S.S.Valencia 

In the Graveyard of the Pacific
the twisted bow of a ship sticks up,
silent, from the sandy ocean bed,
one of many hundreds that dot 
the storm-swept west coast
of Canada’s Vancouver Island.

On the twenty-second day of January
in the year nineteen and six,
three miles east off Pachena Point
the S.S. Valencia went down.
A tangled wreckage marks her grave
off the cliffs of Vancouver Island.

A Pacific Coast passenger steamship,
she was headed northward bound
from San Francisco to Victoria.
when in thick fog and swirling gale, 
she missed the fog horns at Cape Flattery 
and overran the Straits of Juan de Fuca .

The raging North Pacific threw 
the helpless ship against the rocks.
The captain tried to bring the ship ashore
but she was hurled against the reef
and the sheer rock wall 100 feet high;
where huge waves pounded it to pieces.

For twelve hours, as she began to sink,
passengers and crew tried to escape
but the raging water batted them like mice.
Two lifeboats were swept into the sea;
another two with passengers on board
were swallowed by the ocean waves.

Some made it to the lighthouse at Cape Beale 
where the keeper wired their distress.
Three ships came to rescue-- the Czar, 
the Queen City, and the City of Topeka, 
but the violent ocean kept them all at bay
and they could only watch the final hours.

One of the most tragic ship disasters 
on the unrelenting North Pacific,
the Valencia sank, with the last of her 
passengers clinging to her foremast,
taking one hundred seventeen souls 
to the Graveyard of the Pacific.




june 2003