Inspired by Max’s blog, ‘Old Steam Ships’ –
this is my fictionalized “confession” (and I
use that term loosely) made by an un-named
foreman from an unknown shipyard, written
days after the coroner’s inquest re the SS
Pacific, addressed to no one in particular,
which somehow makes this tragedy even
worse. See my notes on the coroner’s inquiry.
San Francisco, November 11th, 1875
They have returned a verdict of “sound and substantial,” and God forgive me, so did I, fourteen years past, when I signed my name to the same lie.
I did not lie the way a man lies who means to deceive. I lied the way a man lies when he has told himself the truth so many times it stops sounding like one. She’ll hold. She’s held before. She’s a stouter ship than she looks. I said these things to my supervisor, Mr. Kelly, and to the underwriters and, worst of all, to myself, standing in dry dock with a splitting maul in my hand and half her bottom planks gone soft as bread beneath my thumb.
We raised her out of the Columbia mud in the summer of ’61 looking like something the river had finished with. I will not pretend otherwise, not now. The frames aft of the paddle boxes were sound enough …. good New York oak, Mr. Brown built her honest …. but forward, where she’d struck, and low along the bilge where the water had sat in her for the better part of a fortnight, the wood gave under a fingernail. I told Kelly what she needed. New timber through the whole forward third. New planking below the waterline, fastened and coppered properly, not patched. Six months’ work, easily, and money the company did not have and would not spend, not with the economy the way it was, thanks to the soft Panama trade.
So we found a middle way, as men in my position always do. We found it the way a man finds a middle way between telling his wife the truth and lying to her outright …. we told her enough of the truth to keep our own conscience quiet, and none of it to anyone who might have stopped us. We caulked what could be caulked. We fastened what timber we could reach without opening her up proper. We painted her white as a wedding dress from the waterline to the rail, and Kelly stood on the dock and said she looked better than the day she was launched, and I did not correct him, because I wanted my wages same as any man.
I told myself …. I remember telling myself this quite precisely, standing in the yard with the paint still tacky …. that a ship does not need to be new to be safe. Only sound. And I believed, or made myself believe, that what I had left underneath that paint was sound enough for calm waters and short runs and captains who did not press her.
Fourteen years she carried that lie, and it very nearly held. That is the part I cannot forgive myself. Not that she was rotten …. wood rots, that is no sin of mine …. but that I knew precisely how rotten, and where, and said nothing. I have read the testimony from the inquest. A glancing blow, they called it; the Orpheus barely scratched her. And they ask, all of them, how such a small blow could open a ship stem to stern and pour her under in twenty minutes.
I do not have to ask. I have known the answer since 1861, and I let two hundred and seventy-some souls sail into the dark not knowing it. God forgive me, the fault is mine.
© MIT Museum
NAR©2026
Nancy’s Notes: At the Canadian coroner’s inquiry, witnesses testified that Pacific’s hull was rotten and leaked badly. Even more, a piece of Pacific’s bow was reportedly found caught in Orpheus’s rigging. The jury concluded that the relatively light collision should not have caused such catastrophic damage if Pacific had been sound and substantial.
This is “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” by Led Zeppelin
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated, and may not be used without permission. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
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