Sneak Peek: Prologue
Ship of Lost Souls

PROLOGUE

In some ways, this story—or at least our window on the story—actually begins twenty-six years after the sinking of the SS Valencia, during the summer of 1933. The wooded wilderness of Pachena Bay, British Columbia—near the place where Valencia struck the rocks that holed her iron hull—is calm, peaceful, and mostly empty. Few come here. For one thing, there is almost no way to get here, other than by boat. There is a narrow path up above the cliffs, part of what became known after the sinking of the Valencia as the Dominion Life-Saving Trail. A telegraph line runs in the trees along the path, but in 1933 it is down about as often as it is up, and few rely on it. The bay itself ripples and shimmers in the breeze; the tops of the trees, which grow almost to the rocky shoreline, sway gently. It is deserted, a quiet, tranquil place. 

In fact, the whole world seems calm and largely at peace. In the United States, Prohibition has just ended and work has begun on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been inaugurated the thirty-second president of the United States. The Washington Senators will face the New York Giants in the World Series. (The Senators will lose, badly.) In the boroughs of New York, it is possible to walk through a neighborhood and never miss a moment of the action as announcers from WOR and WABC bring the games to life for their listeners, the static-ridden play by play drifting out of tenement windows opened against the oppressive summer heat. Bookish sorts might be reading John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, or Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy. It is a seemingly gentle time, though it will not remain so for long.

Deep in the Canadian coastal wilderness stands the Pachena Point lighthouse. Its Fresnel lens blinks a blinding double-flash every 7.44 seconds as it guards a forbidding promontory fronted by one-hundred-foot cliffs. The lighthouse is in radio contact with other lighthouses along the coast, and two lifesaving stations stand not far away. The scene is desolate and wild, but the lighthouse, the radio antennas, and the lifesaving stations provide ample evidence that mariners stranded in that wilderness are not without recourse; the appropriate authorities have considered their plight and put into place infrastructure aimed at guarding their lives and effecting their rescue, should it become necessary. As desolate as the place seems, help is nearby.

A small boat bobs in the sparkling water, dipping and nodding in the wavelets. The vessel is empty, and it drifts and circles aimlessly in the breeze and in response to the hidden currents and eddies of the bay. The boat has not been seen for twenty-six years; it simply appeared in the bay one morning. Though its paint is chipped and worn away, on its bow it bears the still perfectly readable nameplate that proudly proclaims it Valencia’s No. 5 lifeboat.

Where did it come from? Lifeboat No. 5 had been launched on January 23, 1906, from the steamship Valencia as she foundered on the rocks off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, several miles from the bay where the boat reappeared all those years afterward. In the unfolding tragedy, most of the lifeboats—hastily lowered and ineptly manned—were destroyed almost as soon as they hit the water. Lifeboat No. 5, with boatswain Tim McCarthy in charge, had not been seen since it had been lowered into the water in a desperate and futile attempt to save the lives of people aboard the ship.

Where had the lifeboat been for twenty-six years? Some theorized that otherworldly forces were at work here; stories of ghost ships and skeletons found washed ashore made the rounds, and still do. Others, more realistically perhaps, theorized that the lifeboat had been washed into a cave where it had remained trapped until freed by a recent storm surge. No one could deny, though, that the reappearance of the battered lifeboat was . . . peculiar, and somehow oddly unsettling.

Neither the lifesaving stations nor the lighthouses nor the radio stations existed in 1906; if they had, the story of the Valencia and her 170 or so passengers and crew might have ended differently. As it was, the lack of such aids to navigation on both the Canadian and American coasts and the absence of lifesaving infrastructure together helped guarantee that 136 passengers and crewmen on the vessel—including every single woman and child on board—would perish in the wreck.

This is the story of that disaster, one made doubly tragic by the loss of women and children and then, somehow, made even more catastrophic by the fact that both the wreck itself and the ensuing lack of effective rescue efforts were the result of  entirely avoidable errors. Mistakes—and perhaps shady deals—were made; after the fact, politicians and the press railed, and steps were taken to avoid a future occurrence of this sort. In the end, though, that didn’t matter to the crew or passengers, because almost all of them were dead. Many drowned or died of hypothermia, some were crushed by massive spars and beams as the ship broke up in the waves, some were pounded against the rocks until their bodies were limp and bloody—and all within yards of land and within sight of would-be rescuers. Why? This book attempts to explain the inexplicable: How did so many people, entrusted to the care of the finest ship’s officers and taking advantage of the best technology that was available at the time, end up dying? Why did women and children, lashed to the rigging, perish while watching their putative rescuers sail away? Why were men battered to death on the rocks only feet from the shore? Most of all, why did no one help?

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