Did a Sea Monster Guard the S.S. Islander's Gold?
It really is a small world...
As a kid I thrived on shipwrecks--in magazines and books, anyway. Photos in National Geographic and travel magazines of rusted hulks on semi-tropical beaches, underwater scenes of Spanish treasure galleons, and of Second World War naval ships on the sea bottom in the southern Pacific really turned me on.
By junior high school I was into reading the salvage epics of Capt. Harry Ellsberg and others then, years later, watching the underwater explorations of Capt. Jacques Cousteau and the incredible deep, deep dives on the Titanic by Dr. Robert Ballard on TV.
Long before then I'd made the wondrous discovery that British Columbia had its own shipwrecks--1000s of them!
In fact, a stretch of the west coast of Vancouver Island was known as the 'Graveyard of the Pacific' and for 'a wreck for every mile'.
I set out to catalogue them; a pursuit I finally gave up as being too big, too time consuming and, arguably, to no real purpose. But I did begin to write about them--perhaps several 100 by now, in newspaper and magazine articles and two books.
I came to joke that I'd sunk more ships than Nelson--in print!
Early in that pursuit I'd read of the sinking of a coastal passenger liner, the S.S. Islander, after she struck an iceberg in Alaska's Lynn Canal during the Klondike gold rush. Little did I realize that the day would come when I'd have a direct connection to that historic tragedy.
That day is now and every day; the property on which I have my home, on Koksilah Ridge just south of Duncan, was subdivided from the large Keating estate. Mr. Keating Sr. and his two sons went down with the Islander.
There are three fascinating elements to the story of the Islander: her sinking with great loss of life, the subsequent attempts to salvage her reputed fortune in gold, and Mr. Keating.
Worthy of a 'sidebar' of his own, he was incredibly rich--t'was said that he once owned much of downtown Los Angeles--and he built a mansion which, long run-down, has since been restored and is itself is something of a mystery.
All that and more in next week's Chronicles.
PHOTO: Fortunately for those aboard the lost liner, the San Francisco Call's report of 65 lives lost was on the high side. --Alaska State Library
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