Alaska has more than 30,000 miles of navigable coastline, and there is a long list of shipwrecks that are scattered from the deep fjords of the Southeast Panhandle to the silt-laden waters of Cook Inlet, and from the storm-swept fishing grounds of Bristol Bay to the ice-locked shores of the Beaufort Sea, far above the Arctic Circle. Despite the perils of the northern seas, ships have sailed and steamed with cargoes destined for the mines, villages and canneries of the far north. The men who proudly wore the uniforms of the early steamship companies—although brave and capable mariners—were not infallible. One of the ships lost in the waters of Alaska fell victim to a simple mistake made by the vessel’s captain, and the true story of the accident is told here for the first time.
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The iron-hulled SARATOGA was built for the Ward Line in 1878 at the shipyard of John Roach and Sons in Chester, Pennsylvania. She was nearly 300 feet long, and was registered at 2,821 tons. The ship was purchased in 1906 by the Northwestern Steamship Company and added to its growing list of steamers plying the Alaska trade, carrying passengers and freight between Seattle and the northern ports of Juneau, Cordova, Valdez, Seldovia and Kodiak. On southbound trips, vessels would frequently carry copper ore from the mines at LaTouche and Katalla, delivering it to the smelters at Tacoma. In the spring of 1908 the S.S. SARATOGA was in command of Captain L.J. Schage, sailing under the banner of the Alaska Steamship Company, which had been reorganized that year when it merged with the Northwestern Steamship Company. |
The sea route north from Seattle—up the Inside Passage and out into
the open ocean of the Gulf of Alaska, then back through the emerald archipelagos
of Prince William Sound—traverses some of the most remote and beautiful
waters of the world. Icy breakers pound rugged, tree-studded islands that
have remained unchanged since they were carved by retreating glaciers during
the last ice age. Mist-shrouded mountains loom high over narrow fjords, and
icebergs calve from glaciers that still lock much of the region in a perpetual
blanket of ice.
The scenery is breathtaking, and the view from the deck of a ship passing
along the coastline is a perspective that still lures thousands of tourists
north on luxury cruise ships every summer. But beneath the crystal-cold waters
of coastal Alaska lie a menace unseen by visitors, a danger that mariners
would do well to remembers always—treacherous underwater reefs.
In a government report, the superintendent of the United States Coast and
Geodetic Survey described what makes the near-shore waters of Alaska so dangerous:
Passing through these waters the traveler sees on every hand rugged mountain ranges whose profiles present a bewildering confusion of sharp, jagged peaks of various heights. Let him, then, imagine these same topographic features duplicated in the waters about him, the tops of the highest peaks appearing above the surface in the form of precipitous rocky islets, those of slightly less elevation rising to within a few feet of the surface, while others, still lower, rise but slightly above the bottom.
In the waters of Alaska during the early 1900s, the safe
navigation of a steamship depended as much on the captain’s local experience
as it did on the placement of lighthouses, marker buoys and other aids. In
fact, most reefs and hazardous features in Alaskan seas remained unmarked
until after the First World War. Although many ships ran aground on reefs
and pinnacle rocks that were not shown on charts, a number of steamers encountered
obstructions that lay underwater in exactly the spot shown on the government
charts that every vessel carried.
* * *
|
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“She was in first class trim for running,” Captain
Schage said later. “Well by the stern, wheel well under water.”
March is not considered springtime in the North Country, nor is it rightfully
a winter month. In the middle latitudes of Alaska it signifies the beginning
of breakup, a season that extends through the end of April. Breakup is when
the warmth and light of the coming summer does battle with the cold and darkness
of the waning winter, and the conflict often results in nasty storms with
wet, heavy snow. As the SARATOGA lay alongside the dock in Ellamar, passing
snow squalls coated her decks with a slushy coating of white, but dawn brought
just enough warmth that the passengers awoke to relatively clear weather.
The loading of the copper ore cargo was completed shortly before 2:00 p.m.,
and Captain Schage gave orders to make the ship ready for departure. In his
1955 book Mirage in the Arctic, SARATOGA passenger Ejnar Mikkelsen tells of
joining the vessel’s master on the bridge as the ship prepared to sail:
“[Captain Schage] and I soon became firm friends, for we were both sailors,
and, as he was a Norwegian, we were in a way fellow-countrymen as well.”
Quartermaster Ernest Tingvall was at the SARATOGA’s wheel as Captain
Schage gave orders to cast the ship’s lines off from the Ellamar dock
promptly at 2:00 p.m. The big liner backed slowly away from the pier as Mikkelsen
and Third Officer Edward Stewart watched from the pilothouse.
“I suppose I must have boasted a bit about my sledge journey,”
Mikkelsen later recalled, for he had given Captain Schage a full account of
his long trip from Alaska’s interior to Valdez. “That may have
irritated [Schage] the Norwegian, who thought that only Norwegians could sledge
over land and sea.”
“Yes, boy,” Captain Schage said to Mikkelsen, “you can sledge
and I can’t; but perhaps I can maneuver my ship better than you—and
I know the channels here like my own trousers’ pocket.”
Indeed, Schage had commanded vessels in Alaskan waters for seven years, and
he enjoyed a reputation as a careful and knowledgeable seaman. Mikkelsen wrote
later that although he had not suggested anything to the contrary, perhaps
he had “not admired [Schage] sufficiently and also talked a bit too
much about what I can do,” so that the SARATOGA’s captain may
have felt compelled to show off for the benefit of his Danish passenger.
“You watch,” Captain Schage said. “When we go out from here
I’ll let all the moorings go at the same time and ring up full speed
ahead. You stand here with your watch in your hand and when 14 minutes have
passed you say ‘Ready,’ and exactly 15 minutes after I’ve
rung full speed, you say ‘Stop.’”
The record does not reflect whether the two other men on the bridge, Third
Officer Stewart and Quartermaster Tingvall, exchanged a furtive look at this
point, for they knew that the ship’s course from Ellamar out to the
open waters of Prince William Sound would take them dangerously close to foul
ground off Busby Island and the larger Bligh Island just south of it.
Caught up in his boast, Captain Schage continued, “You say ‘Stop,’
then I’ll put the helm hard over to starboard, and if you care to look
over the starboard side you will see a large submerged rock four or five fathoms
away, perhaps only three.”
“Fine,” replied Mikkelsen. “You certainly know your channels,
Skipper. I’m ready. Go ahead when you like.”
Under Captain Schage’s watchful eye, Tingvall backed the ship away from
the dock, and the captain rang the engine room “full speed ahead”
at 2:02 p.m. The SARATOGA’s four boilers had been running while the
ship was at dock, and although the machinery was performing well, First Assistant
Engineer J.J. Weiler later estimated that the boilers were operating at perhaps
five pounds off their working pressure. On the bridge, the four men watched
as the ship gathered speed, passing the buoys that marked the harbor entrance
at eight minutes past two.
“Set course North 74 West, Mr. Tingvall,” the captain ordered,
and the quartermaster watched the bridge compass closely as he swung the vessel
onto the heading Schage had ordered.
Able Seaman W.T. Anderson was standing watch at the SARATOGA’s bow as
the ship came around and headed out from the dock. He said later that although
it was partly clear leaving Ellamar, after the ship “got outside it
commenced to snow and blow pretty hard, a heavy snow squall; it got pretty
thick and you could not see nowhere.”
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On the bridge, Captain Schage studied the ship’s
logbook, examining the SARATOGA’s course from Ellamar that the
vessel had steered on her previous voyage. Since electronic depth finders
and satellite navigational systems were still more than 50 years in
the future, Schage was navigating using dead reckoning, a system utilized
by mariners for at least 400 years. Navigators would plot the ship’s
position by laying off on the chart courses steered and distances traveled,
while making allowances for variables such as tidal currents, the weight
of the ship’s cargo, and the force of the wind against the hull.
By steering the ship on the same heading as her previous voyage, and
running that course at the same speed and for the same length of time,
Schage and other captains of his day could generally be confident that
their vessels would stay on a safe course, keeping well clear of charted
reefs and other obstructions. But even a minor variation in any of the
three components of the dead reckoning course—heading, speed or
time—would put the ship in an unknown and potentially dangerous
location. |
The captain watched the second hand sweep around the face of his pocket watch
seven times, then called out a course change to the man at the wheel. “Come
to South 65 West, Mr. Tingvall.”
“South 65 West, aye-aye, Captain,” replied the quartermaster.
Through the glass on the starboard side of the wheelhouse, Third Officer Stewart
peered into gusting snow, trying to distinguish the shoreline they were passing.
He could just make out the features of Dark Bluff on the mainland, the point
of land that marked the SARATOGA’s usual swing to port.
The steamer cut through the icy water at a speed Schage estimated to be 13
½ knots. To make that speed, the ship’s massive single screw
needed to turn at 60 revolutions per minute, thrusting its huge brass blades
through the dark water once every second. But Second Assistant Engineer Marshall
McGinitie recalled later that the engine was producing only about 50 turns
until the machinery came up to full operating temperature nearly a half-hour
after leaving Ellamar. Captain Schage had rung for full power, the telegraph
showed full ahead, and it felt as though the steamer was making her maximum
speed through the water, but the men on the bridge had no way of knowing that
the SARATOGA had not traveled quite far enough when her captain called for
the third course change.
“I thought she was going through the water very fast, the way she was
traveling,” Schage later recalled. But he also knew that the ship responded
very slowly to course changes. “She is the most awkward thing I was
ever aboard in my life for steering; she has got to have about four or five
mile speed before she will answer the helm at all.”
The SARATOGA, her boilers and engines running full speed, gradually came to
starboard until the wheelhouse compass showed the desired course. Quartermaster
Tingvall kept the wheel steady, while Schage and his distinguished passenger,
Mikkelsen, each studied their pocket watches. There remained one more course
change, another turn to starboard that would bring the ship around the tip
of Busby Island on a course of South 23 East, passing within view of the dangerous
submerged rock and proving to Mikkelsen that the SARATOGA’s captain
was the seaman he claimed to be.
“After I make this island [Busby Island], there is no trouble at all,”
Captain Schage said later, recalling previous voyages. “I know exactly
how far I got to go off that island to keep clear of that rock [which is]
out of the water at ¾ tide.”
If the rock showed at three-quarters tide, Captain Schage must have known
that the dangerous obstruction would be covered as the SARATOGA steamed toward
it just after high tide. On watch in the pilothouse, Third Officer Stewart
pulled on the SARATOGA’s whistle chord, sending long, mournful blasts
out into the falling snow. He hoped to hear an answering echo from the rocky
shoreline of Busby Island, but the low-lying island would not bounce a reverberation
back to the ship.
Newspaper accounts would later claim that the SARATOGA was steaming carefully
at half speed, having slowed down when it started snowing, but that was not
the case. “She run right up full speed as near as I know,” said
First Assistant Engineer J.J. Weiler. First Officer H. Hobey, who had been
on deck for 15 minutes after the ship left Ellamar, later said that the SARATOGA
was “running full speed.” And Third Officer Edward Stewart, who
was standing next to the captain on the bridge, was asked pointedly whether
the ship was traveling at full steam. He replied simply, “Yes, sir.”
In his memoir, Ejnar Mikkelsen writes:
The ship gathered speed, more and more, shooting ahead,
while I counted the minutes. I looked at [Schage], now—‘Ready!’
And a minute later—‘Stop!’
‘Hard to starboard!’ [Schage] called to the helmsman, who spun
the wheel hard over; and while the skipper stood by looking triumphant I ran
towards the rail to see that submerged rock by the ship’s side. But
I never got so far before there was a crunching, grating sound; the ship quivered,
cocked her bows up high, dropped her stern a bit—and there she sat,
immovable.
The rock was there, that was quite certain; only the ship had gone three or
four fathoms too far to starboard. She was right on it!
Captain Schage leapt for the throttle and rang the engine
room to stop the SARATOGA’s engine before the still-churning screw drove
the vessel further up the jagged underwater obstruction.
Able Seaman Anderson, who had been standing watch on the vessel’s forward
deck, was thrown off his feet by the force of the impact. “After she
struck we got busy,” he said later. “We got orders to get the
boats ready. We got to our boat stations and commenced to get them ready for
use.”
Although most accounts of maritime disasters in Alaskan waters tell of the
captain and officers calmly going about the business of reassuring passengers
and supervising the loading of lifeboats, Ejnar Mikkelsen evokes a more frenzied
atmosphere on the SARATOGA’s bridge:
The machine-telegraph clanged, agitated orders rang out across the ship, the passengers rushed panic-stricken on deck, and I stole softly down from the bridge; at moments of disaster the man with responsibility is best left alone. And what could I have said to my friend [Captain Schage]? That it was a pity it had happened, or what? Words to comfort are not easily found in a situation like that. I preferred to say nothing and vanish.
Chief Engineer Willard E. Pierson was off watch when the
impact came. He was in the upper engine room, directly above the cylinder
tops of the SARATOGA’s massive steam engine. He could feel the deck
lift under his feet as the ship’s keel slid along the rocks far below.
The iron plates of the SARATOGA’s hull shrieked and groaned as they
buckled against the rock, and the crewmen charged with stoking the ship’s
roaring coal furnace were certain a rushing wall of seawater would drown them,
or that they would be scalded to death by escaping steam from broken pipes.
They were halfway up the stairs to the open deck when Pierson met them.
“I immediately went down on the upper platform and drove the firemen
back, then I went down to the engine room,” Pierson later recalled.
He met First Assistant Engineer J.J. Weiler, who had been in the engine room
when the crash came. Weiler raised his voice over the sounds of escaping steam
and jangling alarm bells, yelling to his chief that a little water was coming
from the shaft housing astern, but that the forward cargo hold was dry. The
force of the impact had driven the 200 tons of coal ballast forward, buckling
the bulkhead that separated the boiler and engine rooms. “The coal came
out down over the engine room steps,” he said later.
More serious for the moment was a spray of icy seawater that poured into the
engine room through a broken fitting. When the rock slid underneath the ship’s
keel, Pierson remembered, “the engine went over to port a little, tore
that angle iron loose from the cylinder. The starboard fore and aft bulkhead
caved in and broke the elbow to the main suction pipe—broke it off.
The main suction was broken between the skin of the ship and the valve. All
four boilers lifted a little.”
Weiler and Pierson frantically worked to stop the flow of water from the broken
through-hull fitting, finally clamping the broken valve and stemming the leak.
First Officer Hobey had just entered his cabin when the jarring impact came,
and he rushed onto the deck. “As soon as she struck, I come out of my
room and the captain and I and the third officer got the lead and took soundings
ourselves.”
Casting the weighted line into the sea all around the ship, the three men
found between nine and 11 feet of water—far less than the SARATOGA needed
to float, and the tide was dropping quickly.
“The ship heeled over more and more as the water fell,” wrote
Mikkelsen, “and all the landlubbers on board got into a panic. The women
shrieked, the men put on their lifebelts and looked very grave, and cursed
till the sparks flew.” But the ship was in no immediate danger, for
as the tide fell the hull of the stranded SARATOGA rested more firmly upon
the rocks that imprisoned her.
As the plight of the ship and her passengers and crew became more apparent,
Captain Schage sent for the Danish explorer.
“Things didn’t go quite as I expected,” Mikkelsen quotes
the captain as saying. “I was a bit rash, I suppose, and too sure of
myself.” Schage paused for a moment and gazed along the decks of the
stricken vessel, then continued.
“At high water I’ll perhaps get her floated off; she struck on
the ebb. We’ll have a lot to do and I must keep the whole crew on board,
but I would like to be rid of this shrieking hysterical mob of passengers.
They’re only in the way, and the weather doesn’t look too reliable
either. The passengers must leave the ship. Will you take them ashore in the
lifeboats? But you can only have the catering staff to row; I can’t
spare any of the rest of the crew.”
Captain Schage must have detailed at least a few of the ship’s sailors
to assist with the lifeboats, for Able Seaman Anderson picks up the story:
“We got the boats ready... some went to the rail and some right to the
water. There was not much excitement... we had some ladies in the boats and
some gentlemen. We got in the boats and started out; we had orders to go to
Ellamar.”
Mikkelsen recalled that the passengers assembled carrying their luggage, protesting
that they should be allowed to take it with them in the ship’s boats.
“But they could only be allowed the most essential,” he writes,
“and in rising wind and seas I set off with my six boats. It was not
easy to get the stewards and male passengers to take to the oars, but a heavy
tiller has considerable powers of persuasion, and, remembering a few of the
words the Spaniard had used to get my dogs to pull extra hard, I used them
then, and with good results.”
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The little flotilla did not make it very far from
the ship, for Captain Charles Swensen of the small steam tug ELSIE had
seen the SARATOGA’s grounding from shore. The ELSIE put out and
intercepted the lifeboats before they had gone more than four or five
hundred yards. “We went to her and put the passengers aboard,”
Anderson recalled. The ELSIE carried the SARATOGA’s rescued passengers to Valdez, bringing news of the accident. Captain Swensen spent several hours in port, attending to the needs of the rescued passengers, then turned around and headed back to Busby Island, where he would await the next high tide and make an attempt to pull the 298-foot steamship off the rock. |
* * *
As any mariner knows, tides rise and fall on a roughly 12-hour cycle, the
ocean waters rushing through coves, inlets and passages in response to the
moon’s pull. The SARATOGA had run aground at 2:30 p.m., and the next
high tide would not be until the early morning hours of March 21. The hours
spent waiting were utilized by the crews of both the SARATOGA and the ELSIE
to make preparations for what could be the only chance to free the ship before
the waves pounded her to pieces on the exposed reef.
Crewmen were detailed to jettison as much weight from the cargo hold as possible,
and the ship’s cargo winches hummed as buckets of copper ore were hauled
up from below decks and dumped over the side. Working deep in the SARATOGA’s
hold, balancing atop the half-million pounds of ore that had been loaded in
Ellamar just a few hours before, the men worked continuously to lighten the
ship before the tide crested and the time came for the salvage attempt. “[We]
discharged all we could,” said Third Officer Stewart.
A kedge anchor was loaded into a small boat and run out into deeper water
two points off the SARATOGA’s starboard bow, and a stout hawser was
wrapped around the steam-driven deck capstan. Chief Engineer Pierson and his
men checked and rechecked the ship’s boilers, engines, and all other
mechanical workings of the ship, gradually bringing up steam so the SARATOGA
could use the full force of her powerful engines to try backing off the reef.
From the ELSIE, a tug of about 75 tons belonging to the Valdez Dock Company,
a wire cable was secured to the SARATOGA’s stern, coupling the two vessels
and giving the larger ship the added pull of the ELSIE’s engine.
Just before midnight on March 20, preparations were complete and Captain Schage
and his officers gathered at the rail of the stricken vessel, watching the
gentle swells washing higher and higher on the ship’s dark iron hull.
Finally, at 12:30 a.m., Schage gave the order to start the pull.
Captain Swensen worked the ELSIE forward until the slack was completely out
of the steel towing cable, gradually increasing the tension as the steam tug
struggled to help move the SARATOGA, a ship more than 30 times her size. In
the engine room of the larger vessel, Chief Pierson and his crew reversed
the ship’s powerful engines. “[We] gradually brought them up to
60 revolutions,” he said later, downplaying the strain caused by running
the engines at maximum speed in reverse. “I run them 60 revolutions.
I wanted to get the ship off!”
The steam winch at the front of the ship pulled the hawser tight against the
kedge anchor, gradually slewing the SARATOGA’s bow a little to starboard,
into slightly deeper water. The ship’s propeller churned a boiling cauldron
of black seawater at the vessel’s stern as it spun first backward, then
forward in an attempt to rock the ship off her perch. For more than three
hours the engineers, deck crew and officers worked to free the ship, struggling
through the cold hours of darkness under blasts of wind sweeping down from
Columbia Glacier to the north.
Far below waterline, the men tending the SARATOGA’s machinery noticed
water coming in from the shaft alley, the housing that protected the thick
drive shaft that turned the heavy propeller. “The water didn’t
come in till the tide went out and came back in again, and it was a couple
of hours then before the water came in,” said First Assistant Engineer
Weiler.
“The carpenter reported 26 inches of water in the hold,” Chief
Engineer Pierson said later. “About this time I started the pumps and
reduced the water to nine inches.”
At four o’clock in the morning, a last desperate attempt was made to
back the ship off the reef before the tide once again dropped her firmly upon
the rocks. “We tried to get the vessel off but could not and she began
to leak in the shaft alley. [We] closed up the bulkhead door but the that
bulkhead would not hold, and I noticed water coming underneath this bulkhead.”
Despite more than 14 hours of work, it was clear that nothing they could do
would get the ship floating again in deep water. Seawater pouring in quickly
outpaced the ability of the ship’s pumps to dump it over the side, so
the SARATOGA’s engineers bled off boiler pressure and prepared to shut
down the engines. By the time the men climbed up to the ship’s open
deck, water had risen until it was ten feet deep throughout the engine room,
the boiler room, and the forward and aft cargo holds.
Reluctantly, Captain Schage gave his men orders to abandon ship. Captain Swensen
brought the ELSIE alongside, and crewmen passed over sacks of salvaged mail,
described in a newspaper report as “the letter mail and express matter.”
Schage dictated a telegram to be sent from Valdez to steamship company officials
in Seattle: “I consider the SARATOGA a total loss. There are seven feet
of water in the ship, and her compartment bulkheads are gone. I have abandoned
her except to leave two watchmen on board, and will bring the crew down on
the YUCATAN.”
Then, one by one, the crewmen boarded the steam tug for the trip back to Valdez.
Captain Schage stayed the night to keep watch aboard the SARATOGA, along with
the cook and two water tenders. In his heart he must have known that his ship
would never again steam the cold Alaska waters, and he must have known, too,
that the accident had occurred because he had miscalculated the SARATOGA’s
speed in those crucial seven minutes before the third and final course change.
“She could not have been making her usual speed,” he said later,
“ or she would not have been on that reef.”
* * *
The SARATOGA sat stranded on the rocks off Busby
Island for months as the insurance underwriters and the vessel’s
owners argued about the feasibility of salvaging the ship. Ejnar Mikkelsen
waited in Valdez with the other passengers, for the S.S. YUCATAN had
to travel all the way from Seattle to pick them up. “I was, I
suppose, the only sailor in the town other than the skipper of the little
coastal steamer which had [rescued us].” As a result, Mikkelsen was appointed marine surveyor, along with Captain Swensen and another man from the ELSIE. Their task was to determine whether the SARATOGA could be repaired and refloated, and their decision would help dictate who would bear the cost of the accident. |
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It became clear to Mikkelsen that the vessel’s owners
were pressuring the surveyors to declare the wreck unsalvageable, for the
ship was insured only against total loss. The insurance underwriters, on the
other hand, wanted the SARATOGA salvaged at practically any cost, for they
would not have to pay on the claim if the steamer could be towed to dry-dock
for needed repairs. In the end, Mikkelsen tired of the politics and resigned
as surveyor. The underwriters paid a total of $130,000 to the SARATOGA’s
owners for the loss of both vessel and cargo, despite the Alaska Steamship
Company’s claim that the ship had been worth $175,000 before the wreck,
plus the value of 350 tons of ore and coal at $50 per ton.
The insurance underwriters put out bids for the salvage of the still grounded
ship, and newspaper stories throughout the summer of 1908 tell of various
plans to temporarily patch the damaged hull and tow the SARATOGA south for
permanent repairs. Each plan fell through, however, and by late September,
the steamship had been stripped of “all the gear, boats, tackle and
other moveable things valued to the amount of almost $10,000.” Winter
storms finally swept the SARATOGA from her perch on the reef, and she sank
in very deep water.
* * *
A marine casualty investigation convened in Seattle and heard testimony from
Captain Schage and six of his officers and crew. The hearing officer questioned
each man closely about the navigation of the SARATOGA, the speed and distances
traveled, and the weather and sea conditions at the time of the wreck. Schage
maintained throughout the hearing that he had been operating the vessel in
a safe and careful manner.
“It was not my carelessness that got that ship ashore,” Captain
Schage told the hearing officer, “if there had been a buoy or anything
to guide a fellow.”
“You know there is nothing there?”
“I know that,” Schage replied, confident that he had defended
his actions successfully.
“All the more reason you should take extra precaution,” came the
stern rejoinder.
Schage’s license as a master mariner was suspended for three months,
a disciplinary action that was upheld following a letter of appeal that Schage
submitted in June.
An article in the Seward newspaper on May 23 defended the SARATOGA’s master by saying: To blame the captain when an accident befalls a ship on the sea is the first thing that enters the minds of most people, but when they sail up and down these dangerous coasts unaided by lights and buoys year after year, safely bringing their passengers and cargo to shore, little is said in their praise. It is due to the skill and watchfulness of the captainsthat so few accidents have happened in this dangerous North Pacific. Captain Schage is recognized as one of the most careful men on the run to these northern ports. But Ejnar Mikkelsen presented the accident in a different light. After keeping Captain Schage’s secret for 47 years, he wrote, “It was a painful situation to have got into for no fault of one’s own, apart from a little innocent boasting.” |
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End-Notes
John S. Carver, Jr., “The Steamship SARATOGA.”
The Sea Chest: Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, 22:1
(Sept. 1988), p. 43.
Steve K. Lloyd, “The Wreck of the S.S. EDITH, August 1915.” Alaska
History 15:1 (Spring 2000), pp. 1-14.
United States Coast & Geodetic Survey. Annual Report of the Superintendent,
United States Coast and Geodetic Survey to the Secretary of Commerce for the
Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1917. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1917, p. 9.
Paul Kemp (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. London: Oxford
University Press, 1976, pp. 58-59.
Ejnar Mikkelsen, Mirage in the Arctic. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955, pp.
192-193.
United States. “Investigation in the Matter of the Wreck of the S.S.
‘Saratoga’ on March 20, 1908, near Ellamar, Prince William Sound,
Alaska.” U.S. Local Inspectors, Seattle, Bureau of Marine Inspection
and Navigation. Casualties and Case Files, 1887-1942. File 923, Record Group
41. National Archives, Pacific NW Region, Seattle, Washington (hereafter “Inquiry”),
p. 27 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, p. 4 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 7 (Hobey testimony).
Ibid, p. 33 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, p. 16 (Tingvall testimony).
Mikkelsen, p. 197. In his book, Mikkelsen calls the captain “Kragh”
and the vessel the “Saragossa.” Whether that represents the author’s
desire to give the unfortunate Schage a thin veneer of anonymity in the face
of Mikkelsen’s serious accusations, or whether the misspelling of the
names of the steamship and her captain came about through Maurice Michael’s
translation of the work from Danish to English, we cannot be sure.
Ibid. Of the three men questioned by the board of inquiry who had been in
the SARATOGA’s pilothouse as the ship left Ellamar—Captain Schage,
Third Officer Stewart and Quartermaster Tingvall—none mentioned the
presence of Mikkelsen. However, all three men were answering questions put
to them by the board of inquiry. The subject of a passenger’s presence
on the SARATOGA’s bridge was not brought up, and they did not volunteer
the information.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, pp. 197-198.
Ibid, p. 198.
Inquiry, p. 27 (Schage testimony). The captain gives the time variously as
2:02 and 2:03, and the questioning hinges largely on whether Schage executed
his last course change too soon.
Ibid, p. 1 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 28 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, pp. 28-29 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, p. 19 (Anderson testimony).
Ibid, p. 15 (Stewart testimony).
Kemp, p. 234.
Inquiry, pp. 28-29 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, p. 12 (Stewart testimony). “Dark Bluff” is today known as
Black Point, one of at least 11 geographic features in Alaska that share the
name. [Source: Donald J. Orth (ed.), Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967 (1971 reprint), p. 142.]
Ibid, p. 29 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, p. 22 (McGinitie testimony).
Ibid, pp. 33-34 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, pp. 31-32 (Schage testimony).
Ibid, p. 4 (Weiler testimony). “[It was] just high tide when we left
Ellamar.”
Ibid, p. 13 (Stewart testimony).
Ibid, p. 1 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 7 (Hobey testimony).
Ibid, p. 13 (Stewart testimony).
Mikkelsen, p. 198.
Inquiry, p. 20 (Anderson testimony).
Mikkelsen, p. 198.
Inquiry, p. 23 (Pierson testimony).
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 2 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 24 (Pierson testimony).
Ibid, p. 3 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 7 (Hobey testimony). The transcript of testimony given weeks later
at the Seattle board of inquiry does not make it clear what the SARATOGA’s
passengers were doing while the ship’s captain and two of his three
ranking officers were casting the lead line over the ship’s rail.
Mikkelsen, p. 198.
Ibid, p. 199.
Inquiry, p. 20 (Anderson testimony).
Mikkelsen, p. 199.
Inquiry, p. 20 (Anderson testimony).
Ibid, p. 1 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 4 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 13 (Stewart testimony).
Ibid, p. 13 (Stewart testimony).
Ibid, p. 24 (Pierson testimony).
Gordon Newell (ed.) The H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest.
Seattle: Superior Publishing Company, 1966, p. 155.
Inquiry, p. 24 (Pierson testimony).
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 14 (Stewart testimony).
Ibid, p. 2 (Weiler testimony).
Ibid, p. 24 (Pierson testimony).
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 8 (Hobey testimony).
Fairbanks Weekly Times, 28 Mar. 1908. The article also states that the ELSIE
went back to the SARATOGA and returned to Valdez again at 10:00 a.m. with
“all the second-class mail and part of the ship’s crew.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 22 Mar. 1908.
Inquiry, p. 16 (Stewart testimony).
Ibid, p. 32 (Schage testimony).
Mikkelsen, p. 200.
Seward Weekly Gateway, 28 Mar. 1908.
Ibid, 22 Mar. 1908. Also, Mikkelsen p. 200.
Seward Weekly Gateway, 2 May 1908.
Ibid, 26 Sept. 1908.
Inquiry, p. 36 (Schage testimony).
Ibid. Letter from Supervising Inspector John Bermingham to L.J. Schage, 17
July 1908.
Seward Weekly Gateway, 23 May 1908.
Mikkelsen, pp. 200-201.
Sources and Bibliography
Books and Articles
Carver, John S., Jr., “The Steamship SARATOGA.”
The Sea Chest: Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, 22:1.
Kemp, Paul (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. London: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Lloyd, Steve K. “The Wreck of the S.S. EDITH, August 1915.” Alaska
History 15:1 (Spring 2000).
Orth, Donald J. (ed.), Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967 (1971 reprint).
Mikkelsen, Ejnar. Mirage in the Arctic. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.
Newell, Gordon (ed.) The H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest.
Seattle: Superior Publishing Company, 1966.
Government Archives and Publications
United States. “Investigation in the Matter of the
Wreck of the S.S. ‘Saratoga’ on March 20, 1908, near Ellamar,
Prince William Sound, Alaska.” U.S. Local Inspectors, Seattle, Bureau
of Marine Inspection and Navigation. Casualties and Case Files, 1887-1942.
File 923, Record Group 41. National Archives, Pacific NW Region, Seattle,
Washington.
United States Coast & Geodetic Survey. Annual Report of the Superintendent,
United States Coast and Geodetic Survey to the Secretary of Commerce for the
Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1917. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1917, p. 9.
Newspapers
Fairbanks Weekly Times
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seward Weekly Gateway