The Unforgiving Coast: Maritime Disasters of the Pacific Northwest by David Grover (review)

The Unforgiving Coast: Maritime Disasters of thePacificNorthwest By David Grover Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2002. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 224 pages. $19.95 paper. Reviewed by Harvey Steele Portland, Oregon The breakup of the shuttleColumbia re minds us that seemingly dependable sys tems can break down during an otherwise rou tinevoyage. For several hundred years, thePa cific Northwest Coast has been an arena for such unpredictable accidents.David Grover's The Un forgivingCoast describes nine disasters ? from the 1906 grounding of theValencia to the 1936 destruction of the Iowa? thatoccurred along 429miles of coastlinebetween theCalifornia state line andVancouver, BritishColumbia. In a useful introductory chaper, "Events and Milieus," Grover reviews the causes of shipwrecks. In thefirstthirdof thetwentiethcentury,thevoy age of a vessel fromharbor to harbor was nor mally a safe,patterned activity.On the Pacific Coast it was a littleless safe than elsewhere; but even when an accident occurred, the loss of life was usually minimal. Most of the occurrences described in thisstudy, however,were deadly, es pecially the most recent, in which theAmerican freighterIowa was caught in a gale crossing the Columbia River Bar outbound on January 12, 1936.The entirecrewof thirty-four was lost, with only eightbodies recovered. Grover isparticularly incisiveand readable in his analysis of the elements that sunk the Iowa. He concludes thatCaptain Edgar L. Yates "had covered perhaps 90 percent of the ground he needed to cover to reach both the safetyof deep water and eternalvindication forhis fateful deci sion." (p. 186).The adjective unforgiving certainly applies in thiscase. Ships thenand now operate inamilieu where nature and human fallibilityconspire to ravage them.Navigation ruleshave developed toaid the courts in findingfault ratherthanhelping navi gators avoid accidents. Equipment was some timescomplex and barelymaintained intheearly twentiethcentury,and seamen also had to con tendwith nature itself:seventy-foot waves, ice covered decks and equipment, shiftingand nar row channels, atmospheric conditions thatcould distortperception of thedirection from which a sound was coming (or that shutoff sound alto gether), fog so thick that itobscured themain deckfrom thecaptain and navigatoron thebridge, and rock and sand outcrops that extended out into theocean. The statementoftenattributed to Homer iscorrect:humans tempt thegodswhen theyplow thesegreen and undulating fields. In nearly all ofGrover's disasters, decision making by thecaptainwas a prime determinant. The captain of theJA. Chanslor (1919)had lostall senseofpositionwhen he hit therocksnear Cape Blanco. The Santa Claras captain (1915)neglected to use the hand-steering system when the me chanical steeringgear failed. The Queen (1904) had a longhistory ofminor scrapes,yet the loss of life when it wrecked was linked to lifeboat in adequacies thatshould have been corrected.The FrancisH Leggett (1913)broke up ina gale north of theColumbia River Barwhen the captain re acted incorrectlyto a shift of thedeck cargo. The Valencia (1906) hit a jagged reefon the British Columbia coast after faultynavigation. In two cases, thecaptain could not be blamed: the Mimi disaster (1913)was probably caused by a salvage company's decision to remove one-third of the ballast; and theSouthCoast, a venerable but pos siblyunseaworthy vessel,was completely lostat sea in 1930, with few tracesof the wreck. 278 OHQ vol. 104, NO. 2 Grover is at his best in describing the two Columbia River Bar accidents thatbefell theIowa and theRosecrans (1913), a tanker loaded with eighteen thousand barrels ofoil thathit theouter edgesofPeacock Spit (thoughttobe thelightship). The captain compounded his navigational blun der by dropping both anchors upon contact, making it impossible for the vessel towork in closer to thebeach for rescue.All but threeof a thirty-three-man crew were lost. Aboard these ships, thecaptainwas supreme. The working conditions were oftendebilitating: fortyyears of intermittentboredom and strain for the captain and worse for the officers and crew. With somuch riding on one person, even a small error in judgment could bemagnified into tragedy. With grim and dramatic detail, Grover deftly shows thehuman consequences of such miscalculations. Most previous books on shipwreckshave not analyzed theevents themselveswith theparticu laritythatGrover provides. He has a clear grasp of the mechanical causes ofdisaster but also ad dresses thehuman element, including the small acts of heroism thatoften occurred during the last stages of the event.He demonstrates, with wide-ranging scholarship, that any attempt to oversimplifytheepisode, as oftenoccurred...