Islander (ship)
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The Islander was a passenger ship of the Canadian shipping company Canadian Pacific Steam Navigation Company that was put into service in 1888 and was used as a so-called Coastal Liner on the Canadian and US Pacific coasts . These types of ships carried passengers , cargo, and mail between cities on the Pacific coast of British Columbia and Alaska , a route called the Inside Passage . On August 14, 1901, the Islander rammed an iceberg in the Lynn Canal south of Juneau . Attempts to run the steamer failed. The Islander sank within 15 minutes, with 40 passengers and crew lost their lives. Many sources incorrectly state 62, 65 and up to 70 dead.
The ship
Constructed of steel , the 1519 GRT passenger steamer was ordered from the Napier, Shanks & Bell shipyard in Glasgow in 1888 by the Canadian Pacific Steam Navigation Company, a Canadian shipping company founded in 1881 and based in Victoria (British Columbia) and built in their Yoker Dock . The Islander was powered by steam engines from Dunsmuir & Jackson, which allowed a top speed of 15 knots. But she was also equipped with the rigging of a schooner .
The Islander was used in a regular service on the west coast of Canada and the southeast coast of Alaska. The ships on this route carried passengers, cargo, and mail to and from major cities along the coastline such as Prince Rupert , Alert Bay , Wrangell , Ketchikan , Juneau, and Skagway . This important trade route in the Pacific Northwest is called Inside Passage and it still exists today.
She was considered to be one of the fastest, most comfortable and most reliable ships in the Inside Passage and was very popular with paying customers. Because of this, she often transported wealthy businessmen, bankers, stockbrokers and railroad entrepreneurs, but also gold prospectors who wanted to travel to Dawson in the Canadian territory of Yukon because of the Klondike gold rush .
Downfall
On Wednesday, 14 August 1901 at 19.30, which ran Islander in Skagway to another crossing to (Alaska) Victoria from. Captain HR Foot was in command. She had 110 passengers and 62 crew members on board and was therefore occupied to her full capacity. The cargo on the ship included gold worth six million Canadian dollars (in terms of monetary value at the time). The following night the ship steamed south through Lynn Canal Bay . The weather conditions were good and the ship was traveling at full speed. At 02:16 on the morning of August 15, the Islander rammed an iceberg south of Juneau , which tore a large hole in the port side . It took in water and began to sink rapidly over the bow between Douglas Island and Admiralty Island .
Attempts by the captain to put his ship aground on Douglas Island to save it from sinking failed because the rudder no longer responded. The Islander was unable to maneuver in a strong southerly current . Five minutes after the collision, the bow was already so deep in the water that the stern protruded out of the water and the propellers could be seen. When the boilers exploded, the ship's wood paneling was torn from the decks.
15 minutes after the collision, the ship sank, killing 18 crew members and 22 passengers of the 172 people on board. There were 31 men, six women and three children. Among the dead were the wife and youngest son of James Hamilton Ross , the Yukon Commissioner , the multimillionaire , landowner and director of the Canadian Commercial Bank , Andrew Keating with his two sons Arthur and Julius, and 69-year-old Peter Warren Wentworth Bell , former factorist in the Hudson's Bay Company .
examination
Between September 4 and 10, 1901, a commission of inquiry met in Victoria, which dealt with the accident and heard many of the surviving passengers and crew members. Many passengers testified that they were not informed that there had been an accident and that the ship sank. In addition, many lifeboats were half-empty and almost exclusively launched with members of the crew, leaving the passengers to their own devices. During the sinking, there would have been chaos and confusion. It was further alleged that Captain Foot, who did not survive, was drunk at the time of the collision. In the three-page final report, the committee of inquiry came to the conclusion that the master and the officers had not recognized the seriousness of the situation quickly enough and had not sufficiently taken care of the proper evacuation of the ship. However, they were not blamed for the accident.
Salvage
Due to the valuable gold cargo of the Islanders , numerous rescue attempts and court hearings took place after their sinking . Only a few days after the accident, her sister ship , the Haling , searched the area to find out how deep the wreck was. The remains of the Islanders were not found during this attempt.
Only succeeded in 1902 Henry Finch, a former employee of the United States Life-Saving Service, the wreck in 53 m depth at position 58 ° 23 ' N , 134 ° 47' W to locate. But he could not retrieve any objects. In 1904 he returned to the Islander with a specially equipped diving bell . He then reported a very large, gaping hole in the ship's hull. He failed to break into the ship and retrieve the gold from the paymaster's office. Finch was only able to bring parts of the railing and rigging to the surface. Since his son Loren was killed in the action, Finch gave up further attempts. Over the next 25 years there were at least a dozen other attempts to retrieve the gold. In either case, the wreck could be reached but not entered. Rescue attempts at such a depth were hardly feasible in the early 20th century.
1929 Captain Willey began in Seattle in collaboration with Frank Curtis, a demolition contractor from Olympia , on the recovery of the Islander to work. They installed 20 steel cables under the wreck, which were connected to salvage ships and lifted the steamer. The ropes were attached respectively at low tide and pushed the Islander at each subsequent tide on the shore. The action dragged on over several diving seasons. On July 20, 1934, the Islander was finally lifted at Green's Cove ( Admiralty Island ). The damage described by Henry Finch turned out to be much greater than expected: the 18 m long bow section of the steamer, which contained the mail room and the storage room, had been completely separated off. The gold bars were expected to be found in the safe of the paymaster's office , but this proved to be a mistake. The recovery team only found a few gold coins and soggy documents there. A total of C $ 75,000 worth of nuggets and gold dust were seized and the rest disappeared.
In 1996 OceanMar Inc., based in Seattle in the United States and Great Britain, raised funds to charter a recovery ship and conduct an expedition to track down the Islander's bow using side-view sonar and a remote-controlled vehicle . When the research vessel Jolly Roger arrived in Juneau, a US Deputy Marshal came on board and placed an injunction against the company . This had been initiated by Yukon Recovery, a rival salvage company, as they claimed the rescue rights based on the 1988 Abandoned Shipwrecks Act introduced in 1988 .
OceanMar relied on its current salvage agreement and stressed that this has priority. In Anchorage , the parties met with a lawyer specializing in maritime law. OceanMar was finally given permission to search and film the wreck site, but was ordered not to remove any objects from the wreck. The rescue team on board the Jolly Roger found the missing bow section on August 15, 1996, on the 95th anniversary of the sinking. They spent the next five weeks filming the wreck and the surrounding debris field. The dispute with Yukon Recovery was only settled by a judgment of the United States Court of Appeals on March 7, 2000 in favor of OceanMar.
Web links
- Islander website (with illustrations)
- Summary of technical data and doom
- The Islanders in: Shipwreck Investigations
- Summary of the history of the ship on a diving website ( Memento from April 22, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
- Entry in the Miramar Ship Index
- Official document with passenger list from the last trip
