Stranger Than Fiction – The Phantom Pilot of the S.S. Eliza Anderson

It was said of the Eliza Anderson that “no steamboat ever went slower and made money faster”.

During her 40-year-long career she was a fixture of the maritime traffic between Puget Sound, Victoria and the Fraser River, carrying passengers and freight.

But it’s her last voyage, this one all the way to the Klondike gold rush when she was old and decrepit, for which she’s most remembered. A hellish voyage that ended on the very brink of shipwreck and destruction—at which moment a ghost-like figure in white beard and oilskins miraculously appeared on her bridge and directed her to a safe anchorage.

It’s an amazing story—as you’ll see next week in the Chronicles. 

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PHOTO: The sidewheel steamer Eliza Anderson, shown here as she was in 1880, was every bit ungainly as she looked. —Wikipedia