Breaking Titanic

Prologue

The Loss of SS Pacific (1875)

None of the witnesses and perpetrators of the collision of two American vessels - the steam-powered paddle ship Pacific1 and the sailing ship Orpheus - on the stormy evening of 4 November 1875 at first thought that it could lead to any serious consequences.

Owned by the Goodall, Nelson & Perkins company, Pacific made a regular voyage along the Pacific coast of North America between California and British Columbia, heading for San Francisco with a variety of commodity and food cargo in its hold, including oats and potatoes, barrels of cranberries and even six trained horses, as well as $79,220 in gold in the form of sand and ingots. It was already a rather old and worn-out double-decker with a gross tonnage of under 900 tons, length of 223ft (6m) and just over 33ft (10m) wide with an oak hull on copper and iron nails. A 500hp steam engine, powered by two boilers, drove the side paddle wheels.

The paddle-wheel steamer Pacific. (Drawing by an unknown artist from the book Lewis & Dryden's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest/ed. by E.W. Wright. (The Lewis & Dryden Printing Company, Portland, Oregon, 1895), p. 224)

Built in 1850 at the William H. Brown shipyard in New York,2 Pacific was immediately sent to the West Coast after extensive gold deposits were discovered in the Sacramento River Valley in Northern California and mass mining began, known as the California Gold Rush. Over two decades of active operation, the ship changed several owners and was fairly battered by storms; in July 1861, as a result of hitting submerged rocks, it ran aground on the Columbia River, from where it was removed a couple of weeks later and, with the water pumped out, was towed to a dock for repairs. In August 1873, Pacific underwent a major overhaul in San Francisco, where a new, more powerful steam engine was installed in it. According to some authors, the repairs were purely cosmetic in nature, and in fact the ship was in a condition far from satisfactory, despite the certificate of suitability for further seafaring activities issued by the shipping inspectorate.3

The stern view of Pacific taken from Fort Tongass, Tongass Island, US Military District of Alaska (newly acquired by the US from the Russian Empire), 1868. In the foreground is an M-1841 mountain howitzer. Photographer Eadweard Muybridge. (Public domain)

Canadian publicist and writer, editor and owner of the British Colonist magazine David W. Higgins devoted a chapter to the loss of Pacific in his book of memoirs, The Mystic Spring, and Other Tales of Western Life (1904); in particular, it contains the following eloquent lines:

She was innately rotten, but the paint and putty thickly daubed on covered much of the rottenness, as paint and powder hide the wrinkles and crow's feet of a society belle, and scarcely anyone was aware of the ship's real condition, although she was regarded as unsafe.4

In May 1875, in connection with the outbreak of a new phase of the gold rush in the Cassiar Mountains in British Columbia and the Yukon, the steamer was assigned to serve the Victoria-Puget Sound-San Francisco line. On 4 November at 9.30 a.m. (with a slight delay), Pacific left Victoria harbour under the command of 34-year-old Captain Jefferson Davis Howell, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, a Civil War veteran and already quite an experienced skipper. According to the testimony of see-off people from the wharf, the upper deck was black from the crowds of people who had gathered on it; a considerable proportion of them were gold miners who were leaving Cassiar before the harsh Canadian winter came. The official data says there were 275 passengers and crew members on board, but, as in the case of SS Admiral Nakhimov in 1986, this figure was most likely underestimated, and significantly. It is known that more than twenty passengers were taken on board by the purser right on the sailing day, but their names have never been established. The second-class passenger manifest simply listed forty-one 'Chinamen', again without names. Higgins believed that the real number of people could have been up to 500.5

Jefferson Davis Howell, the master of Pacific. (Lewis & Dryden's Marine History ., p. 223)

Yet, the Pacific's main lifesaving equipment consisted of only five standard lifeboats with a total capacity of 160 people.

It left the port waters with a noticeable list to starboard, apparently due to overload or due to a shift of coal in the bunkers. The captain decided to correct the list in a novel way, by ordering the pumping of water into the port-side lifeboats.

It can be said that the weather upon leaving Victoria was 'normally bad' for this region and season (as weather conditions were described when the cruise ferry Estonia cast off in September 1994). Pacific steamed safely down the Strait of Juan de Fuca and passed Cape Flattery, in north-west Washington, at 4 p.m.

Meanwhile, the 1,067-ton Boston clipper Orpheus was sailing from San Francisco on an intersecting course to load coal in Nanaimo. It was drizzling, and a fresh south wind in the stern helped the sailboat develop a speed of up to 12 knots. At 9.30 p.m., the Orpheus' captain, Charles Sawyer, left the bridge in the charge of his second mate, James G. Allen, and went below to his cabin to work on the chart. Around 10 p.m. he:

heard the second mate tell the man at the wheel to starboard his helm. I looked up at the compass over my head and saw that the ship's head was rapidly coming up toward the north-west. I immediately went on deck and asked the officer what was the matter, and he said there was a light on the port bow.6

This approaching light turned out to be Pacific. A warning whistle was sounded from it, indicating that the ship's bridge crew was also aware of the danger of a collision. The next moment, according to Captain Sawyer's recollections, it:

struck us on the starboard side in the wake of the main hatch. The blow was a light one. She had evidently stopped her engines and was backing and gave us a glancing blow, for she bounded off and again struck us at the main topmast back stays, breaking the chain plates. She then bounded off and struck us at the mizzen topmast chain plates, carrying away the back stays and bumpkin, main and main topsail braces, leaving me comparatively a wreck on the starboard side.7

For the next ten to fifteen minutes, as the captain of Orpheus stated at the investigation, he was completely absorbed in finding out the extent of the damage to his ship and organising initial repairs; all hands were called up on deck. 'When, after I found I was not seriously damaged [moreover, a fragment of the Pacific's bow was later discovered entangled in the Orpheus' rigging - Author], I looked for the steamer, I just saw a light on our starboard quarter, and when I looked again it was gone.'8

It can be speculated that neither Sawyer nor his officers imagined that the situation on board the ocean liner as a result of this accident would take any threatening turn (besides, it was Pacific that crashed into them, not they into it). But it is unlikely that the two ships could have moved a significant distance away from each other in the specified period of time - and it is hard to believe that no one on Orpheus saw or heard the madness happening on the deck of Pacific and the change in the position of its hull in the water.

However, everything indeed seemed calm for the first couple of minutes. First-class passenger Henry F. Jelly, a 22-year-old civil engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway from Ontario, was awakened by a slight jar and heard the engine telegraphs on the bridge ringing 'Stop' and 'Full Astern' orders. When he stepped out on deck, Pacific was under way again. Jelly learned about the collision with an unknown vessel and even saw its lights on the starboard quarter. The passengers were told - as is customary - that everything was fine and there was no cause for alarm.

The young man returned to his stateroom and was getting back into bed when he felt the ship giving a sudden lurch and then heard an ominous sound of water ingress. Having run on to the deck for the second time, he no longer had any doubt: the ship was sinking. He saw Captain Howell and asked him, 'Where do you keep your blue lights?' The answer was: 'In the pilot house.' Rushing there, Jelly discovered that there was no one at the helm, while the engines were still working. In his words, he burned from four to six emergency lights, or rockets; if this is true, they should have been seen on the receding Orpheus.

Jelly then aided a group of men who tried to lower the boats, but this turned out to be an almost impossible task: some of the life (death?) boats were filled with water, others were missing oars, and discipline was deteriorating rapidly as the situation became tense.9

In his interviews, Jelly mentioned the unfortunate Chinese huddled on the deck under the funnel, and also talked about an attempt by a gang of several crew members to seize one of the lifeboats. Higgins met with a survivor and also interviewed him, as a result of which the following passage appeared in his book:

They [the Chinese] were among the first...