Qualla: SS Pacific (1850)

SS Pacific (1850): Introduction

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NWShipwreckAlliance, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the evening of November 4, 1875, the sidewheel steamer Pacific pulled away from Victoria's dock with perhaps 275 souls aboard, bound for San Francisco. She never arrived. Somewhere southwest of Cape Flattery, where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets the open Pacific, the sailing ship Orpheus cut across her bow in the dark. Within forty minutes, Pacific was gone. Two men survived. The rest -- gold miners heading south before winter, families, a lumberman who had founded a town, a former Gold Commissioner, forty-one Chinese laborers whose names went unrecorded -- vanished into water so cold that screams lasted only minutes. It was the worst maritime disaster the West Coast had ever seen, and the ship at its center had already lived a dozen lives.

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Image: NWShipwreckAlliance | CC BY-SA 4.0

SS Pacific (1850): Gold Dust and Gunfire

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NWShipwreckAlliance, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pacific was built in 1850 at William H. Brown's shipyard on New York's East River, her oak hull fastened with iron and copper nails, powered by a vertical beam steam engine that could push her past sixteen knots. She was fast, and the California Gold Rush needed fast ships. Her f...

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Image: NWShipwreckAlliance | CC BY-SA 4.0

SS Pacific (1850): Vanderbilt's Shortcut

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NWShipwreckAlliance, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cornelius Vanderbilt saw a faster path to the goldfields. Rather than crossing Panama, he charted a route through Nicaragua -- up the San Juan River, across Lake Nicaragua, and overland to the Pacific coast. He chartered Pacific for the western leg, San Juan del Sur to San Franci...

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Image: NWShipwreckAlliance | CC BY-SA 4.0

SS Pacific (1850): The Northwest Workhorse

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NWShipwreckAlliance, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pacific resurfaced in 1858, now working the coastal run between San Francisco, Portland, Puget Sound, and Victoria for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush brought miners north; Pacific carried them. She ferried troops to the San Juan Islands during bor...

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Image: NWShipwreckAlliance | CC BY-SA 4.0

SS Pacific (1850): Forty Minutes

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Puget Sound Dispatch ad for the Goodall, Nelson & Perkins Steamship Company., Public domain. Captain Jefferson Davis Howell, brother-in-law of the former Confederate president, commanded Pacific on her final voyage. Among the passengers boarding at Victoria were Sewell Moody, who had built the lumber town of Moodyville, and Captain Otis Parsons, who had just sold his fle...

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Image: Puget Sound Dispatch ad for the Goodall, Nelson & Perkins Steamship Company. | Public domain

SS Pacific (1850): A Century of Searching

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NWShipwreckAlliance, CC BY-SA 4.0. The wreck has never been easy to find. No officer from Pacific survived to report her position. The crew of Orpheus did not know precisely where they were. The water off Cape Flattery is deep and uneven, and after more than a century on the seafloor, a wooden hull decomposes to l...

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Image: NWShipwreckAlliance | CC BY-SA 4.0