Princess Adelaide sails out of Vancouver through the First Narrows in 1914. She was one of three sister ships to Princess Sophia, though parts of her deck layout varied considerably.
City of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-: Bo P45.
Fourteen years after she ran aground on Vanderbilt reef, the legal wrangling surrounding the sinking of the Princess Sophia had finally made its long and arduous journey across the finish line. Left in its deadly wake were swaths of anguish, bitter disappointment, and — perhaps most crucially — a deep mistrust of Canadian Pacific.
Even after the dust had settled, some of the most basic questions of the disaster went unanswered. Why had Captain Locke delayed in getting the passengers and crew off in the boats at the first available opportunity? Why had the ship run aground in the first place? Was Captain Locke under pressure from his employers to maintain the ship’s published schedule on this crucial final southbound run of the year? Could the rescuers, most of whom anchored or held their ships at an arm’s length for days, have done any better? The second guessing of the events that played out between October 23 and October 25, 1918, would be analyzed and scrutinized in the years and decades to come.
Canadian Pacific had expected to make nearly $80,000 in profits from the final run of the Princess Sophia; they ended up spending nearly that much paying for the consequences of her sinking. The vast majority went to undertakers; with the line offering to ship victims’ remains anywhere in Canada or the United States for free, twenty undertakers from Vancouver to Ottawa and points in between scooped up $54,973.58 of the company’s profits. Payment for the ships that had anchored near the stricken Princess Sophia and assisted in the rescue tallied $14,892.63. Complimentary tickets for relatives of the bereaved set them back $2,529.78. Flowers alone totalled $130 — nearly $2,000 in modern currency.
In all, not much was left of Canadian Pacific’s expected $80,000 profit. The entire disaster set them back $78,074.22. The damage to their reputation, however, was more difficult to pin down. In an effort to wipe the saga from public view, Canadian Pacific destroyed nearly all materials relating to the ship, from brochures to deck plans and publicity photographs. Sadly, this means that some of the only materials available on this beautiful vessel relate directly to the sinking itself. A quick Google search of the term “Princess Sophia” immediately brings up photographs of the ship, stricken in the blinding snow on Vanderbilt Reef. Had more of these early publicity materials survived, perhaps the story would have ended differently. Should they have been kept, perhaps the ship wouldn’t be shrouded in such mystery — and accusations that Canadian Pacific was eager to cover up the whole affair could have been put to rest.
Nearly a century has passed since the tragic events that occurred in Lynn Canal in the dying days of October 1918. Canadian Pacific ships no longer ply the coastal waters of British Columbia and Alaska. The formation of the British Columbia Ferry Corporation in 1960, coupled with the reduction in passenger traffic from Alaska and the introduction of affordable jet airplanes that made flying the faster and more economical choice, sounded the death knell for Canadian Pacific. While newer steamships were built to sail the Pacific Coast, Canadian Pacific seemed to be stuck in its ways, refusing to modernize. Even when Alaska cruising began in earnest out of Vancouver during the 1960s and steadily gained popularity, Canadian Pacific made no real efforts to court the cruising trade. The waters of Alaska became the undisputed stomping grounds of early cruise pioneers in the region like Princess Cruises, which has continually operated in Alaska and British Columbia since their first voyage back in 1969.
Despite the rising increase in cruise passenger traffic, the construction of the new Canada Place cruise terminal in Vancouver and the restoration of Ballantyne Pier farther to the east, Canadian Pacific never made a move to enter the pleasure cruising market in Alaska. Even the company’s famous “Multimark” logo, consisting of a red-and-white half moon coupled with a black triangle, was no longer hip or cool. Used from 1968 to 1987, video gamers of the 1980s likened it to the video game character Pac Man, while Carnival Cruise Lines famously based their iconic red, blue, and white funnel off that very logo. When Carnival acquired the Empress of Canada in 1972, the line simply altered the colours to blue, red, and white, and smoothed out the black triangle. This basic colour arrangement, with its Canadian Pacific heritage, can be seen on every Carnival cruise ship to this day.
General arrangement plans for the Princess Sophia, as issued to Canadian Pacific agents in 1912.
Present-day Skagway is every bit as busy as the Skagway of days gone by.
Once Empress of Canada had been sold to Carnival to become their Mardi Gras, it was the end of the line for the steamships division of Canadian Pacific. Coastal service limped along into the 1980s, but soon folded under pressure from BC Ferries, the Washington Marine Group, and the staunch Black Ball Line, which has managed to provide service between Washington State and Victoria using a single ferry — the MV Coho — for nearly sixty years.
In 2001 CP Ships, Ltd., was separated from parent company Canadian Pacific, and became its own entity. Four years later, on October 25, 2005 — eighty-seven years to the day of the sinking of the Princess Sophia — CP Ships was acquired by TUI AG to be incorporated into their Hapag-Lloyd division for $21.50 USD per share. In 2011 the Canadian Pacific Steamships Limited trade name was officially abandoned. Two years later it popped up in Ontario, Canada, incorporated as the name of an upstart clothing company.
In the end the real tragedy of the Princess Sophia may very well be her obscurity. Despite the dozens of cruise ships that sail right past her wreckage as they make their way to and from Skagway, few passengers who visit the region will ever learn of the Princess Sophia. Like her wreckage, her memory is kept out of sight and out of view. Books on the ship are few and far between. But inquisitive folks can ask the townspeople in Juneau and Skagway; even if they weren’t around when she went down, nearly everyone who has lived there for any length of time has heard of the Princess Sophia.
On the corner of Front and Franklin Street in Juneau sits the Triangle Club Bar. It’s occupied that site since 1947, and has been quenching the thirst of locals and tourists alike for decades. It’s also one of the few places in the Pacific Northwest to actually pay homage to the region’s treacherous waters. If you go inside, let your eyes adjust to the darkness, amble up to the bar, order a pint of Alaskan Amber ale, and look over the wall of photos that lines the back left corner of the bar. There, third from the left on the top row — just next to the industrial coffee maker — is a photograph of the Princess Sophia, forever perched atop Vanderbilt Reef, waiting for someone to ask who she is. Waiting for someone to tell her story — and the story of the 343 passengers and crew who went down with her on that cold October night.
The final tragedy of the Princess Sophia is that her story was allowed to be forgotten.
He is a professional … he knows where we should be.[1]
— Testimony from officers aboard the Star Princess in the NTSB Inquiry
Like the Princess Sophia seventy-six years earlier, the grounding of the Star Princess quickly evaporated from the headlines — though for very different reasons. In late June 1995 the trial of former footballer and film star O.J. Simpson, for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and waiter Ronald Goldman, was still in full swing. By the time Star Princess ran aground on Poundstone Rock, Johnnie Cochran was close to belting out his famous “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”[2] directive to the jury regarding the now-infamous leather glove. The media circus surrounding the event was still catapulting the daily hiccups of the “trial of the century” on to the front page of most North American newspapers.
In July Iraq, under the direction of Saddam Hussein, revealed the full extent of the country’s biological warfare capabilities. In August Bill Gates and Microsoft took centre stage with the release of Windows 95. And on the last day of the year, cartoonist Bill Watterson drew the very last strip
of Calvin and Hobbes. In the age before commercial news networks like CNN careened from one media spectacle to the next, a ship that ran aground in Alaska without causing a single fatality quickly found itself removed from the headlines. After all, stories with a happy ending aren’t real news.
Despite the absence of any fatalities, the investigation into the accident would drag on for nearly two years. In March 1997 the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released their full sixty-three-page report into the grounding of the Star Princess on Poundstone Rock. A total of $27.1 million dollars’ worth of damage had been caused to her hull in the accident, and Princess Cruises was forced to scrub much of her 1995 Alaska season in order to perform necessary repairs.
The NTSB report outlined seventeen factors that contributed to the accident in the early morning hours of June 24, 1995. Summarized, the accident was largely attributed to the fatigued Pilot Nerup, who suffered from sleep apnea leading up to the grounding. The reluctance of the navigational officers and other members of the deck department who were on the bridge that night also played a part in the grounding; by not questioning the actions of the pilot, the officers essentially assumed that as an experienced marine pilot licenced by the state of Alaska, Nerup knew what he was doing and would make any necessary course corrections in due time in order to ensure the safe navigation of the vessel. As one officer put it during his testimony to the NTSB: “he is a professional … he knows where we should be.”
In the same way that airline disasters of the time brought increased awareness into the importance of communication between junior and senior crew members — a process known as “crew resource management” — the accident also did much to highlight the ever-changing roles of officers on the bridge of a modern ship. This was particularly true in 1995, when technology straddled an odd combination of analogue and digital devices. Star Princess, having been built in 1988 and designed even earlier than that, only exacerbated that gap between proven, existing methods of navigation and the electronic systems that were quickly becoming part of the modern navigator’s toolkit. The NTSB concluded that although the watch officers had manually plotted position fixes at 01:14 and again at 01:30, they did not use the data to project the forward path of Star Princess. Had they done so they would have seen that in thirty minutes’ time their current course would bring them dangerously close to Poundstone Rock. If the officers took the time to fully plot out the track of their vessel they would have undoubtedly notified the pilot, who would have made the appropriate course corrections.
More than anything, the Star Princess accident came out of a lack of crew resource management (CRM) procedures on the bridge that night. The idea behind effective CRM came from the aviation industry in the late 1970s, following the crash of United Airlines Flight 173. A scheduled flight from Denver to Portland, Oregon, United 173 had a completely normal flight until the crew lowered the landing gear. When the gear on the Douglas DC-8 came down, it was accompanied by a loud thump-ing noise and airframe vibration. The plane experienced abnormal yaw, and the green light indicator that would illuminate when the gear was lowered and locked failed to do so. Unbeknownst to the crew, the gear had fallen and locked into place after the failure of a subsystem, and the additional failure of a secondary system caused the gear lights to not light up in the cockpit. The three crew members on the flight deck that night became so obsessed with solving the landing-gear problem — which, in actuality, had already been solved — that they neglected to monitor their fuel levels, which led to the fuel starvation of the DC-8’s four Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines. Ten people died when the plane crashed into a Portland suburb; 179 miraculously survived.[3]
While the aviation industry quickly began adopting the lessons of crew resource management, the marine industry was slower to catch on. Chains of command and the reluctance to question fellow professionals undoubtedly played a role in the grounding of the Star Princess. If anything, the Star Princess accident was the catalyst for implementing and updating crew resource management procedures across the entire cruise and maritime industry.
In hindsight, it is not difficult to surmise that crew resource management — or the lack thereof — played a substantial role in the grounding of the Princess Sophia on Vanderbilt Reef. You have a ship that is short on lookouts sailing through a raging snowstorm in a narrow canal fraught with navigational hazards. An experienced senior captain is in the wheelhouse, in command. The only other officer on the bridge is half his age, commands half his pay, and has half his status. If First Officer Jerry Shaw harboured any doubts about his boss he likely kept them to himself rather than risk a dressing down in front of the ship’s quartermaster.
Timing also probably played a role in this willful complacency; turning around and seeking shelter in Haines or even Skagway would have had an enormous knock-on effect to the ship’s schedule. The fact that this was Princess Sophia’s last journey south for the 1918 season likely had more to do with the decision to press on. Like their passengers, Locke and Shaw were probably more than ready to see the backside of Alaska disappear off their stern. If he had doubts, Captain Locke probably wouldn’t have shared them with the younger Jerry Shaw. Shaw, in turn, would be loath to question his commander’s skill and leadership. And so both men stood there, peering out into the darkness at the snow that zipped like lightning across the window panes, each hiding their nagging doubts from one another, until shortly after two in the morning of October 23, 1918.
Like a bolt of lightning, clarity came to the men on the bridge of the Princess Sophia in the form of a low scraping sound that reverberated through the ship and instantly sealed the fates of those on board.
The only real hope; the one glimmer of light to emanate from those dark days in October nearly a century ago, was that her sinking and the deaths of all those who went down with her serve as a reminder of the power of the sea. Nothing is for naught if it prevents future tragedies.
Today modern navigation systems use computers and global positioning systems to monitor not only the current location of the ship, but also to project its future path. This navigation system displays the number of hours or minutes needed to reach an intended target or waypoint, and can even calculate when approaching vessels — like the Fair Princess that threw off Pilot Robert Nerup aboard Star Princess that evening — will come abreast of the ship, based on their current speed and heading. Radars mounted in multiple locations on large cruise ships help to “paint” a better picture of obstacles that lie ahead of and around their projected path, even in instances of bad weather and heavy fog. The phrase “crew resource management” has transitioned from myth to standard operating procedure.
Coincidentally, the 1997 release of the NTSB’s report coincided with the exit of Star Princess from the Princess Cruises fleet. After less than a decade in service, she was transferred to sister company P&O Cruises, where she was based out of Southampton, England, from 1997 until 2003. Known as Arcadia, she sported a buff yellow funnel in place of the Princess “sea witch” logo. Change was afoot again in 2003, when the former Star Princess became the launch vessel for the short-lived Ocean Village brand. Renamed Ocean Village and given a garish new livery of purple and orange cheatlines, Ocean Village was billed as “the cruise for people who don’t do cruises.” It turned out that most cruisers also didn’t do Ocean Village cruises, and by 2010 Ocean Village had become part of P&O Australia. The former Star Princess changed names again, this time to Pacific Pearl. Repainted with the P&O logo that used to adorn her superstructure, she’s since sailed a happy, trouble-free existence year-round in Australia.
In 2002 a new Star Princess was completed for Princess Cruises. At 109,000 GRT, she is substantially larger than her predecessor, and is derived from the line’s signature Grand Princess that first entered service in 1998. Both vessels are still in service today, though the new Star Princess experienced her own unfortunate bout of notoriety in 2006, when fire broke out in the early morning hours of March 23 as the ship
was sailing off the coast of Montego Bay, Jamaica. An improperly discarded cigarette left smouldering on a balcony sparked a blaze that wiped out nearly one hundred staterooms and led to the death of one passenger from a heart attack. Star Princess was sent to Europe for two months of repairs, and re-entered service in May 2006.[4]
Pilot Ronald Joseph Kutz died on July 9, 2002, in Seattle due to severe complications relating to an accident that occurred on June 12 of that year. His notice of death and obituary ran prominently in the Juneau Empire on July 16, 2002, and reflected on the many happy years he and his wife, Marilyn, had called Alaska’s capital city their home.
For Pilot Robert K. Nerup the aftermath of the Star Princess accident was decidedly less kind. Immediately following the grounding, Nerup would testify before the National Transportation Safety Board investigation team that had been sent to Alaska. His attorney, Anchorage-based Bob Richmond, attempted to do damage control to his client’s reputation, swiftly refusing the multitude of interview requests coming in from publications in Alaska and afar. His refusal to let Nerup speak only compounded the problems he would face as more details emerged about his past accidents, and his use of the drug Effexor, to treat his depression, at the time of the accident.
In the days that were to follow, Princess Cruises attempted to distance themselves from Nerup, despite the fact that they had apparently expressed no qualms about his performance or capabilities as a marine pilot in the wake of the collision between the Island Princess and Regent Sea in Skagway harbour in 1991. Princess captains that he had served alongside had come to his defence, testifying to both his exemplary personal and professional attitudes. Nevertheless, Nerup’s depression and use of Effexor to manage it were publicly disclosed for the first time, and while the NTSB could find no immediate issues with the Effexor, Nerup’s personal problems were dragged to the surface for all to see.
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