The Final Voyage of the «Princess Sophia»

Bill Waiser is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
and the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History of Prince
Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western
Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.  His

In the late evening of November 11, 1918, a makeshift morgue ship,
carrying some of the 350 bodies from the worst maritime disaster in the
history of the Pacific Northwest, quietly docked at a Vancouver pier.
Two weeks earlier, the Princess Sophia, only hours after leaving
Skagway, Alaska, for Vancouver, ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef in the
Lynn Canal. Helplessly stranded on the rocks for 40 hours, the steamer
sank during a worsening snowstorm, taking passengers and crew to a cold,
watery grave. At the time, the sorry episode was largely neglected,
thanks to the end of the Great War and the beginning of another world
crisis, the Spanish influenza pandemic. In fact, until recently, the
event had the distinction of being one the most neglected disasters in
20th-century North American history.

The Final Voyage of the Princess Sophia is the second of two books
about the catastrophe published in the past decade. Whereas the earlier
study, The Sinking of the Princess Sophia (1990), examined the event
within the larger context of the history of the Canadian North, The
Final Voyage of the Princess Sophia challenges the 1919 inquiry finding
that the loss of the Sophia was attributable to the peril of the sea.
The authors question, for example, whether the accident was avoidable:
when the Sophia left Skagway, it sped south through the narrow Lynn
Canal, not only in the dark but also during a blizzard. They also
question whether the number of dead could have been minimized: while the
Sophia sat on Vanderbilt reef, the captain refused to transfer
passengers to smaller rescue ships in favor of waiting out the storm.
These kinds of questions, according to the authors, were never
adequately addressed at the time—nor will they likely ever be, since
Canadian Pacific, the steamship’s owner, has kept no records of the
disaster.

It is easy to understand why the loss of the Princess Sophia remains
one the Pacific Northwest’s greatest tragedies.