Stranded

by Aaron Saunders

  The sacks of mail were retrieved and brought to the surface. Interestingly, they carry no letters of any kind, having been filled instead by $70,000 in gold. This “mail” was placed in T.W. Allan’s room aboard the Tees for safekeeping, and delivered to Victoria personally. Where they went after that is unknown.

  By ten in the morning of November 8, less than four hours after having arrived on the scene, the weather turned so ugly that both ships were once again forced to seek shelter. The Wells-Fargo safe, three sacks of mail and gold, and a single body were all the men had to show for two days of work.

  The actions and motives of T.W. Allan, John Davidson, and Thomas Veitch would be scrutinized in the coming months, with the investigation in the United States going so far as to accuse Allan of either destroying or tampering with the ship’s log books, which were never recovered anyway. If Allan is genuine in his testimony — there’s little reason in either his background or character to believe he wouldn’t be — then they were likely washed away when the chart-room floor collapsed during the sinking. Still, during the American investigation Allan claimed that Canadian Pacific had given them no specific directives regarding the recovery of the Wells-Fargo safe. This statement seems highly implausible, particularly considering how strong the current was around the wreck at the time. Divers with no knowledge of the ship’s general arrangement, layout, or storage spaces would have had to search for days to locate the safe; T.W. Allan’s Pacific Salvage Company managed to not only locate but also retrieve the safe on the very first trip down to the wreck. That same selective amnesia would dog Allan when the question of the mail sacks and their $70,000 payday surfaced during the American inquiry three years later. Allan naively claimed to have never opened the sacks to check on their contents.

  Similar accusations, whether founded or not, would surface on both sides of the border, as investigators and prosecutors sought to establish liability and even negligence on the part of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, their subsidiaries, suppliers, and employees for their role in the sinking.

  In his journal, Alaskan Governor Thomas J. Riggs, Jr., would put a face to a more human side of the disaster. While preparations were being made to dive to the wreck for salvage purposes, Governor Riggs took time on November 2, 1918, to visit the morgue in Juneau.

  I went to the morgue today. All these poor silent bodies stretched out and the embalmers from all the towns working over the corpses. There are 179 recovered so far. I do not think there will be very many more found as the recent storms have scattered them far and wide.[2]

  Canadian Pacific’s Juneau agent, Frank Lowle, also suffered through a grim and unenviable task in early November. “My length of service in Alaska came in useful in helping me to recognize, or know of, fully 60% of bodies recovered,” he would later write. “[One hundred and eighty-two] bodies are recovered to-date … we were all near the breaking point so that if many more had come in at that time, I fear things would have been very serious.”[3]

  However downplayed in his letter, the obvious mental strain on Frank Lowle spilled from his note, which he wrote to Captain James Troupe in Victoria as a detailed account of his actions from the first distress signal to the grisly aftermath.

  Nakedly, Lowle closed his letter with a sentence filled with sadness and regret. “I trust it will not be yours or my lot to experience a similar sad and overwhelming disaster. Quite half of those lost are personal friends.”[4]

  Lowle wasn’t alone in his feelings; in Juneau, Skagway, and points farther north, nearly every citizen was either directly or indirectly affected by the sinking. Those who were fortunate enough to not lose family, friends, or loved ones quite often knew someone who had. Even in the much-larger cities of Vancouver and Victoria the sinking of the Princess Sophia had cut deeply, particularly for those who worked aboard other Canadian Pacific steamships.

  One of the saddest post-sinking events to play out occurred that December. Al Winchell, who lost his wife, Ilene, in the sinking, hired Juneau diver Selmer Jacobson to search the wreckage for her remains. Ilene had battled with frequent premonitions of her death in the days leading up to her trip south, and she had made Al promise to find her remains and bury her next to her mother if anything should happen to her. Al Winchell spent his last dime to fulfill his wife’s last wish.

  Suiting up, Selmer Jacobson dropped into the frigid waters above the wreck just after two in the afternoon on December 21. The upper decks of the Princess Sophia were a tangled mess of twisted metal and blown-out windows, so Jacobson made his way along the main deck to the forward hatch, fighting the powerful currents as he did so. Upon entering the wreck, he immediately encountered the body of a man resting on the deck. A grim scene awaited him as he swam farther in: enormous legs hung suspended in space, drifting toward him with the current. They belonged to the horses the Princess Sophia had embarked in Skagway.

  In the observation lounge on promenade deck, Jacobson found the body of a woman floating near the ceiling. It was Louise Davis. Her husband, twenty-five-year-old Richard Harding Davis, was apparently separated from her when the end came.

  Jacobson next made his way to the ship’s wheelhouse, which was mainly intact except for some shattered windows. However, he discovered that the strong currents had swept everything out of the room; not even a log book or a stray navigational instrument remained inside. There was also no one to be found.

  The officer’s quarters just aft of the bridge hadn’t fared nearly as well. Their ceiling had been blown out, taking with it the skylight that the Cedar’s Second Officer Robert Martin had found washed ashore on the beach nearly two months earlier. “It appears to me,” Jacobson would later say, “that the smokestack has broke aft, about six feet aft of the [deck] house, and has fell forward and broke into those rooms.”[5]

  Jacobson could see clothing floating around inside the remains of the officer’s quarters. But diving in 1918 was an inexact science at best, compounded by the late hour of the day. With daylight fading and darkness approaching, Jacobson made his way to the surface around four that afternoon, hoping to make another go of it the following day. Beset by the miserable December weather, Jacobson had to wait several days before conditions improved enough to allow him to continue his search for Ilene Winchell.

  When he finally got back to the wreck — once again, late in the afternoon and with daylight fading — Selmer Jacobson peered into the stateroom windows on the starboard side of the vessel, but could see no evidence of bodies. “I went through approximately all of the ship,” he would testify. “All of the rooms on the starboard side of it — all of the rooms which I could view from the outside; there was a couple of those staterooms, inside rooms, and I don’t know what they contained, but the outside rooms on the starboard side to the best of my knowledge contained no bodies.”[6]

  Making his way past the superstructure to the adjacent smoking room in the deck house situated at the stern of the promenade deck, Jacobson peered through the windows, but couldn’t see anyone. A quick swim inside confirmed his initial thoughts: the room was completely deserted. Before leaving, he paused long enough to take the name plates off the door to the smoking room.

  From the smoking room Jacobson made his way to Stateroom 35 on the aft port side of the ship’s awning deck. In conversations with Canadian Pacific, Al Winchell learned that Ilene was given Stateroom 35. Jacobson found the room, but there were two women inside instead of the solo traveller he was expecting to find.

  “I went to Room No. 35, which is a little aft of the smokestack on the port side, and there was two ladies in that room,” he testified. “One had a life preserver on, on the floor, under the ceiling. The other one, her hair was entwined in the window and I could feel what I presumed was her head under the bed pillow.”[7]

  But Jacobson was unable to retrieve the two women because the stateroom window had separated. Despite having broken the glass panes to gain entry to the room, the wooden sash supporting the two-piece window refus
ed to budge. Jacobson had to return with a saw on a different day to cut the window’s wooden sash open. With the sash removed, he was able to recover the body of the woman in the life preserver. After being brought to the surface, the body was determined to be that of Sarah O’Brien, who was travelling on board the Princess Sophia with her husband, William, and their five children. At the time of her identification it was assumed that O’Brien went to Ilene Winchell’s stateroom to comfort her during the sinking, and that the two women had become trapped as the ship slid off the reef. Identifying Winchell, however, would prove to be a difficult task: the body of the woman Jacobson spotted lying on the bed with her hair caught in the window was nowhere to be found. Jacobson surmised the strong current swirling around in the room when he broke the glass panes of the window had picked her up and washed her remains out of the wreckage.

  Although he may have been initially hired by Al Winchell, Selmer Jacobson’s testimony revealed that Canadian Pacific stepped up to the plate once he discovered more bodies. In all, the Juneau diver had made five separate trips out to the wreck, but questioned how much more he could do to help recover the remains of those still trapped within the sunken ship. Testifying at the inquiry in early 1919, Jacobson admitted “I don’t see that I can do any more. The bodies is getting in such a state now … it is getting pretty creepy, to tell you the truth, Your Honor.”[8] He still thought that more bodies could be found if a thorough interior search of the vessel was done, but Jacobson didn’t do it because he was diving alone and was concerned about becoming trapped in the ship’s interior passageways and corridors.

  For Al Winchell, mentally exhausted and financially drained by repeated failures to find the remains of his wife, closure would not come until July 1919 when, after a series of false starts, the body of his beloved wife was finally pulled from the wreckage. History doesn’t record where in the ship she was found. Though he honoured his promise, burying Ilene’s remains in San Francisco near her mother, he was never the same again. After having mounted a relentless nine-month search for his wife, Al Winchell, much like the Princess Sophia herself, rapidly sank into obscurity.

  Perhaps nothing helped to sweep the Princess Sophia from the front pages of the newspapers more than the events of November 11, 1918. Just seventeen days after the Princess Sophia carried her passengers and crew to their watery grave in Alaska, the Great War officially came to a close on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Victory in Europe was a major cause for celebration. The global conflict had dragged on for over four years, and had so many casualties that it had been called “The War to End All Wars.” In that short time over thirty-seven million people worldwide had been killed; a number that encompassed more than half the total number of enlisted troops around the globe. Victory, particularly on this unimaginable scale, overshadowed failure. The sinking of the Princess Sophia quickly became a footnote in history, relegated to the margins of a few west coast newspapers — mainly publications like the Dawson Daily News, Victoria Daily Colonist, and the Vancouver Sun that would have had a more personal connection with the victims. Unlike the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, or the torpedoing of the Cunard liner Lusitania, off the coast of Ireland in 1915, the tragedy of the Princess Sophia had little staying power outside of residents of Alaska and British Columbia.

  In an ironic twist, the Canadian Pacific steamship Princess Alice also came alongside Vancouver’s Pier D on the jubilant evening of November 11. Buried amid the next day’s headlines cheering the end of the war to end all wars was the news that Princess Alice — the “Ship of Sorrow” — had brought with her 156 bodies from the Princess Sophia, destined for Vancouver, Victoria, and Seattle. It was an enormous amount for a single ship to carry, yet that still represented less than half of the total passengers and crew on board. Owing to the late hour of her arrival, their remains would spend one final evening on the ship before being offloaded at 7:00 a.m. the next day.

  For the relatives of the victims, however, closure would be a long and painful road. Relatives had to come from far and wide to identify their loved ones. In some cases identification proved to be a bizarre process. Such was the situation that befell Orton Phillips, a waiter on board the Princess Sophia. An American citizen, Phillips had no close relations who could identify his remains, so two Victoria policemen performed the task. Phillips had been arrested in Victoria in August 1918, when he was found to have driven a motor vehicle while under the influence. Unable to pay the fine, he had spent a week in the local jail instead. Three months later the arresting officers had been asked to make the identification. They did, and the story made the next morning’s Victoria Daily Colonist.

  More often than not, however, the stories shared amongst the victims’ relatives and friends were the same. Although the names were different, the profound sense of loss experienced by their relatives permeated entire towns and cities, particularly in the rural cities of Alaska and British Columbia. Even larger cities like Vancouver were not immune to the overriding scope of the tragedy. Still reeling from the influenza outbreak that had swept through the Pacific Northwest, gravediggers had difficulty keeping up with the bodies that were being offloaded from the Princess Alice.

  The sinking of the Princess Sophia had devastated entire swaths of the Pacific Northwest, and the region’s pain was felt across Canada. In Ottawa Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden wrote that “the shocking completeness of the great tragedy has deeply moved and touched the citizens of the entire Dominion.”[9]

  In the United States memorial services were held in Seattle and vast swaths of Alaska, though Juneau and Skagway arguably suffered the most. On both sides of the border, the United States and Canada were united in their grief.

  If the actual sinking failed to make headlines, the inquiry and subsequent decades of legal wrangling on both sides of the border often did. In Victoria the first days of the Canadian inquiry into the sinking commenced at the start of the New Year, on January 6, 1919. Held before Justice Aulay Morrison and Captain J.D. Macpherson, the inquiry lasted over two months and eventually moved from Victoria to Vancouver to Juneau, Alaska, in order to obtain testimony from every person who had any relevant connection with the ship and its subsequent sinking.

  The inquiry was nothing if not thorough, with anyone who bore the slightest connection to the ship being called to testify. Questions ran the gamut from standard (“At what time did you arrive at the wreck?”) to absurd. Eager to free Canadian Pacific from any claims of liability that would have cost the company dearly, the company’s lawyers went into overdrive. Their efforts were equally matched by lawyers for the victims’ families, who took great strides to paint Captain Locke as a drunk, sex-crazed womanizer who frequently invited guests to run wild in his wheelhouse. At various stages he was accused of having been senile, racist, suffering from acute illness, and bouts of rage. The crew of the Princess Sophia were painted as young and inexperienced; Canadian Pacific as cheap and unwilling to pay for expensive rescue operations, but more than willing to pony up the cash to recover the gold on board.

  These were, of course, gross generalizations, and their only real effect was to drag out an already long and painful legal process. In the end, Justice Morrison’s final take on the over seven hundred pages of testimony accumulated during the Canadian inquiry filled just eight pages of text. His conclusion: Princess Sophia was lost “through the peril of the sea.”[10] With no real evidence as to how or why the ship came to be off course and aground on Vanderbilt Reef, and photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony indicating that rescue was, for the most part, too risky to have been conducted given the weather conditions at the time, Morrison also found that Captain Locke acted prudently in not trying to attempt a more aggressive evacuation of his ship.

  Although the inquiry had concluded, by May of 1919 it was becoming apparent that Canadian Pacific’s initial efforts to recover bodies that might still be trapped within the wreck were not enough. Diving operations resumed in
the spring. A total of eighty-six more victims were found inside the wreck, and their remains were brought to the surface. Their seven-month disappearing act was attributed to strong currents and poor visibility on previous searches.

  Around this time the shipping line also decided that the time had come to salvage the wreck of the Princess Sophia. Canadian Pacific hired the Deep Sea Salvage Company to raise the wreck, but this, too, brought more unwanted attention. During the winter of 1919 the Deep Sea Salvage Company raised over $40,000 from investors throughout British Columbia and Alaska, dangling the promise of untold rewards that would spill forth from the sunken ship once she was salvaged. This, of course, never came to pass. As the Whitehorse Weekly Star alluded several times throughout the winter of 1919–20, the general feeling was that people had been duped. The wreck could not be raised, and most of the items of value (like the Wells-Fargo safe) had already been recovered. By the summer of 1920 the Deep Sea Salvage Company was bankrupt, and with that all talk of salvaging the Princess Sophia ceased.

  The gold rush never seemed to truly die out in Alaska. Where there was tragedy and despair, profit was not far behind. Public opinion was also largely against Canadian Pacific at the time. To fully appreciate the negative sentiments toward the prosperous rail and shipping line, the modern-day comparison would be legacy airlines like Air Canada or American Airlines. Though nearly a century has passed, our love-hate relationship with the companies that get us where we need to go has changed very little.

  In 1921 the American inquiry into the sinking began in earnest. It produced thousands of pages of testimony, many of which contained contradictory testimony and wild, baseless accusations inserted in an attempt to prove the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company’s guilt. The sordid tale of the legal wrangling alone was enough to fill a book; proceedings, claims, counter-claims, and petitions of various nature related to the sinking would tie up the process until 1930, when the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington granted Canadian Pacific the limitation of liability the company had requested. In 1932 the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that decision.