Nearly 150 years after it left Victoria, B.C., for a final doomed voyage, preparations are being made to raise the wreck of the SS Pacific.
The 225-foot paddlewheeler went down off the coast of Washington state on the rainy night of Nov. 4, 1875, en route from Victoria to San Francisco, and is believed to have been carrying gold dust now worth millions from B.C.’s Cassiar gold rush.
Tragedy struck as the ship neared Cape Flattery, which juts into the Pacific Ocean from the northwest tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
“There was another ship travelling in the opposite direction, the Orpheus, and records aren’t exactly clear what happened because not many survived this accident, but it seems that the Orpheus came right in the path of the Pacific, and the Pacific ended up scraping right up against the other vessel,” Jacyln Pollock, curator of collections at Vancouver’s Maritime Museum, explained.
“The Orpheus didn’t seem to have been damaged too much, it continued on with its run and didn’t actually know the Pacific was sinking, but in the end, the Pacific appears to have been split in two and went down fairly quickly.”
More than 325 people are believed to have died in the collision, while just one or two people are thought to have survived.
Last month, a Seattle company called Rockfish Inc. secured the exclusive salvage rights to the wreck in a U.S. court, after years of fruitless hunting finally paid off.
“The state of preservation of this wreck is on par with any of the greatest shipwreck finds in the world,” Rockfish president Jeff Hummel said.
It’s been a long hunt. Hummel has been searching for the Pacific since 1993.
Five years ago, his team finally had a breakthrough.
“Eventually, I found a commercial fisherman who brought up some old coal,” he said. “And so, I was able to get it chemically analyzed at a laboratory up in Alberta.”
That analysis revealed a match to the Pacific’s cargo, massively narrowing the search area Rockfish was targeting.
In the summer of 2021, Rockfish located a target it believed to be the wreck with sonar sweeps. Subsequent surveys this summer and fall revealed a debris field and wreckage about 70 metres in length matching the configuration of the Pacific, including what appeared to be paddlewheels.
The company deployed camera-equipped remote submarines in September and November, and retrieved artifacts from the wreck, including fire brick and pieces of wood.
The team is aiming to get salvage operations off the ground next year.
While the potential gold treasure contained within the wreckage has captured most of the headlines, Pollock is hopeful treasures of historical interest could be retrieved as well.
Until now, virtually all that remained of the lost ship is a scrap of wood that managed to float back to Victoria.
Scratched into the wood is an eerie final message from one of the wreck’s victims, reading “all lost” and signed with the name S.P. Moody.
“It is his last message to the world – and the only record from someone who perished in that accident — detailing what they were feeling at the time,” Pollock said.
The salvage of the wreck then holds the potential to flesh out another chapter in the Pacific coast’s long and deadly history of maritime disasters.
“This area, from about the Oregon coast to the top of Vancouver Island, it’s known as the graveyard of the Pacific,” Pollock said.
“Over the past few centuries, there have been over 2,000 shipwrecks and over 700 lives lost.”