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Reviews
The Unforgiving Coast: Maritime Disasters of the Pacific Northwest
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By David Grover
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2002. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 224 pages. $19.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Harvey Steele
Portland, Oregon
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The breakup of the shuttle Columbia reminds us that seemingly
dependable systems can break down during an otherwise routine voyage.
For several hundred years, the Pacific Northwest Coast has been
an arena for such unpredictable accidents. David Grover's The
Unforgiving Coast describes nine disasters — from the
1906 grounding of the Valencia to the 1936 destruction of
the Iowa— that occurred along 429 miles of coastline
between the California state line and Vancouver, British Columbia.
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1
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In a useful introductory chaper, "Events and Milieus," Grover reviews the causes of shipwrecks. In the first third of the twentieth century, the voyage of a vessel from harbor to harbor was normally a safe, patterned activity. On the Pacific Coast it was a little less safe than elsewhere; but even when an accident occurred, the loss of life was usually minimal. Most of the occurrences described in this study, however, were deadly, especially the most recent, in which the American freighter Iowa was caught in a gale crossing the Columbia River Bar outbound on January 12, 1936. The entire crew of thirty-four was lost, with only eight bodies recovered. |
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Grover is particularly incisive and readable in his analysis of the elements that sunk the Iowa. He concludes that Captain Edgar L. Yates "had covered perhaps 90 percent of the ground he needed to cover to reach both the safety of deep water and eternal vindication for his fateful decision." (p. 186). The adjective unforgiving certainly applies in this case. |
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Ships then and now operate in a milieu where nature and human fallibility conspire to ravage them. Navigation rules have developed to aid the courts in finding fault rather than helping navigators avoid accidents. Equipment was sometimes complex and barely maintained in the early twentieth century, and seamen also had to contend with nature itself: seventy-foot waves, ice-covered decks and equipment, shifting and narrow channels, atmospheric conditions that could distort perception of the direction from which a sound was coming (or that shut off sound altogether), fog so thick that it obscured the main deck from the captain and navigator on the bridge, and rock and sand outcrops that extended out into the ocean. The statement often attributed to Homer is correct: humans tempt the gods when they plow these green and undulating fields. |
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In nearly all of Grover's disasters, decision-making by the captain was a prime determinant. The captain of the J.A. Chanslor (1919) had lost all sense of position when he hit the rocks near Cape Blanco. The Santa Clara's captain (1915) neglected to use the hand-steering system when the mechanical steering gear failed. The Queen (1904) had a long history of minor scrapes, yet the loss of life when it wrecked was linked to lifeboat inadequacies that should have been corrected. The Francis H. Leggett (1913) broke up in a gale north of the Columbia River Bar when the captain reacted incorrectly to a shift of the deck cargo. The Valencia (1906) hit a jagged reef on the British Columbia coast after faulty navigation. In two cases, the captain could not be blamed: the Mimi disaster (1913) was probably caused by a salvage company's decision to remove one-third of the ballast; and the South Coast, a venerable but possibly unseaworthy vessel, was completely lost at sea in 1930, with few traces of the wreck. |
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Grover is at his best in describing the two Columbia River Bar accidents that befell the Iowa and the Rosecrans (1913), a tanker loaded with eighteen thousand barrels of oil that hit the outer edges of Peacock Spit (thought to be the lightship). The captain compounded his navigational blunder by dropping both anchors upon contact, making it impossible for the vessel to work in closer to the beach for rescue. All but three of a thirty-three-man crew were lost. |
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Aboard these ships, the captain was supreme. The working conditions were often debilitating: forty years of intermittent boredom and strain for the captain and worse for the officers and crew. With so much riding on one person, even a small error in judgment could be magnified into tragedy. With grim and dramatic detail, Grover deftly shows the human consequences of such miscalculations. |
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Most previous books on shipwrecks have not analyzed the events themselves with the particularity that Grover provides. He has a clear grasp of the mechanical causes of disaster but also addresses the human element, including the small acts of heroism that often occurred during the last stages of the event. He demonstrates, with wide-ranging scholarship, that any attempt to oversimplify the episode, as often occurred in the post-wreck hearings, usually fails. |
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Each disaster is illustrated with photographs of the ship, in many cases taken soon after the wreck. Most of the photographs are indistinct and lack contrast, but, considering the events they record, that may be inevitable. The map of disaster locations is inadequate, but that is a minor quibble. The Unforgiving Coast is a valuable collection of prose snapshots of maritime life and death during the first third of the twentieth century. |
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