At 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, 1875, the 223-foot side-wheel passenger steamship “Pacific” with about 275 on board sailed from Esquimalt Harbour on the southeast end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Passengers crowded the deck as the ship headed into the Strait of San Juan de Fuca separating the island from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
A great tragedy was about to unfold.
The sail-steamer built in New York in 1850 was only 33-foot-6-wide — making it unstable at sea. With a crew of 52, the fateful voyage started in Tacoma, destined for San Francisco, picking up more passengers in Puget Sound and in Victoria on Vancouver Island, where Chinese laborers boarded — listed collectively as “41 Chinese.”
“Her deck was black with people,” witnesses said. No one knows exactly how many were aboard. As the ship left the dock, un-manifested miners scrambled over the rails. Small children traveling free were not counted.
The hold was loaded with 2,000 sacks of oats, 300 bales of hops, 363 animal hides, 11 casks of furs, two cases of opium, 31 barrels of cranberries, six horses, two buggies, 10 tons of miscellaneous and 18 tons of general merchandize. There was also a Wells Fargo strongbox containing $79,220 cash ($1.76 million in today’s money). Reports say passengers carried another $100,000 in gold from the Cassair gold fields in British Columbia.
The cabins were fully booked, and other passengers hunkered down wherever they could — some possibly even on deck in the cold rainy weather.
The ship sailed an hour late because the captain — 34-year-old Jefferson Davis Howell — was in his cabin nursing a headache (some say he was drunk) and asked not to be disturbed. However, he recovered enough to take the helm and steer the ship out of the harbor.
Right after leaving port, the weather started getting ominous, with wind and rain slowing progress. The ship struggled as it headed out to sea at 12 knots. Captain Howell then turned the vessel over to an inexperienced helmsman, a rookie third mate and a sole lookout, and returned to his cabin.
By four in the afternoon, they were in the Pacific Ocean after rounding the Tatoosh Islands and Cape Flattery with its lighthouse on the northwest tip of Olympic Peninsula. Large ocean swells topped by whitecaps were stopping them from full speed and visibility was poor — but that was not unusual fall weather.
Apart from being overloaded, the trip seemed routine. However, there were only five lifeboats and could accommodate only 160 passengers.
To keep the ship stable, “Captain Howell ordered all of the lifeboats along one side of the ship filled with water to counteract the list,” according to later testimony by survivor Henry F. Jelley from London, Ontario.
The Pacific had a checkered history: During the California Gold Rush days, she ran between Panama and San Francisco. Then in 1861 while sailing down the Columbia River from Portland to Astoria, the ship hit Coffin Rock in the fog and sank.
They salvaged the ship however and transported it to San Francisco for repairs, but by 1872, it sat forlornly in a mudflat in San Francisco Bay. When gold was found in Cassair, every available ship was called to action to carry eager miners north.
Goodall, Nelson and Perkins Company of San Francisco bought the ship and spent some $75,000 restoring it.
They should have saved the money and left the ship in the mud.
After cosmetic repairs, much of the wood was still rotten, but incredibly they still certified the Pacific as seaworthy.
It was unusually dark between 8 and 10 p.m. on that fatal night after leaving Esquimalt. The paddle-wheeler was 12 to 15 miles off the Washington coast and 30 miles south of Cape Flattery.
Heading right toward them from the south was the wooden-hull “Orpheus,” a 200-foot sailing ship from San Francisco heading to Puget Sound, commanded by Captain Charles A. Sawyer.
“I heard the second mate tell the man at the wheel to starboard his helm …” Sawyer said. “I immediately went on deck and asked the officer what was the matter, and he said that there was a light on the port bow (and) said it was Flattery Light. I told him it was impossible to have Flattery Light on that bow, and just then I saw the light on the starboard bow.”
Quickly, he turned the ship hard to port to avoid a collision, but the Pacific kept coming until it reversed engines at the last minute to avoid a hit. Too late. The Pacific struck the Orpheus on its starboard side caving in the side planks.
Pacific passenger Henry Jelley, 22, testified later, “While I was in the cabin in bed, I heard a crash and felt a shock as if we had struck a rock or something …”
It was not a major blow to the Orpheus, but more like a “maritime fender-bender” breaking part of the wooden hull and sweeping away some of the rigging and railing.
But it was fatal to the Pacific.
At first, the two ships were locked together and Captain Sawyer’s wife Lillian was about to board the Pacific to give its captain a piece of her mind, but her husband restrained her. Then the two ships drifted apart and Sawyer assessed the damage not paying attention to the other ship.
The last the Pacific was seen by anyone on the Orpheus, she was heading for shore and then disappeared from view.
Unknown to the Orpheus, water was flooding into the Pacific’s broken hull, with passengers and crew panicking. Jelley boarded a portside lifeboat that had been partially filled with water. When it was cut loose from the davits, it swamped and capsized. The four men aboard could do nothing but watch the women drown in the frigid waters, weighed down by their heavy clothing.
Then the Pacific sank.
A while later, the four men climbed on to wreckage of the pilot house. By morning waves were running high and the freezing water kept drenching them until one by one they were washed away and drowned or died of hypothermia, leaving only Henry Jelley.
By daybreak on Nov. 6, he’d drifted into the San Juan de Fuca Strait and was rescued by the bark “Messenger.”
Pacific’s quartermaster Neil O. Henly, 21, was asleep in his bunk when the collision occurred. He rushed out on deck and helped lower a lifeboat holding 15 women and six men. Hitting the side of the ship, the lifeboat capsized, throwing its occupants into the water. Within minutes the steamer broke in two and sank as people struggled to stay alive.
Henly swam to a piece of the hurricane deck crowded with seven people — including Captain Howell. By the following afternoon, all were dead except Henly who miraculously survived 78 hours in freezing conditions and was rescued by the U.S. Revenue Service cutter “Oliver Wolcott,” commanded by Lieutenant Lewis Harwood looking for survivors.
Henry Jelley and Neil Henly were the only survivors of the worst maritime disaster in the history of the Northwest, taking more than 250 lives.
After the collision, the Orpheus crew struggled to keep the ship afloat and eventually ran aground on Tzartus Island in Barkley Sound and waited for rescue. Everyone was safe but the ship was destroyed.
A coroner’s inquest in Victoria put the blame on the Orpheus for crossing the Pacific’s bow, and censured the crew and officers for being negligent and incompetent in their duties, while also declaring the Pacific unseaworthy and with insufficient lifeboats.
They also declared Captain Sawyer (in absentia) guilty of manslaughter, and for leaving the scene without trying to help the other ship, but nothing ever came of the verdict.
In San Francisco, a two-man commission of inquiry chaired by Captain Robert H. Waterman — the inspector of hulls who originally certified the Pacific as seaworthy — predictably blamed the Orpheus, chastised Captain Sawyer but generously let him off the hook and wouldn’t declare the ship’s seaworthiness as a factor. Case dismissed.
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Source: Coeur d’Alene Press
