide his lifeboats to retrieve passengers, but even they would not be able to get close enough to render assistance. Passengers would have to jump in the water and take the chance that they would be picked up before hypothermia set in.

  Like Captain Leadbetter on board the Cedar, Captain James Miller decided he would wait near the wreck, hopeful for a break in the weather so that they could safely begin transferring passengers off the stranded Canadian Pacific liner. “We came to the conclusion that his [Locke’s] passengers were safer on the ship than to try to transfer them on board our boats on account of the weather.”[4]

  The morning’s abandoned evacuation efforts evidently changed little in the shipboard routine aboard the Princess Sophia. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, passengers once again attempted to busy themselves to pass the time as quickly as possible. Were it not for the reef underneath them and the harsh winter climate outside, they could have very well been sailing down the Inside Passage toward Vancouver: the usual socializing took place in the observation lounge on the promenade deck, while many of the men no doubt retreated farther aft, to the cigar and leather-clad smoking room located in a separate deck house at the stern.

  Wherever thirty-five-year-old United States Army Private Auris McQueen decided to sit down and write shortly after eight in the morning, he was apparently quite comfortable. Gathering a pen and some paper, he wrote a candid letter to his mother, giving it the title “In the Lynn Canal Off Skagway” and noting the date: 10-25-18. Despite the fact that he had been stranded on board the Princess Sophia on Vanderbilt Reef for over thirty hours, his light mood was reflected in an opening joke:

  The man who wrote “On a Slow Train Through Arkansas” could write a true story of a “Slow Trip Through Alaska” if he had been with a party of a few soldiers. We were sure making a slow trip. We were on a government steamer from Fort Gibbon to Whitehorse and had no pilot who knew the river, so had to tie up nights, and at that got stuck on six sand bars [sic].[5]

  The smoking room aboard the Princess May, photographed in April 1903, would have been similar in design and appearance to the same space on board the Princess Sophia.

  City of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-: Bo P434.3.

  The journey continued to get more darkly comical for Private McQueen; the irony that he was on a steamer that had ground out hard on a reef in the middle of a storm was not lost on him. He and the small party of soldiers he was travelling with were so delayed on their riverboat trip down to Skagway that when they arrived there they missed three consecutive steamers south before Skagway’s Canadian Pacific agent, Lewis H. Johnston, secured them passage aboard the Princess Sophia. In his letter, McQueen noted they only got on board the Princess Sophia “by good luck.”[6]

  Aside from the blackout, McQueen wrote to his mother that the only real inconveniences passengers had suffered up until then were the lack of fresh water on board and that the ship had run out of sugar. “But,” he continued, “we still have lump sugar and water for drinking.”[7] He also noted it had taken him a while to pen the letter, owing to the fact that the ship continued to be pounded and whipped about by the seas. He still closed jovially enough. “I’m going to go quit,” he writes, “and see if I can rustle a bucket and a line to get some sea water to wash in.”[8] If McQueen did manage to find the bucket and line he sought, he might have thought differently about washing in it: the temperature of the water outside was just above freezing. Still, before he rose from his chair and left the warmth of the lounge, he took the time to fold and tuck the note into his pocket.

  In all likelihood, many passengers were either penning letters to loved ones during the morning hours or updating their personal journals with firsthand accounts of their adventures. Their personal stories, thoughts, and feelings will never be known. Jack Maskell and Auris McQueen had no way of knowing it at the time, but the letters they penned would form the only real insight into what was happening on board the stricken Princess Sophia — because they had the foresight to place their notes inside their clothing.

  With the passengers doing their best to while away the long morning, shortly after 9:00 a.m. Frank Lowle messaged the Princess Sophia from Juneau. After having worked around the clock for over twenty-four hours with little to no sleep and under increasing pressure from Captain Troupe in Victoria, he was exasperated that his efforts had yet to yield any real results. Now he was at a loss for what to do:

  I SENT OUT YESTERDAY THE GAS BOATS ESTEBETH, AMY, LONE FISHERMAN, ALSO KING AND WINGE AND CANNERY TENDERS EXCURSION AND ELSINORE. AMY CAME BACK THIS MORNING. ARE OTHERS THERE? TWO MEN ON LONE FISHERMAN HAVE NO GRUB. WOULD APPRECIATE ANY INSTRUCTIONS YOU MAY WISH TO GIVE ME. STANDARD OIL TANKER IS HERE. CAN YOU USE HER?[9]

  Because of the continued problems with the steam pipe aboard Princess Sophia, it was four hours before the message reached her wireless operator, David Robinson. Having been awake since the accident occurred, Robinson was exhausted. Still, he kept trying to communicate with the Cedar using his battery backup.

  Meanwhile the weather conditions outside were so awful that any rescue attempt was unthinkable. Winds gusting up to one hundred miles per hour tore through Lynn Canal and slammed into the Cedar and the King & Winge, which were still standing by to render assistance that was beginning to seem impossible. “I couldn’t make my anchors hold,” Captain Leadbetter would later say of the hefty Cedar.[10] He consulted quickly with Captain James Miller of the King & Winge, and both men agreed that it would only be a matter of time before they would have to seek shelter. Before doing so they did come up with a plan of action: fitted with a three-hundred-and-fifty-fathom anchor chain, the King & Winge would anchor near the stern of the Princess Sophia while the Cedar took up a position to the immediate west of her. From there they would run lines to the stern of the Princess Sophia, allowing the Cedar’s boats to run along this makeshift guideline and eliminating the need to launch Princess Sophia’s lifeboats. In conversation with Captain Locke, all three captains agreed that the current weather made rescue impossible. The next ideal time, they thought, would be around 4:30 p.m.

  For the most part, Princess Sophia spent her last afternoon on Vanderbilt Reef alone, whipped by the monstrous gusts of wind that raced down Lynn Canal and pounded by the churning seas. Just after one in the afternoon the snow returned full force. Rather than abating, as Captain Locke had been hoping, the storm intensified with each passing minute. In Sitka the barometer had dropped dramatically by midday, making a major storm all but certain. Reflecting on the intensity of the storm later, Captain Leadbetter would call it “a strong blizzard as I ever saw in Lynn Canal. It was a date earlier than I ever saw before; 8th of November, I think, is the earliest.”[11]

  Nearby on the King & Winge, just before 11 a.m. Juneau photographer E.P. Pond mounted his camera on a tripod fixed to the ship’s deck. Between the pitching ship he was standing on and the stationary one he was trying to photograph, Pond grasped the camera tightly in an attempt to gain a clear exposure. He rattled off a series of shots of the stricken Princess Sophia and hoped for the best. Little did he know that these photographs would show the ship’s final hours. Compared to the photograph taken the previous morning by the Davis brothers on board the Estebeth, Pond’s exposures would show a ship surrounded by a vengeful, angry sea, as if the Princess Sophia was about to be swallowed up into the gates of hell.

  Around lunchtime the lights aboard the Princess Sophia blinked back on. The broken steam pipe had been repaired by the ship’s understaffed three-man engineering team, who had worked tirelessly through the night to restore power. Now, smoke once again wafted from her funnel uptake, onl
y to be pushed horizontally across the horizon as it emerges.

  With the steam pipe patched up and electrical power restored to the Princess Sophia, Captain Locke had wireless operator David Robinson immediately message Captain Troup in Victoria, via Juneau Radio:

  STEAMER CEDAR, THREE GAS BOATS STANDING BY. UNABLE TO TAKE OFF PASSENGERS ACCOUNT STRONG NORTHERLY GALE AND BIG SEA RUNNING. SHIP HARD AND FAST ON REEF WITH BOTTOM BADLY DAMAGED BUT NOT MAKING WATER, UNABLE TO BACK OFF REEF. MAIN STEAM PIPE BROKEN. DISPOSITION OF PASSENGERS NORMAL.[12]

  Captain Locke also found the time to return Frank Lowle’s earlier message, advising him that any and all rescue efforts were suspended until the weather moderated, and that the Cedar and King & Winge were standing by. Somewhat glibly, he also asked Lowle how the weather was in Juneau. Lowle didn’t respond.

  Captain Locke’s assessment that the current disposition of his passengers was, as he put it, “normal,” was surprisingly accurate. United States Army Private Auris McQueen’s letter to his mother was focused more on the logistical challenges that lay between him and his final destination than on the predicament he found himself in.

  As soon as this storm quits we will be taken off and make another lap to Juneau. I suppose after 3 or 4 days there, we can go to Seattle, after I reckon we will be quarantined, as there are six cases of influenza on board. The decks are dry, and this wreck has all the markings of a movie stage setting. All we lack is a hero and a vampire.[13]

  McQueen even closed his letter with a darkly ominous line: “We are mighty lucky we were not all buried in the sea water.”[14]

  Nearby, on board the Cedar, Captain Leadbetter perked up as his ship’s wireless set crackles to life for the first time in hours with a message from the Princess Sophia. Leadbetter asked how the ship was faring; Captain Locke wired back that she was taking on water in her forward compartment, but that the ship’s engine room, fire room, and aft cargo hold were dry and intact. Although they were still covered with their canvas toppers, Leadbetter noticed that Princess Sophia’s lifeboats remain swung out over the sides of her boat deck, ready to be boarded at a moments’ notice. One of the Princess Sophia’s crew members had also opened her aft shell door on the starboard side of the ship’s main deck. Presumably passengers would be off-loaded from this lower point as soon as the weather allowed. If the weather allowed. Between the snow and the near-gale-force winds that were whipping the sea into an angry black froth, putting passengers into the boats looks like certain death. “At no time I was there, from the time I saw her, would it have been safe to lower those boats,” Captain Leadbetter would later say. “If they had lowered into the water, the sea would either have upset the boat, or she would have punctured on the reef.”[15]

  Either way Captain Leadbetter cut it, passengers would end up in the bitterly cold water. Hypothermia would take only minutes to set in. For now the safest place they could be seemed to be on the decks of the stranded Princess Sophia. He wired Captain Locke, who agreed, and recommended that Leadbetter anchor the Cedar until the tide was lower. Locke hoped that the lowering tide would bring better weather and calmer seas.

  For the second time that day, the Cedar proceeded to her sheltered anchorage. On board the Princess Sophia, passengers shuffled back inside the ship’s warm public spaces, a handful grumbling as they did so. Since the disaster began they’d been assembled multiple times. Rescue had seemed imminent — even tantalizingly close — for nearly thirty hours. With each passing call to muster that turned out to be a false alarm the message was becoming less and less effective. As he sailed away, Captain Leadbetter wired the Princess Sophia:

  The engine room on board the Princess May illustrates the kind of working environment that engine officers would have had on board the Princess Sophia.

  City of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-: Bo P434.3 .

  AM GOING DROP ANCHOR NEAR SENTINEL ISLAND. WILL BE OUT AGAIN BEFORE DARK. IF WANT ME BEFORE, CALL.[16]

  At 1:20 p.m. the King & Winge was also forced to seek shelter. Captain James Miller guided his ship approximately five miles from Vanderbilt Reef to Benjamin Island, sheltered by the lee side of Sentinel Island, he dropped anchor at 1:45 p.m. and put his small launch in the water to talk to Captain Leadbetter on the Cedar. The two men did not know each other — indeed, at the trial two months later, Captain Miller would refer to Captain Leadbetter as “Captain Lindberg” — but both men would play a very important role in the coming hours.

  Captain Miller asked Leadbetter what they should do, and Leadbetter replied that there was nothing the men could do until the weather calmed down. Both men were in agreement about one thing: the Princess Sophia had survived a full day up on the reef. A day of being battered by the wind and pounded by the waves, not to mention surviving both high and low tides. If the Princess Sophia wasn’t firmly wedged atop Vanderbilt Reef, she was certainly doing a good job of fooling everyone.

  Captain Miller also recognized another dilemma facing would-be rescuers: even if the storm moderated in the next few hours, they would have the almost impossible task of convincing the passengers and crew of the Princess Sophia to abandon their large, seemingly secure ship for a much smaller one bobbing in the sea — and they might have to jump into the sea to do it.

  “Judging from the way she looked that morning, if I was on the ship, I don’t believe I would have jumped overboard to take a chance in the dorry,” said Miller. “The boat looked so safe … judging by the manner [that] she lay there, I didn’t think the boat would [ever] come off there.”[17]

  Instead of obsessing over how to get the passengers off, Miller has a theory bouncing around in his head that might make their temporary home safer: if the Princess Sophia were to open her seacocks and let the water flood her double-bottom hull, it would keep the ship firmly rooted to Vanderbilt Reef. That way, if the tide did attempt to wash her off, the weight of the water inside her hull would keep her grounded. It might even stabilize her enough to get the passengers off when the weather let up. It was a risky move though, and the thirty-six-year-old Captain James Miller eventually decided to keep the thought to himself.

  On board the Princess Sophia the next four hours played out largely as if nothing was wrong at all. Many passengers busied themselves by socializing with one another. Some wrote letters and others — convinced that rescue was imminent despite the worsening weather — began cramming their most valuable personal effects into overcoat pockets as a precaution, in case the worst should happen.

  One guest enjoyed semi-privileged status, and during the afternoon he took advantage of this unique position. Juneau Customs Collector John Pugh visited wireless operator David Robinson in his office on the boat deck to ask Robinson to wire a personal message for him. With the Cedar anchored and very few messages coming and going, Robinson readily complied. Pugh wired a simple message to his wife in Juneau, intended to reassure her against the news of the disaster that, he assumed, must have made the daily papers. Robinson also took a moment to send out several variations of the same message, “Ship ashore; all safe.” Passing them along via the Cedar, he first notified his mother before sending similar messages out to relatives of Second Officer Frank Gosse, Third Officer Arthur Murphy, Purser Charles Beadle, and Engineer Charles Waller. Aside from a handful of crew members, Customs Collector Pugh was the only passenger to have a wireless message sent on his behalf.

  Outside the weather continued to worsen. As the afternoon progressed even the most optimistic observer could not help but notice that if the ship were to founder rescue would be nearly impossible. Each wave that pounded up against the hull of the ship caused the most violent cacophony of sounds to emanate from deep within her hull. Like an out-of-tune orchestra, it reverberated through every steel plate in her hull, channelling upward before dissipating amongst the atrocious howling noises created by the wind whipping through any gap it could find in the superstructure, from window seals to doors to cargo hatches.

  The crew probably didn’t share the full e
xtent of their plans with the passengers; more than likely the crew would estimate or offer positive reassurances that the weather would clear up, in time. The line between keeping people informed and creating panic is a thin one. Captain Locke no doubt would have wanted to ensure no one did anything rash — like, perhaps, jump from her decks into the churning sea in a desperate bid to reach shore. Despite that, as the hours dragged on and the situation outside visibly disintegrated before their very eyes, it’s likely that the seeds of doubt began to fill the minds of many of the passengers and crew. Visibility outside was evaporating. The view was replaced by a wall of grey punctuated by speeding flakes of white that swirled around the Princess Sophia’s decks. Unable to see more than a few feet outside, cabin fever was probably setting in with the passengers. For the moment, their entire world was confined to the 245-foot Princess Sophia.

  At 2:00 p.m. Princess Sophia’s steam pipe broke again, and the ship was plunged into darkness for the second time in less than a day. In the wireless room, operator David Robinson was absolutely exhausted; he had been awake and at his station ever since the accident occurred the previous morning. Working on his battery set, Robinson messaged Elwood Miller on the Cedar to let him know about the power outage. “I told him at that time I was very tired,” said Miller. “I had been on for about forty hours … and he said he was tired, too. We made a date to call each other again at 4 p.m. That was about three hours later.”[18]

  Exhausted, both men lay down in their respective wireless rooms. Miller wore his headphones over his ears and shut his eyes. He never went to sleep, but took a moment to shut the rest of the world from his mind.