Inspired by Max’s blog, ‘Old Steam Ships’ –
“So Close Yet So Far”, this is my ballad
about the unimaginable sinking of the
SS Valencia, January 22, 1906 in the
Pacific Northwest, just sixty feet from shore.
Sixty Feet From Shore – A ballad with lyrics by me, music by Suno
From San Francisco harbor in the dead of winter’s cold,
The Valencia steamed northward with her passengers and hold,
A hundred souls and seventy, bound for Victoria’s shore
But the fog rolled in like a curtain, and they saw the sun no more.
No star to steer by in the sky, no beacon on the coast,
The captain reckoned by the log and trusted to it most,
He thought he’d passed Cape Flattery, he thought the Strait was near,
But Vancouver Island’s teeth lay waiting, black and sheer.
At midnight came the grinding, the shudder through the keel,
The cry rose up from every berth, the groan of tortured steel,
She’d struck the reef by Pachena where the great Pacific roars,
And through the dark they heard it, the surf upon the shore.
So near, so near, just sixty feet from land,
Close enough to hear the breakers, close enough to reach a hand,
Oh, the shore lay there before them, but the sea stood at the door,
Valencia, Valencia, sixty feet from shore.
They lowered down the lifeboats with the women and the young,
The falls ran wild, the davits groaned, the boats like leaves were flung,
The black waves took them one by one before the break of day,
And not a wife nor child of them would live to see the bay.
A boat of men fought through the surf and climbed the cliffs of stone,
They found the humming telegraph wire and followed it alone,
Through forest, mud, and darkness to a lineman’s cabin door,
And the wire sang out to Victoria: “She’s dying off the shore.”
The Queen came up, the Topeka too, the Salvor through the gale,
They saw the people in the rigging clinging to the rail,
But the reef stood guard, the swells ran high, no boat could pass that wall,
And the men upon the clifftop watched, and could not help at all.
They say that in the final hour, as the light was growing thin,
The voices rose up from the masts as the sea came rushing in,
“Nearer, my God, to Thee,” they sang above the breakers’ roar,
Then a great wave took the rigging down, and they sang no more.
They raised a light on Pachena Point, they cut a trail along the coast,
So the next poor souls the Graveyard claimed would not become its ghosts,
And fishermen on foggy nights still tell it as before:
A phantom ship among the rocks, still sixty feet from shore.
So near, so near, just sixty feet from land,
Close enough to hear the breakers, close enough to reach a hand,
Oh, the shore lay there before them, but the sea stood at the door,
Valencia, Valencia, sixty feet from shore.
Valencia… sixty feet from shore.
NAR©2026
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.
