More Than 100 Died When the S.S. Valencia Wrecked in the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’—Learn Why This Stretch of Coastline Has Claimed Thousands of Ships

Captain Oscar Marcus Johnson didn’t know where his ship was.

It was January 22, 1906, and the S.S. Valencia had set out on its voyage from San Francisco to Seattle two days earlier. Since then, conditions had worsened, and visibility was poor. To attempt to find a landmark, the captain ordered the ship to take a course that would bring it nearer to shore. It was a fatal mistake.

Not long before midnight, the Valencia struck a rocky reef off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Johnson ordered the ship run aground, but it caught on rocks less than 400 feet from shore.

What followed was a slow-motion tragedy as the Valencia sank over the course of almost 40 hours. The ship proved yet another casualty of the treacherous “Graveyard of the Pacific.”

SS Valencia: The Ghost Ship that Haunts the Graveyard of the Pacific

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After the ship wedged in the rocks, those aboard attempted to launch lifeboats, but they capsized, tossed by the rough waves. In the panic, some boats didn’t launch successfully. In one case, a passenger accidentally cut the ropes on one side of the boat.

“Like a shot the stern of the boat fell to the water’s edge, leaving the bow hanging in the air,” Valencia freight clerk Frank Lehm recalled. “The occupants were spilled out like pebbles from a glass and fell with shrieks and groans into the boiling surf.”

The other passengers and crew fared little better. A handful of survivors from the lifeboats reached shore and eventually managed to alert others to the ship’s plight—after navigating a 100-foot cliff and trekking through unpopulated brushland, among other challenges. However, rescue boats couldn’t get near the Valencia in the tempestuous sea, and the steep cliffs along shore made an approach from land equally impossible. A few people survived after fleeing the ship on life rafts, but dozens remained on the ship.

“Over the next 36 hours, terrified people huddled on the hurricane deck or clung to the rigging as huge waves slowly broke the ship apart,” writes HistoryLink’s Daryl C. McClary. “Finally, as rescuers watched, horrified and powerless, a huge wave swept the remaining passengers and crew into the sea.”

Only 37 survived. Though the number of deaths is still contested, historians believe up to 136 people died, including all the women and children who had been aboard.

The Valencia wrecked in the northern reaches of the area referred to as the “Graveyard of the Pacific,” the stretch of treacherous coastline between Oregon’s Tillamook Bay and Canada’s Vancouver Island. Unpredictable weather and currents propelled the ships toward the foggy, rocky coastline, and there were few places to shelter from storms. Approximately 2,000 vessels have sunk in the area since 1792, the Oregonian’s Jamie Hale and Mark Graves report.

Most of the graveyard’s shipwrecks concentrated where the powerful Columbia River feeds into the Pacific, further south than the Valencia's resting place. In fact, on one May day in 1880, a sudden gale rose up in nearby Cape Disappointment, and within one hour, 200 fishermen drowned, according to maritime historian James A. Gibbs in Pacific Graveyard.

“This great battleground, where the mighty Columbia meets the surging Pacific head-on, is a constant turmoil of sand, silt and waterpower,” Gibbs wrote.

Weather, waves, swift currents and a shifting sandbar made the area particularly hazardous, even for experienced captains. Government projects have helped make the channel deeper and more predictable, and sailors now have better navigational technology, but traversing the Columbia Bar remains tricky.

The Valencia’s fate convinced the Canadian government to invest in better rescue infrastructure. After the wreck, it commissioned the Dominion Lifesaving Trail, now known as the West Coast Trail, and the Pachena Point Lighthouse, and committed to grow its Coast Guard stations.

“The true legacy of the Valencia is not only 126 lives lost, but the countless saved by the lessons learned,” writes the Seattle Times’ Nicole Brodeur.

Teresa Nowakowski | | READ MORE

Teresa Nowakowski is a print and multimedia journalist based in Chicago. They cover history, arts and culture, science, travel, food and other topics.