Stranded

by Aaron Saunders

  Here, even as this end-game played out to its horrifying conclusion, order and purpose seem to have escaped Captain Locke. Passengers and crew were literally swarming the decks of the Princess Sophia, both inside and out, during her final moments afloat. There was, it seemed, no organized effort to abandon ship. People were scattered all over, in staterooms, public rooms, and the open decks. Passengers were even found, fully clothed, in the public bathrooms. Even if the ship were to have foundered exactly after the last message tapped out by David Robinson, a full half hour had elapsed between his first and last message. Yet most victims were found with their watches frozen at 6:50 p.m. ship’s time; 5:50 p.m. Alaskan time. This gave Captain Locke a full hour to order an evacuation. Most signs indicate that never happened.

  As the ship went down, passengers took matters into their own hands: from the decks of the Princess Sophia, clad in their lifebelts and warm coats, and carrying many of their valuables in their pockets, they clambered over the deck railings and jumped into the water. But there, too, death was waiting. Survival in the frigid, swirling seas already bordered on impossible, but the 1,933 barrels of thick, heavy bunker oil that poured from the ship’s fuel tanks as she went down made death a certainty. A few grades above raw sludge, the bunker oil coated those who jumped into the water, clinging to their bodies like tar and sapping the buoyancy of their lifebelts. Shocked into taking a deep breath when they first entered the icy water, it filled their lungs and, mercifully, ceased their struggle.

  The screaming of passengers and the horrifying protests of the ship herself emanated from Vanderbilt Reef, only to be drowned out by the howling wind and fierce snow. To the Cedar, steaming to the rescue, the Princess Sophia was all but invisible. Captain Leadbetter drove his ship hard through the raging blizzard. She pitched and rolled in the heavy seas, but Leadbetter didn’t give an inch. He remained in the wheelhouse, legs spread apart to keep his balance amidst the rolling deck, eyes focused on the grey in front of him. Simply keeping his ship on course was a hellish task. “I ran full speed toward the Princess Sophia until 5:55 p.m.,” he would later say. “While I was out searching for the Sophia that night, we got into communication with the steamer Atlas, and I wired the captain where I was, and what I was doing, and relayed the message from the Sophia … She [Atlas] was 46 miles from the wreck, feeling her way in a blinding snowstorm for anchorage in Taku Harbor.”[2]

  Blinded by the snow and the darkness that had descended upon his ship, Captain Leadbetter continued to search in vain for the Princess Sophia; a ship that to him seemed to have literally disappeared. Hidden by the fog and obscured by the snow, he was spared the sight of the petite Canadian Pacific ship’s final death throes.

  Once her bottom had been torn away by the reef, water rushed in to the Princess Sophia’s engine room, flooding the machinery spaces and causing her boilers to violently explode. Portholes shattered under the increased pressure being put on them by the ship’s hull, and the entire midships deck structure buckled under the weight. Steam blew out through the ship’s funnel, pulverizing it instantly and sending hot clouds of air, soot, and ash firing into the night sky. As the ship twisted and groaned on her descent into the ocean, water poured in through the broken portholes, hastening the inevitable. It quickly spread to the oversized cargo hold spaces, engulfing the twenty-five horses that filled the ship with their cries of protest. Old Billy, the horse belonging to Walter Barnes, was among them. Given how close Barnes was to his trusted old friend, in all likelihood the old prospector was caught up in the hold trying to free Old Billy, or on his way down to the holds when the Princess Sophia began her final plunge.

  Racing up through the machinery spaces, stairwells, and ventilation ducts aboard the Princess Sophia, the cold, black ocean finally engulfed the brightly polished woodwork of her passenger interiors. It sped along her corridors and seeped into her staterooms, travelling from the aft of the ship forward. It swirled around her grand forward staircase and swept away those guests and crew who had gathered in the social hall. As Princess Sophia’s list became more apparent, anything not bolted down crashed aft, down her decks, as she began her journey to the bottom. With the ocean rapidly taking up space in the interior of the ship, windows began to blow out as the air pressure inside became too great for the glass panes to handle.

  Up on the boat deck, wireless operator David Robinson was likely swept up by the oil-coated sea as he tried to save himself. The windows of the officer’s quarters were blown out at some point, along with those in the wheelhouse. Though it is unknown where Captain Locke was on the ship during her final moments, it seems likely he was in or near the wheelhouse when the end came. He, like so many others on board in those last few minutes, probably tried to picture his family before the waters rushed up to greet him.

  Prior to the sinking the doors to the wheelhouse had been opened and placed in their latch-pin hooks, securing them to the sides of the deck house as if it were a hot summer’s day. As the water swept past the officer’s quarters and engulfed the wheelhouse, it took with it Princess Sophia’s charts, navigational warnings, and the ship’s log book. Aided by the heavy bunker oil coating everything in its path, Mother Nature succeeded in covering her own tracks; the ship’s log book was never recovered.

  The captain of the Princess Adelaide, a sister ship to the Princess Sophia, enters a notation in the ship’s log book in this 1941 photo. Captain Locke and his officers would have had a similar setup. The Princess Sophia’s log books were never found.

  City of Vancouver Archives AM1545-S3-: CVA 586-543.

  In a last-ditch effort to save themselves, those passengers and crew who had not already jumped or were trapped below decks tried to get away in Princess Sophia’s lifeboats. Most were caught in the falls still attached to the ship’s davits, and were dragged down as the ship went under. Of the few boats that managed to get away in the final seconds, nearly all were pulverized against Vanderbilt Reef by the storm that raged on unabated. A few passengers and crew latched onto the complicated and ineffective approved buoyancy apparatuses that had been lashed to the roof of the officer’s quarters. As they floated free, passengers struggling in the water frantically tied themselves to them in order to stay afloat; an act that merely bought them minutes, if not seconds, in the freezing, oil-coated water.

  One boat, however, did manage to reach shore. One of Princess Sophia’s eight steel lifeboats was found washed ashore on a rocky beach. Those who found the lifeboat first claimed to have seen footprints in the snow leading away from it, and the body of Second Officer Frank Gosse was discovered not far away. Covered in his officer’s greatcoat, he was found frozen to death, with a bad gash to his head. The connect-the-dots logic was that Second Officer Gosse had made it to shore in the washed-up lifeboat and had set out to find help before succumbing to the cold, his injuries, or both. In an article in the Dawson Daily News published nearly two months later, Juneau’s Special Deputy Collector of Customs C.D. Garfield would dispute that these tracks were ever made by Gosse. Sadly, how Gosse came to be on shore didn’t truly matter; he did not live to tell the tale of what had occurred during Princess Sophia’s final moments.

  There would be no outside witnesses to the sinking, either. At the very moment the Princess Sophia foundered the storm seemed to redouble its efforts, intensifying with frightening speed. Aboard the Cedar, Captain Leadbetter was forced to turn his ship around and seek shelter. Repeatedly sounding the ship’s whistle, Leadbetter gingerly felt his way back through the canal to his anchorage. His mind never left the stricken Canadian Pacific vessel, though. After reaching shelter, he informed his crew that there was still work to be done. “I left orders to call me as soon as the weather cleared so that I could find the wreck,” he would later say.[3]

  By six o’clock in the evening of Friday, October 25, 1918, all that remained of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Princess Sophia was her forward mast. Submerged up to the masthead running light, it rose out of the water like a tombstone
.

  When help finally arrived at daybreak the following morning, the light would be the only sign that anything out of the ordinary had ever occurred here at all. Even Captain Leadbetter was shocked by the calm scene that confronted him in the early morning hours. “There was no sign of any survivors at all,” he would recall. “No sign of the wreck, any flotage [sic] at all, until we reached the northwest end of Shelter Island. There were three overturned lifeboats about one mile south of the narrows.”[4] For the crew of the Cedar, the full horror of that day would linger in their memories and nightmares for years to come.

  The most horrible twist of fate, though, was delivered by Mother Nature herself. Just twelve hours after the Princess Sophia had foundered, the snow, wind, and heavy seas that had battered her for nearly three consecutive days suddenly subsided.

  We lost our battle with the elements, and there were no survivors to tell the tale.

  — Wireless message from Cedar [1]

  By daybreak on Saturday, October 26, 1918, Captain John Leadbetter confirmed the worst had happened to the Princess Sophia. As he gingerly manoeuvred the Lighthouse Tender Cedar near Vanderbilt reef, he could see no sign of the stricken Canadian Pacific vessel. It was still snowing heavily, though the dangerous swells and fearsome winds of the night before had subsided. Peering through the windows of the wheelhouse, he strained to see much beyond his own bow. He held out hope that, somehow, he might spot the Princess Sophia’s white lifeboats bobbing nearby, filled with survivors. Gradually, out of the haze and snow ahead of him, he began to make out a solitary object. It looked like a tree branch suspended vertically in the water. Confusion, however, quickly gave way to recognition: the object sticking out of the water was no branch. It was Princess Sophia’s forward mast, submerged nearly to the white running light affixed three quarters of the way up.

  At 9:15 a.m., the Cedar broke the news to Frank Lowle, Canadian Pacific’s tireless Juneau agent. In his telegram, Captain Leadbetter stated there were no survivors, but that he would continue to cruise Lynn Canal in the hopes of finding someone. It was a task that would turn out to be more horrifying than anyone had likely imagined. Thanks to the strong winds and swells of the previous night, and the enormous tidal fluctuations in the area, the Cedar, assisted by the King & Winge and other boats, searched for three hours before finding a single body. Most of those found on the surface were strapped into their lifebelts and coated in the thick bunker oil that had gushed from the ship as she went down.

  Despite the fact that the Princess Sophia was obviously no longer on Vanderbilt Reef, and unquestionably sank, it wasn’t until 11:30 a.m. that the first evidence of the ship’s foundering was located: a solitary white metal lifeboat had washed ashore, and lay overturned on Shelter Island. Lookouts positioned aboard the King & Winge had spotted it, and the order was given to put the ship’s smaller boats in the water to make a closer inspection. As the crew aboard the King & Winge were doing so, Captain Leadbetter spotted three white lifeboats resting on shore and sent Second Officer Robert Martin to examine them. Arriving on the beach, Martin quickly determined there were no survivors to be found. The only thing he found was the skylight that once sat atop the Princess Sophia’s forward staircase; it had broken off during the sinking and was lying on the beach, next to the three boats.

  Nearly eighteen hours after the Princess Sophia slid off Vanderbilt reef to her icy grave, the first body was spotted. Then another. Then another. The corpses that had refused to present themselves all morning were suddenly at every turn, and nearly every ship on the scene was stopping to pluck bodies from the waters of Lynn Canal before the tides returned to performing their gruesome work. Though no one was aware of it at the time, retrieving the bodies of the 343 passengers and crew aboard the Princess Sophia would stretch on for months. Some were simply never found.

  One of those to disappear seemingly without a trace was Princess Sophia’s captain, Leonard Locke. Though the bodies of many of his senior officers and junior deckhands were found in the coming days and weeks, Locke’s body was never recovered from the surface or the wreckage.

  In Juneau, Canadian Pacific Agent Frank Lowle was devastated by the telegram he received from the Cedar early that morning. Like everyone else, Lowle had become accustomed to receiving a steady, even monotonous, stream of news from the Princess Sophia that was essentially variations on the “still stuck, all well” theme. Lowle cancelled the Juneau hotel arrangements he had spent so much of the previous day arranging. Wearily, he turned all his resources to the grim task of recovering bodies. Before he did anything, though, he wired Captain Troup in Victoria with the unthinkable news.

  Even then, at this late stage in the disaster, word still didn’t filter down to Captain Troup in Victoria until late in the afternoon. At 3:38 p.m. he received Frank Lowle’s message stating that the ship had been lost, and there were no survivors. Troup immediately ordered Lowle to put rescue efforts into play, and to continue to search for any survivors who might have gotten off in the boats or made it to shore. Thanks to the unpredictable nature of wireless communications at the time, Captain Troup had no way of knowing that his dependable Juneau agent had been doing that very thing for the past six hours. Through no fault of his own, the head of Canadian Pacific’s coastal fleet division was still the last man to learn of developments in Alaska. Professionally, he’d committed to the grim task at hand. Personally, the Princess Sophia left Captain Troup a shattered man. At the official inquiries in Canada and the United States, he was called on to testify to everything that transpired after the Princess Sophia left Skagway. He was forced to endure long hours of inane questioning that ran the gamut from sensationalistic (Did Captain Locke entertain young female passengers in his cabin? No) to the absurd (Was there any incompetence on the part of Frank Lowle due to the delays in passing the wireless messages along? No).

  The inanity of the questions at the inquiry weren’t entirely without merit. On November 4, less than two weeks after the sinking, the small Canadian Pacific Steamship known as the Tees quietly steamed up Lynn Canal, anchoring not far from Vanderbilt Reef. Aboard the 1893-built vessel were two divers, John Donaldson and Thomas Veitch, along with their employer, Superintendent T.W. Allan of the Pacific Salvage Company in Victoria. Joined by a supply ship called the Santa Rita, which contained two sets of diving gear, both vessels arrived on the scene just after 8:30 in the morning.

  Diver Donaldson went into the icy waters first. He initially found the seas quite calm, but was quickly caught up in strong underwater currents as he passed sixty feet of depth. The condition of the wreck was also proving hazardous to his long-term health; rigging and wiring were strewn about, and jagged metal protruded from the areas of the wreck that had torn free during the sinking. Donaldson managed to plant his feet on the forward open deck, where he found a single body, which he brought to the surface. It was fifty-two-year-old George Paddock, of Dawson City. The jack of all trades had family that he had left behind in New York State, and Paddock was returning home to be with his daughter, who had fallen ill.

  Donaldson’s main objective, however, wasn’t recovering bodies. Despite the fact that hundreds of passengers were still missing, the Pacific Salvage Company had been hired to assess whether salvaging the wreck of the Princess Sophia was even possible. They had also been engaged to recover a single very important piece of cargo: the Wells-Fargo safe that had been loaded onto the ship in Skagway at the last moment.

  Once the body of Paddock had been successfully taken aboard the Tees, and before diving back down to the wreck, Donaldson told his boss, T.W. Allan, that the strong currents were preventing him from going farther aft than the ship’s wheelhouse. Allan persuaded him to give it another try, and the dutiful employee once again submerged beneath the inky waves. Once again Donaldson was no match for the current, which was now so strong and murky that he could no longer make out any details of the wreck aft of the wheelhouse. Increasingly concerned that he was going to tangle his suit on wreck
age he couldn’t see — or that he could be simply swept away by the current — Donaldson returned to the Tees to swap places with his colleague, Diver Thomas Veitch.

  Veitch also found the conditions on the wreck less than ideal for making a complete survey of the ship. Instead, he was lowered into Princess Sophia’s forward cargo hold, where he found and attached a line to the Wells-Fargo safe. Shortly after lunchtime on November 4, 1918, the safe broke the surface of the increasingly choppy waters and was loaded onto the Santa Rita. Inside was $62,000 in gold bullion.

  Having achieved one of their objectives, the Tees and the Santa Rita left Vanderbilt Reef and the grave of the Princess Sophia shortly after one in the afternoon.

  Four days later, on November 8th — exactly two weeks to the day of the sinking — the three men were back at Vanderbilt Reef for another shot at determining whether or not the Princess Sophia could be salvaged. This time, divers Donaldson and Veitch both went down to the wreck together, with Veitch leading and Donaldson serving as a guide for his air hose. Once again, the strong currents sweeping past the wreckage created a perilous atmosphere. The two men were able to gingerly pick their way through the wreckage to the chart room just aft of the wheelhouse. The room looked like a disaster zone: Donaldson and Veitch found that the wooden floor had been entirely swept away, along with much of its contents. All that remained were three bags of mail that had become tangled up in one another; two were resting on the small chunk of flooring that remained while the third dangled precariously over the black void.