Disasters of the Century | Season 3 | Episode 36 | The Princess Sophia Sinking

the story of the princess sophia is one largely forgotten even by the people its loss most greatly affected on october 23 1918 the canadian pacific steamer princess sophia left skagway with 75 crewmen and 268 passengers those on board could not know that they would never reach their destination [Music] [Music] wednesday october 23 1918 the canadian pacific steamship the princess sophia pulls into the port of skagway alaska after its journey north from vancouver canada the harbor is packed with passengers trying to get bookings for the return trip south to vancouver and victoria and seattle washington for many it is an annual pilgrimage marking the end of the summer season in the yukon it was a seasonal society in fact what happened was people would come north every spring as soon as the water started to run in the yukon river they would work like crazy through the land of the midnight sun and then as the snow came and as the river started to freeze many of them hundreds of them would leave it's been 20 years since murray eads has traveled south he and his wife lula may one of the north's most famous dancehall queens own the successful royal alexandria hotel in dawson over the summer lulu may has had several premonitions of death in icy northern waters before the trip she and murray draw up a will that includes five thousand dollars worth of jewelry that lulu may brings on board luna may was from kentucky and she hoofed her way into the yukon and trailer 98 and she was a singer allegedly in the saloons now the hoi polloi sniffed at people like that in dawson if they were not all totally scarlet women they were a bit pink around the edges but that didn't bother a little to me at all [Music] 31 year old eileen winchell has had similar premonitions about her own death before heading south for her health she asks husband l winchell to bury her beside her mother in california if anything should happen probably the great love story that came out sophia was eileen and niall winshaw he was a minor and he was sending her back to her home in southern california picked the sapphire because it was safe and comfortable forty-year-old william o'brien travels with his wife sadie and their five children there were people like the o'brien family who represented the cream of the crop in dawson city the future of the place and they were leaving the place for forever by the fall of 1918 there were a lot of people saying goodbye [Music] 32 year old john maskel a well-known entertainer in dawson is on his way to england to marry his fiancee several passengers are joining the fight in europe arriving in skagway without reservations private oris mcqueen misses three boats before being lucky enough to get space aboard the princess sophia with so many heading south the cpr has erected makeshift berths in some of the sophia's staterooms normally the passenger rate or load was about 250 people so they helped it by 50 because of demand with so many passengers to load the princess sophia is three hours behind schedule when she steams out of skagway harbor at 10 10 p.m on wednesday october 23 1918 originally designed as a coal burner the sophia has been converted to oil which burns more cleanly sophia was designed for the rough-and-tumble of the north coast she was about 240 feet long 2300 tons and very wide in the beam she was 40 feet across and she was recognized on the coast as the best it was people would deliberately choose to write on the sapphire tonight the sophia has 343 people on board including a crew of 65 it is snowing slightly and 66 year old ship captain leonard locke is eager to stay ahead of any approaching storm he uh was fairly austere fairly quiet not particularly loved not particularly disliked by his men he uh he was a stickler for trying to stick to the schedule which of course the cpr demanded 20 year old wireless operator david robinson has been on the sofia since may earning his license just two years earlier during the loading of crew in vancouver one crew member has nearly missed this trip altogether arriving late from a dance frank goss gets on board just before the sophia pulls out for its journey north now as the ship's second mate frank goss works the deck as the sophia heads down the lin canal a huge fjord stretching 140 kilometers south to juneau and beyond captain loch of the prince of so far had been up and down this coast for many years i mean he knew it well he knew its intricacies and knew its challenges and but he also knew as all of them did that when the storms came along they changed the dynamic in the area that dynamic does change less than an hour out of port when blinding snow and powerful winds overtake the sophia from the north still it is not unusual and captain locke does not order the ship to slow down they said that luck usually sailed the canal at about 11 knots in bad weather and snow maybe nine unless well she was doing 12 knots or better in 1918 radar is still a thing of the future in bad weather navigators use a compass to pinpoint known positions and the echo of the ship's whistle to estimate the distance from shore on this particular night perhaps the howling wind distorts the echo of the ship's whistle or heavy waves push the ship off course whatever the reason at 2 10 a.m on october 24th 1918 the princess sophia is on a collision course with a reef known as the vanderbilt and really what it is is is two piles of rock uh side by side and and so there's a bit of a channel in the middle of them now imagine you're in a very large vessel it's going going at a fairly fairly rapid pace and when it hits rock it stops insulin you can imagine the scraping noise and the grinding that it makes people are being thrown from their bunks people who are standing up or crashing to the ground and she was wedged in a crevasse now the the reef was the top of an old volcano that went about 900 feet down into the bottom of the canal very deep barely out of the water at high tide about 12 feet out in the water at low tide captain lock immediately orders the lifeboats but the rising storm makes their launching much too hazardous besides with the ship wedged firmly in the rocks there is no immediate danger fortunately sophia was a double hull there was water in the lower part of her but power wasn't affected the engines weren't affected so she had heat and light and she was almost upright she was stuck up in this route almost straight up and down wireless operator david robinson alerts the canadian pacific office in juneau 30 kilometers to the south boats are immediately organized to go to the reef and remove passengers from the stricken sophia by the time the first ships arrive at the reef on thursday morning october 24th skies have brightened somewhat the low tide of pre-dawn is rising but not enough to launch lifeboats safely captain locke decides to wait for the next high tide hopeful that the storm will dissipate by then the sight of rescue boats close by helps calm passengers on the deck of the sophia including murray and little may eads who share a mutual fear of the sea the rescue boats come out to vanderbilt reef and they start sailing around and around around vanderbilt reef and the ship is there and the ship is stuck and the vessels can get close enough they can see people waving at them from the deck they can see people walking by and holding hands they can hear people playing the piano unfortunately by afternoon high tide the storm has intensified more ships arrive but none can get close enough to offer assistance realizing that nothing can be done until morning captain lock tells rescue ships to seek shelter from the pounding waves meanwhile cp headquarters in victoria sends another steamer the princess alice to pick up the sophia's passengers once they are delivered safely to juno but when the time comes for the princess alice to take sophia's passengers on board it will be under very different circumstances friday october 25th 1918 by 4 am the cpr steamship the princess sophia has been stranded on vanderbilt reef off the alaskan coast for more than 24 hours the storm that has lasted just as long sends huge swells crashing against her beleaguered hulk in the pre-dawn hours life jackets are given out and lifeboats assigned as passengers are taken through evacuation procedures in preparation for high tide but it is another false start another postponement conditions are too rough and although the sophia situation is precarious all the captains agree that her passengers and crew are safer staying aboard some passengers such as private oris mcqueen write letters to loved ones describing the situation mcqueen wrote a letter to his mother and it was very cheerful totally optimistic he expected we're going to be taken off and take it to general decks are dry and this wreck has all the markings of a movie stage setting all we lack is the hero and the vampire we are mighty lucky we are not all buried in the sea water others are not so optimistic passenger james masko writes his last will and testament leaving everything to the fiance he believes he will never see again coastal newspapers carry the first reports of the accident and most are optimistic for an early rescue as long as the weather doesn't get worse but the weather does get worse with winds increasing to speeds as high as 160 kilometers per hour the rescue ship the cedar has been by the sophia's side most of the day but now even she must find shelter sophia's skipper captain leonard locke agrees to contact her when the afternoon tide begins to rise 4 50 pm elwood miller wireless operator on board the cedar receives an urgent message from david robinson his counterpart aboard the princess sophia one of his messages said come quick there's water in my room so tremendous waves must have been battering the side of the ship sweeping up over the deck and into his uh into the operating room is the princess sophia is sitting firmly between these rocks the tide comes along and lifts it a little bit so it's not as firmly any sitting as firmly anymore the wind spins the rock spins the ship on the rocks and it tears the bottom out of the vessel all of a sudden the princess sophia has no no hull anymore the bottoms are ripped out water is rushing in the sophia is pushed back off of the reef and the ship starts to go down after several false alarms many passengers and crew are caught off guard some are dressed for evacuation but many are below deck taking shelter from the storm as the sophia slides into deep water heavy oil empties into the sea from the ship's hole icy sea water rushes in flooding the engine and boiler rooms the boilers explode killing passengers and trapping many more in the lower decks the people on board at this point now do panic they try to get the lifeboats off they jump overboard themselves doing anything they can to save their lives the dying moments of the of the sapphire must have been quite horrible the noise the wind the howling the snow the darkness despair some people had life jackets on when they found their bodies some that later on they found some of them children still in their bunks so obviously law could not amount to great evacuate take to the boats because it was pointless but this time the water was smashing over the decks anybody who'd gone up and died would have been washed away just like that to stay on board means certain death but chances in the sea are not much better for those who jump the water is so bitterly cold it is painful but that is not the worst of it when the ship tore apart um it released a whole bunch of bunker fuel bunker fuel was its ballast and when we the evidence of these people jumped overboard trying to save themselves they jumped not in just to the cold water they jumped into an oil slick and you can imagine what it's like to jump into freezing cold water you would gasp and if when you gasped you got a mouthful of bunker fuel you would suffocate you would you would die instantly from that your lungs would be coated with oil at 5 20 p.m wireless operator david robinson sends his last desperate message this is a man who's sitting by his machine realizing that he is the only contact between the people on this ship and the rest of of the world and he's telling them that the ship has turned and the disaster is imminent saying the ship is going down and i'll be dying the cedar battles heavy seas for a half an hour trying to reach the reef but is finally forced to turn back for the princess sophia it is already too late saturday morning october 26 1918 as rescue ships approach vanderbilt reef visibility has improved enough to see its craggy surface the rescue ships came out from where they were hiding to sort of out from their shelters to sort of rescue the people and they came back and all they saw was 20 feet of the mast of the princess sophia the ship was gone for three hours the ship searched the area for survivors but find no one alive or dead then one ship finds the body of a woman in a lifeboat it will be the first of many found some floating in the water they found some washed up on islands they found smashed lifeboats the lifeboats they said obviously had been ripped from their davis they hadn't been lowered they'd been torn away when sophia went into the water one flotation device is found with the bodies of four women tied to it search parties find capsized lifeboats and six more bodies 50 kilometers from vanderbilt wreath dancehall queen lula may eats is found with her bag of jewelry still around her neck [Music] government official bill o'brien and his entire family are lost to the frigid waters there were very very emotional stories saying that o'brien's body had been found and he was clutching his youngest son well he wasn't they found the son's body separate they found o'brien a long time later washed up in the beach the body of second mate frank goss who just made the voyage out of vancouver is found on a rocky shore not far from a lifeboat one of the interpretations at the time was that he actually made it to shore slipped on the rocks banged his head and then died of hypothermia sort of having made it to safety by sunday evening october 27th 162 bodies have been recovered only two have died of drowning the rest have been suffocated by the oil that covers them the cpr steamer the princess alice originally sent to collect rescued passengers now carries the corpses south to vancouver victoria and seattle dubbed the ship of sorrow it arrives in vancouver harbor on armistice day november 11 1918. two blocks away people were singing and dancing celebrating the end of the morning it was a very strange situation the great sorrow at one place and jubilation close by there are many bodies still missing including that of eileen winchell miner al winchell hasn't forgotten his promise to bury his wife with her family in california he was devastated as you could well imagine and he felt he had to honor a pledge so he actually hired a diver to go down onto the ship and do to see if they could find more bodies while he doesn't find eileen winchell the diver does uncover more bodies trapped below in 1919 the cpr hires its own divers who retrieve 86 bodies many of them found in the ship's social hall in the summer of 1919 divers finally bring eileen winchell's body to the surface her husband fulfills his pledge at the cost of his entire life savings john maskel's last will and testament found in his coat pocket arrives at his fiancee's home six months after his death private oris mcqueen's letter is also found and sent to his mother many in the northwest blame sophia captain leonard locke for the deaths of his passengers and crew but most fellow mariners believe they would have done the same now the reality is when you look at it more closely is that you can't really blame him particularly for the failure to take the passengers off the rescue ships could not get close enough to run a line across they could not get close enough or the rescue ships would have been bashed against vanderbilt reef if you lower the lifeboats down it probably would have been tipped upside down in a matter of seconds and anybody who was sitting in it would have been smashed into the rocks people including the people in the rescue vessels did not believe that princess sophia was at imminent danger they were wrong and people died as a consequence a government inquiry commissioned within weeks of the disaster agrees and they came back and said we looked over really carefully and this is a maritime disaster they happen no malfeasance no deliberate intent on anybody's part it just was one of those things that happened and it's a tragedy canada's east and west coasts have had their share of tragic maritime disasters today on the west coast the princess sophia still rests at the bottom of the lin canal its sinking is the worst shipping disaster in pacific coast history and yet the story is all but forgotten [Music] it takes hundreds of people of very important people out of the out of the economy and society of the yukon and the interior of alaska and the pacific northwest generally ultimately there was nobody there to keep the story alive or very few people there to keep the story alive [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Bad Day HQ

Views: 52,978

Keywords: true crime documentary, murder documentary, discovery crime stories, true crime stories, natural disaster documentary, disaster history channel, disaster discovery, The Princess Sophia Sinking, Ian Michael Coulson, Bruce Edwards, Jason Malloy, Chris Triffo, Disasters of the Century, first World War, Princess Sophia, sinking ship, ship disaster, Heavy winds, snow, poor visibility, rescue, Vanderbilt Reef

Id: PEInXOncVKY

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021