Ship of Lost Souls:
The Tragic Wreck of the Steamship Valencia
by Rod Scher (Lyons Press)
The book is a history of the SS Vallencia, a ship that sank in the early 20th Century in the “Graveyard of the Pacific” a range of the Pacific Ocean at the U.S. Canada border where the problems start at where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean in Washington State and continue northward to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The story is not one that I encountered previously in my marine disaster tourism (shout out to BrickImmortar). I think that the reason for this is, as the author points out, the Valencia represents at least two different modalities of disasters happening simultaneously, making it harder to align its narrative with stated or unstated theses of this brand of edutainment.
The Valencia was transporting cargo and passengers from San Fransisco to Seattle. The ship went off course, due to bad weather in general and errors of the captain in particular. It hit a reef and grounded. Despite how close it was to shore (less than an Olympic-sized pool. Not lengthwise, but widthwise), and despite a variety of rescue attempts from different parties, most everyone on the Valencia died. Then come the inquiries.
The author approaches the material in a relaxed tone, without becoming unserious. He is conspicuously even-handed in assessing fault, avoiding the accusatory hot-take by providing the most favorable evidence for the frustrated rescuers.
The book fixates on odd counterfactuals in a if-wishes-were-horses sort of way. Would things have been different if maritime safety standards…existed then? Yes. In the same way that Aquaman would too have helped. I think that the attempt is to compose a broader intellectual history about life-saving technologies in a marine context. It comes off as unfocused.
The point where wide-angle lens works well is in the study of the different investigations into the disaster, how they happened and what their results were. The author explains the people involved in each, and while biography is not destiny it is a useful frame, particularly in this case where it is possible to compare the different results from the different bodies.
The book is a great read, albeit of circumspect interest, but ideally crafted for the subject that it is.
My thanks to the author, Rod Scher, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Lyons Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 