Did a Sea Monster Guard the S.S. Islander's Gold? (Conclusion)
The ill-fated steamship Islander drew treasure hunters right up to 2012! --Wikipedia
It wasn't long after I began researching B.C. and west coast shipwrecks that I first read of the sinking of the S.S. Islander. The Victoria-based coastal passenger liner had 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 this historic tragedy.
Among the 42 victims of the Islander were Andrew (Andres) Keating Sr. and his two sons. Keating, who was so rich that he'd once owned much of downtown Los Angeles, had retired to the Cowichan Valley, bought up 1000s of acres, and built one of the most unusual manor houses in the province.
The property on which I have my home, on Koksilah Ridge just south of Duncan, was subdivided from the large Keating estate which has since been reduced to 50 acres. Fortunately, his iconic mansion, my one-of-a-kind neighbour, has been restored.
There are three fascinating elements to the story of the S.S. Islander: her inexcusable sinking with great loss of life, the subsequent attempts to salvage her reputed fortune in gold, and Andrew Keating.
In this, the second and concluding instalment, I tell you of the incredible attempts to salvage the Islander's treasure--attempts that spanned over a century! I also tell you more about Andrew Keating and his unusual Cowichan Valley legacy...
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No sooner had the Islander vanished in the icy waters of Lynn Canal than rumours began to fly thick and fast as to the actual amount of raw Yukon gold that had gone down with her. Many voiced the opinion that her lost treasure amounted to as much as $3 million. Despite the repeated denials as late as 30 years after by the ship's purser, Percy Harry F. Bishops, the rumours persisted.
As far as Bishop was concerned, "There was only $1,000 in the safe of the Islander when she went down. I would have known if there had been more because I would have had to sign for it."
He also refuted stories that many of the ill-fated steamer's passengers had been carrying millions in gold in their luggage, saying, "Miners could get as good a price for their gold in Dawson as the outside. They sold in Dawson and got their money when they reached a bank on the outside."
Bishop's denials were forgotten when other survivors estimated the actual amount of lost treasure to have been $275,000. (Still a very large sum at that time.) This tempting figure was based upon reports that several passengers had been carrying large amounts of gold in their baggage. One, identified as H. Hart, was said to have had at least $35,000 in his satchel, which he'd been forced to leave on the liner's deck.
A second rich passenger hadn't been as sensible or as fortunate. Believed to have been carrying $40,000 in a portmanteau, he'd refused to abandon it. Instead, he'd carried the heavy case to the railing and jumped over the side, only to miss the lifeboat for which he was aiming, and the weight of his gold dragged him under.
Three more claims amounted to $68,000 and other, smaller ones, brought the total figure of gold claimed to have been lost with the Islander to $275,000. Although this figure could well be said to be inaccurate either way, it attracted several corporations bent upon salvage.
Initial attempts, however, were defeated by the icy depths of Lynn Canal and primitive equipment.
The first attempt at salvage came as early as 1902 when diver Henry Finch, with 40 years' experience under his belt, located the wreck by dragging but was defeated by the depth. Two years later, armed with a specially-designed barge and diving bell, he again located the wreck, reporting her to be 175 feet (53) metres deep, her crumpled bow showing clearly the force of her impact with the iceberg.
Finch hoped to enter the purser's office, amidships, but when he finally gave up his attempt all he had to show for his daring was a length of deck railing and a grating.
Over the next quarter-century, Wikipedia tells us, at least a dozen salvage attempts were made. All of them found the wreck "but none proved able to penetrate the ship's hold or recover any of the gold" because of adverse weather conditions, strong currents, extreme cold and the depth which defied the technology of the age.
One of those intrepid salvagers was Frank Walters, "the international diver," who planned to reach the wreck by means of a "diving suit of newly invented pattern". This, he hoped in the spring of 1921, would enable him to "turn the trick" on the canal's rocky bottom.
Confident that the Islander contained at least $200,000 when she sank, Walters announced his plan to dive on the wreck that summer. Besides the precarious depth of 140 feet he said that the greatest obstacle facing him was that he'd have to break his way into the ship--no easy task, 23 fathoms down and in darkness.
But, he said, the Islander's iron hull likely would have deteriorated to the point that he'd be able to hammer his way through the sections which hadn't been penetrated by rust.
Aside from the $200,000 in gold Walters was after the ship's safe which he believed contained "a large amount of money deposited...by passengers."
A veteran of salvage operations in Australia and New Zealand waters, Walters was the man who'd successfully removed the safe of the S.S. Princess Sophia, also sunk in Lynn Canal, with the loss of 343 lives in 1918. Unlike the Islander, however, the Sophia had been in shallower waters and it remained for Walters to test his new suit at 140 feet.
Whether or not Walters did dive on the Islander isn't recorded. In 1931, a second diving bell was employed. Even this novel approach wasn't without its hazards, one of its occupants reporting that he'd spotted a "monster" in the wreck.
According to this fascinating report there were "huge foot tracks on the bottom about two feet apart and the mark where a great tail had been dragged along... Something was lurking in the gloom but suddenly vanished in a flash of phosphorescence."
Further investigation disclosed that the "brute was living inside the wreck, but we never got a good look at it. It's something like a sea crocodile."
The expedition then turned its attention to operating a dredge with which they sucked debris from the wreck to the surface where it was run through a riffle to recover any treasures that it might contain. Almost $6000 worth of nuggets and a diamond ring were recovered in this manner before the operation was stalled by the great depth.
It was a Seattle man, Capt. Wiley, and a professional house-mover, Frank Curtis, who came up with a winning plan in 1929. Drawing upon the latter's experience in moving large structures, they conceived the idea of laying a series of cables under the Islander's hull. These would be connected to two steamships anchored on each side of the wreck, tightened at low tide, and lifting begun with powerful winches.
The wreck would be raised just enough so that it could be drawn towards shore with each high tide.
The fact remained that no diving suit of that period was able to withstand the pressure at a depth of 23 fathoms. It was 1934 and the designing of a new diving dress before they were able to put their plan of recovering the Islander to work; theirs would be one of the great salvage feats of the era.
The most vivid account of this achievement is that of the diver responsible, Charles W. Huckins: "On first descending to the Islander on November 1 [1932], I found the ship easily and stood in bewilderment to see her decks caved in. Tons upon tons of sea growth, shells and silt which had settled upon the decks had caved them in and carried them down into the holds in an awful mess of twisted beams and steel plates as sharp as knives--a terrific place to venture in a suit whose puncture at that depth meant instant death. The steel was encrusted with live barnacles to a depth of two feet.
"I made my surveys of the wreck and hunted among the debris for the treasure for 10 days--diving four times a day for a stay of an hour at a time. I found nothing because of the tremendous depth and the shells and the silt. It was late in the year and the work was abandoned for the winter.
"When I made my first dive in May 1934, I found the Islander had slid offshore 60 feet and shoved up a mud bank. Her shattered bow was in 140 feet of water, her stern in 95. And she was listed 40 degrees to starboard. In all the history of diving, I know of no other commercial job in 140 feet of water.
"And the water was horribly chilled by the glacier. [There were several near the site of the wreck.--Ed.) The glacier also gave off silt which rolled along the bottom in black clouds, like some awful fog.
"I found that the cables we laid had fouled so badly where the ship had slid over them that we had to pull 17of them back out from under the ship and saw them back into place. That was my job, down there on the bottom--to guide them into place in utter darkness.
"That ship was bad to work on. The deck plates were so rusted you could stick your helmet through what had been three-eighths-inch steel plates to look inside the cabins. But the hull plates were in perfect condition--we had to cut holes in the hull with a torch to let the water out when we finally had her beached.
"There were bones of the drowned scattered all through the shells and silt."
So tricky was this operation that it had taken two successive salvage seasons before the Islander broke the surface, July 20, 1934, and was beached five days later in nearby Green's Cove, Admiralty Island.
Huckins continued: "The hull broke above the water at 7:20 a.m., July 25, for the first time in 33 years. We all cheered as the barnacle-encrusted thrust of jagged steel came above the surface... We lugged her up on the beach between the two teamed ships, and on July 26 I walked around that hull in ordinary shoes without getting my feet damp.
"It was strange to walk in ordinary clothes across those decks where I had laboured in darkness at the bottom of the sea..."
Thus diver Huckins described his months-long ordeal on the bottom of Lynn Canal in total darkness, benumbed to the bone by cold, and in constant danger of having his air line cut, or his suit punctured by the ship's jagged plates.
Once on land, according to Wikipedia, "The 'gaping hole' [in the bow] first noted by Henry Finch in 1904 turned out to be more significant than suspected: 60 feet (18 metres) of the Islander's bow, including the Mail and Storage Room, had been completely sheared off." Salvagers, however, were convinced that the Islander's treasure was amidship in the Purser's Office.
Alas, when its conglomerate of rusted steel and marine growth was sifted and sluiced, Ship's Purser Bishop was proved correct--there was no bullion. The safe contained only "a handful" of $10 and $20 gold coins and some waterlogged currency. The rest of the ship proved to be as disappointing.
By literally digging the ship apart with shovels and sluicing the debris for any valuables hidden within, the treasure hunters proceeded to "prospect" for the Islander's legendary wealth. It's known that their efforts weren't without some reward, two salvagers finding a poke of gold in what had been a washroom, and the ship's safe yielded Canadian currency amounting to more than $8000.
Also found intact were 25 bottles of expensive champagne.
Whether or not the operation made a profit remains unrecorded as the company refused to disclose the amounts spent and recovered on the project. Their salvaging of the Islander is estimated to have cost $200,000, it being thought in some quarters that they recovered only a quarter of that sum.
As for the poor S.S. Islander, her ravaged hull was left on the beach until 1952 when a Seattle salvage firm cut her up for scrap. But her allure to treasure hunters didn't end there. Wikipedia again: "According to statements made by the [Royal North West Mounted Police] constables who were aboard the ship to guard the shipment of gold [sic], the bullion had been stowed in a locker on the port side of the forward well deck, just abaft the break of the foc'sle--an area located within the 'missing' bow section..."
The search for Islander's reputed treasure was resumed in 1996 when a Seattle-based company raised funds in the U.S. and the U.K. to explore the wreck site with new-age sidescan sonar and a remotely operated submersible.
Ironically, their biggest obstacle was a competing salvage company which, despite its name of Yukon Recovery, was also based in Seattle. The latter obtained a temporary restraining order based upon their claim to having already recovered artifacts from the Islander under the Abandoned Shipwrecks Act.
But OceanMar prevailed before a judge by arguing that it had a Salvage Agreement with the original insurers of the Islander and that it had located the sunken bow section before Yukon Recovery entered the picture.
It proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. Legally restricted to surveying and videoing the wreckage but prohibited from removing anything, OceanMar returned to the wreck site and "located the severed bow section on the 95th anniversary of the ship's sinking".
The company then spent five weeks side-scanning the wreckage and the debris field between it and the hull's final resting place.
At which point Yukon Recovery re-entered the fray and four years of expensive litigation ensued. Not until March 2007 did a U.S. court of appeals rule in favour of OceanMar, by which time the company was having difficulty in raising capital to resume its work at the wreck site.
In 2012, allied with MK Salvage Ventures, and apparently no longer banned from recovering articles from the wreckage, a months-long salvage operation yielded 1200 troy ounces of gold in six original, sealed leather pokes and other artifacts.
This ad for Coin World shows four of the 'pokes' and their contents of dust and nuggets salvaged from the Islander.
In March 2016, the recovered "Alaskan Gold Rush" gold, described as "unrefined placer gold contained in fie original leather pokes, all sealed, and the contents of a sixth leather poke that broke open during the recovery process," were offered for sale for $4 million.
This, it would appear, is the final chapter in the saga of the steamship Islander.
However, her name remains fresh in the annals of British Columbia marine lore as the story of her gold--wherever and however much there may have been--continues to intrigue armchair treasure hunters to this day.
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Their names are among the newspaper accounts listing the Islander's 42 victims: Andrew (Andres) J.W. Keating, and his sons, Arthur and Julius. A strange ending, it would seem, for this German immigrant who'd made his fortune in the Chilean nitrate trade and who'd finally settled with his large family on the Koksilah Ridge, south of Duncan.
This is where my tenuous connection with Andrew Keating comes in: my acre, a corner lot, has been subdivided from what's left of Keating's vast property holdings in the Cowichan Valley--once no less than 4000 acres spread from Glenora's Keating Lake to Sansum Narrows!
At one time, it was said, he'd been one of the “largest landowners in what is now the city of Los Angeles”.
But today's Keating Estate Farm with its manor house, barn and numerous outbuildings, is just 50 acres. The Keating house is something of a marvel. Situated at the entrance to the Glenora area with sweeping views of Mount Tzouhalem and the Shawnigan and Glenora hills, it's one of the oldest in the Valley and one of the oddest.
The original part of the house was built about 1880 by the Scottish-born Alexander Blyth who came to Cowichan with his wife and two children at the urging of his brother-in-law, James Mearns, in 1873. After a six-week voyage from Australia, where they’d spent the previous 17 years, the Blyths homesteaded on the ridge between Koksilah and Glenora until selling to Keating
who later purchased the adjoining W. Waters property.
After living in Torquay, Devonshire, he and his family had resided in Los Angeles before settling in Victoria where he commissioned architect John Gerard Tiarks to design him a new home in 1894. That same year, he engaged Tiarks to transform the modest Blyth house, which he’d already doubled in size, into what the late Valley historian Jack Fleetwood termed “a palatial home befitting his status”.
Tiarks, for all his youth (he was just 27 at the time) had had a remarkable 13-year career. He'd worked with the illustrious F.M. Rattenbury who’s best remembered for Victoria’s Parliament Buildings, served on Victoria city council and designed 75 buildings (mostly residences) in British Columbia before his accidental death in 1901.
Keating needed room for his six sons and two daughters.
To serve their spiritual needs, it’s believed, he added a 35x28-foot chapel, Tiarks basing what became known as the Great Hall on Worspring (Woodspring) Priory, a 12th century building just north of Weston Super Mare, England, where he took his architectural training.
In March 1894 the Colonist gave a project report on Keating’s latest home: “The Drawings for an addition to Mr. Andres Keating’s residence at Koksilah which has just been completed, show a strikingly beautiful dining room all in cedar panels, in which the mantel and over-mantel form a striking feature, but the Great Hall, with its huge fireplace and mantel shelf nine feet high...is certainly the only hall of its kind in the Province. The roof, with its heavy timbers, the windows, which are leaded in panes of clear glass and indeed each and every part of the addition are a faithful reproduction of one of the ancient English Dining Halls.”
Most prominent of the Great Hall’s features are its vaulted ceiling supported by carved beams that arch across the room. The intricately finished panels of first-growth fir and cedar yet brandish their 1894 finish. A ‘wicket’ window in the dining room behind the Great Hall reveals that food was passed through from an adjoining ‘summer’ kitchen, since demolished. Illuminated by kerosene lanterns, the Hall must have been very dim when the Tudor-arched windows didn’t admit daylight.
Another curious feature of the Keating house is the fact that he had Tiarks retain the humble Blyth farmhouse, likely because Keating had already enlarged it, by enclosing it and the new addition with a common, high-peaked roof. In the attic you can see the walled-up, pre-1894 roof still clad in its original cedar shakes!
A large porch facing the Shawnigan hills to the south and Tiarks’ trademark ‘Tudor’ siding completed the project.
Of the dozen-odd outbuildings, the hay barn may be the oldest, perhaps going as far back as, or before, 1894, too. The handsome gambrel-roofed dairy barn is circa 1949 as denoted by the date scratched in the cement, and there’s a ‘heritage’ orchard.
The 24-room Victorian farmhouse became known for the lavish entertainments hosted by its owners. But that all ended with the sinking of the Islander and the deaths of Andrew, Arthur and Julius. Mrs. Keating returned to Los Angeles where she died in Santa Monica County in 1906. The last of the Keating children, Mrs. Elvera Link of Los Angeles, died at the age of 102 in July 1989 and the names of Keating’s heirs and descendants disappear as owners from Land Registry files in 1911.
There's been a succession of owners since then, including the Land Conservancy; the current owners have embarked upon an ambitious and expensive renovation program, not just of the house but of the barn and outbuildings. Their goal, they told me, is for the property to become, once again, a "working farm".
In 1999 the Keating House was shown on the Cowichan Heritage House Tour.
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The death of John Gerhard Tiarks, occurring as it did just days after the loss of the three Keatings in the sinking of S.S. Islander is, to say the least, a curious coincidence.
On Sunday afternoon, Aug. 18, 1901, he was riding his bicycle on the Gorge Road in Victoria when he apparently suffered a fall. At first his injuries were thought to be no more severe than a cut over one eye but he soon lapsed into unconsciousness from which he never recovered despite the surgical efforts of four physicians.
Ironically, because its pages were filled with accounts of the Islander tragedy, there was little room for news for the untimely death of “one of the best known architects of the city” and former alderman who’d taken a keen interest in municipal affairs and was in the prime of life.
Tiarks left a widow, Ada Constance Helen, but no children. Sadly, but a handful of his creations, said to be “distinctive, often encompassing unique details [and] frequently sited to take advantage of the views or topography,” have survived.
Fortunately, Andrew Keating's Glenora manor house is one of them.
Today, Andrew Keating's Koksilah mansion is a fascinating memorial for this Chilean nitrates king who went down with his sons on the ill-fated S.S. Islander. --Author's collection
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