With Capt. Hinckle recovering from the fall in his cabin, she was caught in a blinding 100 mile an hour hurricane, her engines powerless, her sails blown away.
Truth, as often has been said, is stranger than fiction. And never more so than when examining British Columbia’s maritime past.
For that matter, upon realizing that, in the romantic age of wooden ships and iron men, West Coast mariners risked uncharted waters in bottoms that were not only frail to begin with but, so often, were rotten, too, it’s little short of miraculous that they survived to give B.C. a maritime heritage.
Yet…it’s said that the Lord watches over fools and drunks. Without further definition, I’ll venture to say that, possibly, some pioneer sailors were included in this heavenly blessed fraternity — as the record would seem to indicate.
Take, for example, the incredible voyage of the long-ago steamer Geo. W. Elder. Only the intervention of a mighty power from above — or fate, luck, as you will — guided her to safety on that terrifying night in February 1898.
The voyage began uneventfully enough on the auspicious morning of St. Valentine’s Day when the little steamer, crowded with 39 passengers, wheezed southward from gold-crazed Juneau, bound for ‘the outside.’ All went well until the Elder entered Queen Charlotte Sound where “a severe wind and snow storm was encountered, and owing to the ship being without ballast [sic], she tossed in the mighty waves like a gull, and soon became unmanageable in the storm which was running at 100 miles per hour”.
By the time the struggling steamer reached narrow Goletos Channel, her puny engines were all but powerless, Capt. Hinckle and Pilot Thompson battling only to keep her off the rocks which, by this time, were “close at hand on both sides”.
Somehow, as terrified passengers held on for dear life, Hinckle and Thompson kept the Elder on course despite the fact she was drifting almost blindly at the rate of four miles per hour in the blizzard.
Six hours later, the crew succeeded in raising a sail, only to have the canvas shredded in minutes by hurricane force winds, and for the next six and a-half hours the Elder drifted helplessly before the storm.
By 9 o’clock that night, the barometer had fallen to 28:90. However, towards dawn, the glass began to rise and the storm seemed to abate somewhat.
But Sunday morning found the ship yet a prisoner of the sea’s fury and not until early that afternoon could her steering gear again take effect. Finally the storm passed, although a blinding snowfall continued as the battered steamer entered calm seas.
When her officers took sick call of passengers and crew, they found an impressive list of injuries. Too, Capt. Hinckley was exhausted. Worse, when trying to catch some sleep in his bunk, a sudden lurch of the ship had thrown him violently against a steam heater, knocking him unconscious. Upon coming to, he’d returned to his post on the bridge.
Passenger E.A. Cassel, president of the Juneau Board of Trade, had suffered a broken kneecap when slammed into a deckhouse. Then, when attending the unconscious Capt. Hinckle, he’d sprained his thumb. And, like the captain, Pilot Thompson had been hurled from his bunk, suffering a broken rib.
But, to make my point about ‘divine’ intervention (or whatever): When the floundering Elder had barreled into half-mile-wide Goletas Channel between the rocky islets of Hope and Nigel, she was caught in a blinding 100 mile an hour hurricane, her engines powerless, her sails blown away, Capt. Hinckle recovering from the fall in his cabin, Pilot Thompson suffering the agony of a broken rib. Adding to the officers’ discomfort had been the fact their ship was swept through the dangerous passage broadside! Miraculously, she weathered through, a newspaper reporter later understating, “She had a marvellous escape only accomplished by extremely difficult navigation.”
As for the Elder’s bruised company, after a brief layover at Departure Bay for medical attention and repairs, they calmly proceeded on their way to Portland. But if Capt. Hinckle and Pilot Thompson gave no sign of having experienced anything out of the ordinary, their relieved passengers did; they took pains to draw the reporter’s attention to the fact that “it was only through the great skill of the officers of the vessel that another sad catastrophe was not chronicled….during the 36-hour gale.”
Yes, they were experienced mariners, highly skilled in their professions. But — to successfully navigate a narrow channel sideways and without power suggests to me, at least, that more than skill was involved in the Geo. W. Elder’s escape from disaster.
Now, the Elder’s survival was just a case of blind luck, a sceptic might say. But was it chance or coincidence that the Tacoma motor vessel Boobyalla’s resident cat moved her litter to safety the night before disaster?
In May 1929 the American freighter dropped hook in Esquimalt Harbour. The first sign of trouble came when smoke was observed in her engineroom and the crew ran to their emergency stations. On a ship loaded with tinder-dry cedar shingles there was no threat greater than fire. The Boobyalla was like a floating powder keg with a lit fuse.
As the alarm spread, crewmen unlimbered fire hoses and set pumps in operation, but a growing column of smoke soon forced them to retreat. Then the Pacific Salvage Co.’s great tug S.S. Salvage King reached the scene, her company joining the battle. Time and again, the firefighters, reinforced by members of the Victoria Fire Department, were beaten back.
In desperation, they tried to scuttle the ship by cutting holes in her hull. But the Boobyalla refused to settle and the holes, intended to sink her, acted instead as draughts for the flames. When firefighters daringly removed the after hatches to get directly at the inferno, “the fire only burned with redoubled fury…”
“All day yesterday (May 12), the fire was steadily creeping forward beneath her blistering decks and in an effort to check this a large section of decking was cut away forward of the engine room to allow diver [John ‘Jumper’ Collins] to descend into the smouldering inferno with a hose to spray underneath deck cross sections.”
For hours, the heroic Collins stood by in his heavy gear but the cancer spread without pause. In the meantime, having learned of a tank of ether in the ship’s paint locker, Salvage King’s remarkable second engineer, W. Reay, fought his way below to remove the potential explosive.
By this time all ventilator shafts were acting as chimneys and those fighting the fire were scorched and singed by the heat. With increasing danger of explosion of the ship’s oil tanks, which would spread the fire to the neighbouring naval powder magazine on Cole Island, the Salvage King hooked a line to the dying ship and towed her out into the harbour, towards Ogden Point.
Then, a muffled roar and a flash as the oil tanks burst and flames devouring her deckload of shingles and paper engulfed her from stem to stern.
Abandoned off Albert Head, the Boobyalla continued to flare throughout the night as thousands of spectators lined the shores to watch. It was, according to the Victoria Daily Times, “one of the most spectacular sights ever seen at sea off Victoria”.
And Martha, the ship’s tabby cat and her four kittens? All safe and sound, she having carried her kittens, one at a time, from the warmth of the engineroom to the forward deck, the night before the fire.
Was she driven by animal premonition? On deck, they’d been safe from immediate danger until evacuation to their new home — on board the S.S. Salvage King.
