Plans afoot to raise wrecked ship that may have left B.C. with millions in gold aboard | 24CA News
Nearly 150 years after it left Victoria, B.C., for a closing doomed voyage, preparations are being made to lift the wreck of the SS Pacific.
The 225-foot paddlewheeler went down off the coast of Washington state on the wet night time of Nov. 4, 1875, en route from Victoria to San Francisco, and is believed to have been carrying gold mud now price thousands and thousands from B.C.’s Cassiar gold rush.
Read extra:
New Titanic footage reveals particulars of shipwreck in highest-ever high quality
Read More
Tragedy struck because the ship neared Cape Flattery, which juts into the Pacific Ocean from the northwest tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
“There was another ship travelling in the opposite direction, the Orpheus, and records aren’t exactly clear what happened because not many survived this accident, but it seems that the Orpheus came right in the path of the Pacific, and the Pacific ended up scraping right up against the other vessel,” Jacyln Pollock, curator of collections at Vancouver’s Maritime Museum, defined.
“The Orpheus didn’t seem to have been damaged too much, it continued on with its run and didn’t actually know the Pacific was sinking, but in the end, the Pacific appears to have been split in two and went down fairly quickly.”
More than 325 persons are believed to have died within the collision, whereas only one or two persons are thought to have survived.
Last month, a Seattle firm known as Rockfish Inc. secured the unique salvage rights to the wreck in a U.S. court docket, after years of fruitless searching lastly paid off.
“The state of preservation of this wreck is on par with any of the greatest shipwreck finds in the world,” Rockfish president Jeff Hummel stated.
It’s been an extended hunt. Hummel has been looking for the Pacific since 1993.
Five years in the past, his crew lastly had a breakthrough.
“Eventually, I found a commercial fisherman who brought up some old coal,” he stated. “And so, I was able to get it chemically analyzed at a laboratory up in Alberta.”
That evaluation revealed a match to the Pacific’s cargo, massively narrowing the search space Rockfish was concentrating on.
In the summer season of 2021, Rockfish situated a goal it believed to be the wreck with sonar sweeps. Subsequent surveys this summer season and fall revealed a particles area and wreckage about 70 metres in size matching the configuration of the Pacific, together with what seemed to be paddlewheels.
The firm deployed camera-equipped distant submarines in September and November, and retrieved artifacts from the wreck, together with hearth brick and items of wooden.
The crew is aiming to get salvage operations off the bottom subsequent yr.
While the potential gold treasure contained inside the wreckage has captured a lot of the headlines, Pollock is hopeful treasures of historic curiosity might be retrieved as effectively.
Until now, just about all that remained of the misplaced ship is a scrap of wooden that managed to drift again to Victoria.
Scratched into the wooden is an eerie closing message from one of many wreck’s victims, studying “all lost” and signed with the identify S.P. Moody.
“It is his last message to the world – and the only record from someone who perished in that accident — detailing what they were feeling at the time,” Pollock stated.
The salvage of the wreck then holds the potential to flesh out one other chapter within the Pacific coast’s lengthy and lethal historical past of maritime disasters.
“This area, from about the Oregon coast to the top of Vancouver Island, it’s known as the graveyard of the Pacific,” Pollock stated.
“Over the past few centuries, there have been over 2,000 shipwrecks and over 700 lives lost.”
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
