Saunders - Stranded: Alaskas worst maritime disaster nearly happened twice

O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel (Who had no doubt some noble creature in her) Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished!

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

In the course of writing this book, it occurred to me that I cant really remember the first time I learned of the wreck of the Princess Sophia . I do, however, remember where I was when I thought it would be a good idea to write a book juxtaposing her accident with the 1995 grounding of the cruise vessel Star Princess : in a little pub in Juneau known as the Triangle Club Bar, where I sat, nursing a pint of Alaskan Amber Ale while in port on a cruise through Alaska. Id come into the bar because Id heard there was free Wi-Fi internet access with purchase and there was. But instead of checking emails and filing articles, I found myself staring at a wall covered in photos of famous Alaskan shipwrecks, one of which was the unmistakable silhouette of the Princess Sophia , stranded up on Vanderbilt Reef.

The first step in what would become a multi-year journey occurred when I literally walked across the street to Hearthside Books and purchased a copy of Ken Coates and Bill Morrisons masterwork, The Sinking of the Princess Sophia. In Alaska, everything you need seems to be close at hand.

I read the book as we made our way up to Skagway, and when I disembarked I stood in the middle of Broadway Street and tried to imagine the scene that would have greeted travellers in October 1918. I found it both easy and difficult; easy because of the cruise ship passengers like myself who swarmed the dock apron and clogged the streets. Difficult because Skagway today is a bit of a parody of itself; theres re-enactments of shootouts and fake brothels designed to entertain families. Have you ever heard a father trying to explain to his son what a brothel is? You will, if you visit Skagway in the summer.

The real tragedy, however, is not that its difficult to visualize the world of 1918, but that the story of the Princess Sophia has been largely forgotten. Even the grounding of the Star Princess , which occurred in modern times, wasnt given the media-circus frenzy that has accompanied simi-lar accidents in recent memory. It wasnt until I was one of the hundreds of people queuing up to get back on my massive floating palace in Skagway that it hit me: absolutely no one who comes to Skagway by ship knows the sad, stor-ied events that have played out right in the very waters on which they sail.

Now, you could argue cruise lines dont really want to talk about shipwrecks its a bit like showing Alive on an airplane. Thats fair. But the more I read about both accidents, the more utterly fascinated I became by the parallels between them. The Princess Sophia is the Titanic of the west coast; yet her journey into obscurity was greatly accelerated by the end of the Great War; the war that, people hoped, would be the War to End All Wars.

Our knowledge of what happened on board during those two grim days Princess Sophia spent stranded on Vanderbilt Reef comes from the passengers aboard her, and from those who had the most fleeting encounters with her crew. These included her would-be rescuers who kept their ships nearby in absolutely atrocious weather, sometimes at great risk to their own vessels and personal safety. Passengers wrote letters, some of which were discovered when the ship foundered. Wireless conversations, recorded in Juneau and preserved for all time, also provide brief glimpses into what life was like on board.

Many books about the Princess Sophia focus on the trial and the aftermath of the sinking. We dont know every detail of what happened on board, but theres enough witness testimony to put together a substantial part of the puzzle. From there its possible to fill in the blanks to surmise what exactly happened on board during those two awful days stranded upon Vanderbilt Reef. On the second evening she slipped silently and suddenly into the churning ocean that had been trying to claim her, hidden by a raging snowstorm that only seemed to intensify during her greatest hour of need. She took 343 passengers and crew down with her that night.

At least, we think she did. The official court documents and accident proceedings which wouldnt be finalized until over a decade after the accident occurred and are contested to this day continuously pegged the number of souls on board at 343, despite the passenger and crew lists being fraught with errors. Additional crewmembers were brought on board in Skagway to cover for crew who had fallen ill with influenza. They are not recorded on the official list. Many of the Chinese crewmembers who worked aboard the Princess Sophia on her final voyage were posthumously (and, today, insensitively) lumped into a single category: 12 Chinamen in stewards department. Either way its likely there were at least 350 souls on board that final voyage and that the exact final number will never be known.