343 lives lost: Revisiting the Princess Sophia, BC's worst maritime disaster

It is the worst maritime disaster in the history of British Columbia and among the most tragic in Canadian history as well. It is the story of a storm, of rescue attempts, and of one dog who made it to shore.

By the turn of the 20th century in British Columbia, the Canadian Pacific Railway was running steamships along the west coast, into Alaska. Many passengers were still making their way up to the Yukon, hoping to take advantage of whatever bit of the gold rush was left in the Klondike.

These ships moved through the Inside Passage, which weaves through the islands off the coast of British Columbia, beginning between Victoria and Vancouver and running up to Juneau, Alaska.

The route was vital for the communities along the coast to receive cargo, passengers and mail.

One of those ships was the Princess Sophia. Built with a double hull made of steel, she featured electric lights, wireless communication and all the amenities you could expect at a fancy hotel. If you were in First Class that is.

The dining room for First Class passengers featured 112 seats with large windows and a social hall with a piano. As you moved down from second and to third glass, the accommodations became smaller, more sparse, and with fewer windows.

The Princess Sophia launched on Nov. 8, 1911 and took her maiden voyage on June 7, 1912, travelling from Scotland, around Cape Horn, to the coast of British Columbia. Upon her arrival in Victoria, she began her first route to Prince Rupert. The next year she ran all the way to Skagway.

After a break during the First World War, the Princess Sophia was put back into service in 1918.

Her time in service would be all too brief.

On Oct. 23, 1918 at 10:10 pm, the Princess Sophia left Skagway, well behind schedule, with stops in Juneau and Prince Rupert scheduled for Oct. 24, followed by an eventual stop in Vancouver on Oct. 27. On the ship were 75 crew members and 268 passengers, including 50 women and children.

Four hours after leaving Skagway, she was hit with heavy snow around Lynn Canal, an inlet in southeast Alaska.

At the helm of the ship was Captain Leonard Locke, who made the decision to go full speed, in a storm, through the inlet. It was his hope to make up time as the ship was three hours behind schedule.

Due to the blinding snow, the crew used dead reckoning, which involved blowing the ship’s whistle and making calculations on their location based on the echo of the whistle in the canal.

No one on the ship knew they were heading to Vanderbilt Reef.

The reef was actually the top of a 1,000-foot underwater mountain that was just barely under the water at high tide.

At 2 am on Oct. 24, 1918, the Princess Sophia struck the reef. After hitting the reef, a distress call was put out immediately but the wireless signal was weak and could not go much farther than Juneau, Alaska.

The Princess Sophia stuck on the reef.

The signal was received and a rescue flotilla was immediately organized.

At the time, the ship had not suffered severe damage on the reef but the high winds kept grinding the hull against the sharp rocks.

On the ship, panic was low, the electricity still worked and most of the passengers and crew were comfortable.

By 6 am, the ship was still stuck on the reef, but was pushed farther up by the winds and waves.

When low tide hit at noon, the entire hull of the ship was out of the water. By 4 pm, high tide had returned, and the seas were so rough with waves that any evacuation was too hazardous to try.

The location of the Sophia, despite the fact it was not sinking at this moment, made it almost impossible to rescue anyone. If lifeboats were put in the water, they would likely be smashed on the rocks due to the high waves.

All that could be done was to wait to see if the weather would become calm enough to mitigate an evacuation of the ship. Captain Locke believed that the ship was safe enough that he told the other ships they should shelter in the water.

On the morning of Oct. 25, the weather was calm enough that plans were put in place to begin rescuing passengers. The plan was to wait until 5 am, when the reef was covered by a few feet of water. It was hoped that lifeboats on the Sophia could be launched to take passengers to the rescue ships.

Unfortunately, the wind began to rise, and the waves were breaking hard against the hull of the Sophia. It was decided that the passengers were safer on the Sophia than in the water.

By 9 am, the wind was reaching gale strength and the ships in the Lynn Canal were having trouble staying in place.

As the ships moved to safer waters, the Sophia sent out a wireless message at 4:50 pm stating, “ship floundering on reef, come at once.” The Cedar immediately prepared to steam to the reef, and Captain Ledbetter signaled to the King and Whipe to follow.

At 5:20 pm, David Robinson, the wireless operator on the Sophia radioed out the following:

“For God’s sake hurry, the water is coming into my room!”

The Cedar wired back to conserve battery power and only transmit when necessary due to the weak wireless batteries.

Robinson wired back the following:

“Alight I will. You talk to me, so I know you are coming.”

This was the last message to come from the Sophia.

For half an hour, the Cedar moved slowly towards the reef but conditions were so bad that the light from the lighthouse could not be seen half a kilometre away.

By the evening, the Sophia was beneath the waves but no one knew it. With the wind blowing in from the north, the ship was raised much higher off the reef by increased water levels. Becoming buoyant briefly, the bow of the vessel remained on the reef, but the waves spun the ship around completely and washed it off the reef. The force of this dragged the ship on the rock, ripping out the bottom of the Sophia. When the ship moved to deeper water, it immediately began to sink, taking about half an hour.

The ship went down with no survivors. On board there were 268 passengers, with 75 crew, with a final estimated death toll of 343.

Due to the sudden sinking after so much time without movement, there was no time for an organized evacuation. Many people had life jackets on, and two wooden lifeboats floated away while the steel ones sank. At least 100 people were in their cabins when the water came in.

The mast of the Princess Sophia sticking out of the water

Several passengers seemed to have jumped into lifeboats but with the waves becoming too rough, they jumped into the water. In the water, the oil from the ship clung to them, weighed down their clothes and got into their noses, mouths and lungs, coating them in tar.

The morning of Oct. 26, the weather had improved with less wind. The rescue vessels returned to the reef only to find the foremast of the ship above the water. For the next three hours, the ships searched for survivors but only found bodies.

The only survivor of the ship was an English Setter dog, believed to be the pet of a wealthy couple, that was able to swim to an island. The dog had swum 10 kilometres from the reef to Tee Harbour, then walked another five to six kilometres to Auk Bay where it was found by residents of the town, two days after the sinking.

The watches on the bodies were found to have stopped at 5:50 pm and the rescue ships switched from search and rescue to body recovery.

Several passengers, knowing the danger they were in, wrote letters to loved ones.

Private Auris W. McQueen wrote a letter that was found on his body later. It states:

“Two women fainted and one of them got herself into a black evening dress and didn’t worry about who saw her putting it on. Some of the men, too, kept life preservers on for an hour or so and seemed to think there was no chance for us.”

For the next several months, bodies washed up on shores along the coast. Pieces of wreckage and belongings, including toys belonging to children, also floated onto the shores. Divers at the site would also recover about 100 bodies, most of which had been floating in cabins for months.

The city of Dawson City was especially hit hard with roughly two-thirds of the passengers coming from the community. Some of the prominent individuals included William O’Brien, a member of the Yukon Legislature and of the Dawson City Council, along with his wife and five children. William Scouse was also killed in the sinking. He had been the first person to get gold out of the Eldorado River during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Over a year after the sinking, there was talk about raising the ship off the sea floor, but the decision was made to abandon the idea due to the poor weather of the area.

In 2018, the Royal Canadian Mint would release a pure silver coin with the Princess Sophia on it, honouring those lost a century previous.