Have You Seen The Phantom Ship? That’s what the front page of the Sunday magazine in a Seattle newspaper said on January 30, 1910. The headline was accompanied by a line drawing of two men in a small, open boat. In the distance, a large steamship floats on the calm waters. Bearing down on the men is a ghostly, vaporous hull of an unidentified vessel.
The story relates the tale that in the previous year, several mariners had reported seeing a “phantom ship” in the waters off the west coast of Vancouver Island near the lighthouse at Pachena Point, and they also reportedly could “vaguely see human forms clinging to her masts and rigging.”
To many the “phantom” looked a lot like a ship called the Valencia, what some would come to regard as the “Titanic of the West Coast.” And those “human forms” looked a lot like the countless women and children who had clung to the masts and rigging in the Valenica’s infamous final moments.
The Valencia was a 252-foot long passenger steamer owned by the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, an enterprise that moved people and freight between the Sand Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest starting in the late 1800s. The ship had been on its way from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia and then Seattle when it ran aground late southeast of Bamfield, British Columbia on the stormy night of Monday, January 22, 1906.
“He hit a rock”
Captain Oscar Johnson was in command of the vessel.
“He hit a rock,” said the late maritime historian and author David Grover. “And that rock was only about a quarter mile off the coast of Vancouver Island,” Grover continued. “He had overshot the entrance to the Strait that far.”
A man in his twenties named Frank Lehn, who was freight clerk aboard the Valencia and who survived the wreck, later told an inquiry panel what he had witnessed.
“The ship began to break up almost at once, and the women and children were lashed to the rigging, above the reach of the sea,” Lehn told investigators. “It was a pitiful sight to see frail women, wearing only night dresses, with bare feet, on the freezing ratlines, trying to shield children in their arms from the icy wind and rain.”
“Screams of women and children mingled in an awful chorus with the shrieking of the wind, the dash of the rain, and the roar of the breakers,” Lehn continued. “As the passengers rushed on deck, they were carried away in bunches by the huge waves that seemed as high as the ship’s mastheads.”
Tragedy Begets Myths and Spooky Stories
After a horrific day and a half of failed rescue attempts and heavy weather, the Valencia broke apart and sank just off shore around midday on Wednesday, January 24, 1906. Only 37 men survived. All told, at least 117 people died, including all the women and children who were aboard. Victims were eventually recovered from the sea and from the shore. Many were never identified and were buried in mass graves in Victoria and Seattle.
With such a great loss of life, it’s not unusual that a lot of spooky stories about the Valencia circulated in the days, months and even decades after it was lost.
Rumors of a lifeboat full of skeletons in a cave, and reports of sightings of the phantom ship repeatedly running aground helped make the legend grow in the months and years after the tragedy. The shocking discovery of a relic from the Valencia nearly three decades after the wreck cemented the ship’s dramatic loss permanently into Pacific maritime mythology.
Silver Lining
Though the loss of the Valencia was a tragedy, it was not without a silver lining.
Clay Evans of Victoria, BC knows his Valencia history. Evans has served as interim CEO of the Maritime Museum of BC, and he spent nearly 20 years of his career with the Canadian Coast Guard stationed in Bamfield, BC near where the ship was lost.
Evans says that major infrastructure for the Canadian Coast Guard and the U.S. Coast Guard was created on both sides of the Strait of Juan de Fuca as a direct result of the disaster.
“If there’s any enduring positive legacy, the tragedy did lead to the establishment of a life-saving station at Waadah Island which became Neah Bay, which still exists today” on the American side. Evans said. “And, of course, the life-saving station at Bamfield and other ones on the west coast of Vancouver Island, too.”