Anchorage Daily News

A century ago this year, an iron-hulled, three-masted sailing ship departed the Southeast Alaska fishing town of Wrangell laden with 5,260 cases of salmon.

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Doubtless no one aboard the ship, which carried 21 crewmen plus 117 mostly Asian cannery workers heading home after the fishing season, imagined their voyage to San Francisco would turn into the worst tragedy ever seen in the grand history of the Alaska salmon industry.

The bark Star of Bengal belonged to the Alaska Packers' Association, the state's dominant canned salmon producer at the time.

Two steam-powered tugs, the Hattie Gage and the smaller Kayak, began towing the ship out of Wrangell toward the open sea about 8:20 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1908. The barometer readings indicated fine weather.

They made about 5 miles per hour, easing their way through Sumner Strait, past islands and reefs. Around midnight, a breeze came up from the southeast with rain squalls.

Just before 2 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 20, the chief mate "began to scent trouble," according to a shipping inspector's account, and called Capt. Nicholas Wagner, who was asleep below and who had left orders to call him if needed. When Wagner came on deck, he saw the ship needed to change direction, and he tried to communicate with the tug captains by megaphone and fog horn.

"The high bluffs of Coronation Island loomed up on our starboard quarter, and we tacked to port, thinking to safely pass the island and reach the open sea," Erwin Farrar, captain of the tug Hattie Gage, would later tell the Wrangell newspaper.

But the Kayak lost steering in the mountainous seas, and the Hattie Gage couldn't hold the heavy sailing ship.

"The ship backed into a little bight in the shoreline just east of Helm Point, drawing the two tugs with her," Farrar said. "At 4 o'clock our soundings showed only 8 fathoms of water, and by the phosphorus we could tell that there were rocks all around us, and we could see the shores of the bight rising on either side abreast our pilot house.

"Then, seeing that all hope of saving the ship was gone, we cut the tow line and fought our way out to open water."

DROP ANCHOR AND PRAY

Aboard the Star of Bengal, an exasperated Capt. Wagner fired several blue rockets, his signal to the tugs that he expected help.

But no help was coming.

"The tugs were no value in the high wind, so we steamed into Shipley Bay to wait until the storm abated," Farrar would say later.

Even before the tugs departed, Wagner had dropped his anchors in an effort to halt the ship's drift toward land.

"I cheered the men up by the thought that if our anchors held till daylight the tugs would come to our assistance," Wagner said.

At dawn, he found his ship within 50 yards of a high, rocky shore on the starboard side.

The tugs never returned.

SWIM FOR YOUR LIVES!

The wind and rain increased, and the seas tossed. Breakfast was served to charge the crew for action, and maybe something terrible.

By 8 a.m., both anchors were dragging and thoughts turned to lifeboats, or just swimming for shore. The crew launched two boats, one of which got away empty and was dashed in the surf.

At 9 a.m., four volunteers made it to shore in a boat and tied a line from the ship to a tree for transporting people off the Bengal in a breeches buoy. As the first passenger started over in the sling, however, the ship pitched and the rope snapped, "throwing the man high in the air," according to the inspector's account.

Wagner gave a fateful order: Swim for your lives!

But because the captain didn't jump overboard himself, his men didn't either.

POUNDED ON THE ROCKS

The stricken ship, already bumping bottom, struck violently and broke into three pieces. No longer capable of rising on the next swell, everybody was swept off the deck.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

The men found themselves flailing amid thousands of boxes of canned salmon, fuel drums and other debris that bludgeoned the shipwreck victims in the breakers.

"Swimmers had but little chance in the water, as the waves looked like solid walls of salmon cases and gasoline tanks," one survivor, Frank Muir, told the Wrangell newspaper.

"The scenes on the beach were simply indescribable," Wagner said. "We saw 27 mangled corpses tangled in among the wreckage. Some of these were crushed and even disemboweled, and some were minus legs and arms."

ANGRY AFTERMATH

Survivors managed to build a fire, and those who had stripped naked for the desperate swim took clothes off the bodies that washed up. One thing they didn't need to worry about was food, as the beach was piled high with cases of salmon.

A total of 111 people drowned or suffered fatal injury. A government report said the dead included 15 whites, 67 Chinese, 26 Japanese and three Filipinos.

Bitterness and investigations came in the wake of the shipwreck on Coronation Island, half a mile north of Helm Point.

Wagner, who was pulled half unconscious from the surf, accused the tug captains of criminal cowardice. "I will send them both to San Quentin if it is possible," he told the Wrangell newspaper. Meantime, shipping inspectors initially revoked Wagner's master and pilot license.

In the end, however, all were cleared of blame in what one government fisheries analyst called "a disaster without parallel in the history of the Alaska salmon industry."

STILL REMEMBERED

In late September of this year, the tragic story of the Star of Bengal again made the front page of Wrangell's local newspaper, the Sentinel.

Alice Rooney, who helped plan a centennial commemoration at the local museum, told the paper the shipwreck never captured the kind of attention of other disasters, such as the Titanic sinking four years later in 1912.

That might have been because the Star of Bengal was a cannery ship and not a passenger ship, Rooney said. It might also have had something to do with the fact that "many of those who died were not part of the mainstream population," she said.

"The racial overtones were pretty overt back then," said Bob King, a Juneau resident and Alaska seafood industry historian.

In the 1908 newspaper account of the shipwreck, only the names of the white people aboard were printed. And Wagner, the ship captain, was quoted as saying, "We buried all the white men we could find" on the beach after the disaster.

Alaska's fishing industry today still generates a lot of bad press for its disasters, but the Star of Bengal is unmatched.

"Over a hundred people killed all at once -- it was a big deal," King said.

Find Wesley Loy's commercial fishing blog online at adn.com/highliner or call 257-4590.

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