The sinking of the Canadian Pacific steamship Princess Sophia was Alaska’s worst maritime disaster ― until it nearly happened again. In 1918, the Canadian Pacific steamship Princess Sophia left Skagway, Alaska, on her last trip of the season to Vancouver. She never made it. Battered by a raging snowstorm and sent dangerously off course, she ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef, a rocky shoal in Lynn Canal, North America’s deepest and longest fjord. She would spend two days high and dry on the reef, with rescue ships standing by, unable to help, before she finally slid to her watery grave. Seventy-six years later, another ship ― the modern Star Princess ― finds herself off course in Lynn Canal, and history nearly repeats itself. Weaving together events past and present, Aaron Saunders tells the story of two very different ships that set sail from Skagway at opposite ends of the century. Their common bond ― the unassuming and often treacherous stretch of water known as Lynn Canal. Stranded is a fluid telling of the stories of two passenger ship groundings in Alaskan coastal waters. ― The Northern Mariner Aaron Saunders writes about cruises and maritime history for The Province , Canadian Traveller , Cruise & Travel Lifestyles , Shippax CFI , and many others. He is the founder of the website From the Deck Chair. When not at sea, he calls Vancouver home. Introduction O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel (Who had no doubt some noble creature in her) Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished! ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest In the course of writing this book, it occurred to me that I can’t really remember the first time I learned of the wreck of the Princess Sophia. I do, however, remember where I was when I thought it would be a good idea to write a book juxtaposing her accident with the 1995 grounding of the cruise vessel Star Princess: in a little pub in Juneau known as the Triangle Club Bar, where I sat, nursing a pint of Alaskan Amber Ale while in port on a cruise through Alaska. I’d come into the bar because I’d heard there was free Wi-Fi internet access with purchase ― and there was. But instead of checking emails and filing articles, I found myself staring at a wall covered in photos of famous Alaskan shipwrecks, one of which was the unmistakable silhouette of the Princess Sophia, stranded up on Vanderbilt Reef. The first step in what would become a multi-year journey occurred when I literally walked across the street to Hearthside Books and purchased a copy of Ken Coates and Bill Morrison’s masterwork, The Sinking of the Princess Sophia. In Alaska, everything you need seems to be close at hand. I read the book as we made our way up to Skagway, and when I disembarked I stood in the middle of Broadway Street and tried to imagine the scene that would have greeted travellers in October 1918. I found it both easy and difficult; easy because of the cruise ship passengers like myself who swarmed the dock apron and clogged the streets. Difficult because Skagway today is a bit of a parody of itself; there’s re-enactments of shootouts and fake brothels designed to entertain families. Have you ever heard a father trying to explain to his son what a brothel is? You will, if you visit Skagway in the summer. The real tragedy, however, is not that it’s difficult to visualize the world of 1918, but that the story of the Princess Sophia has been largely forgotten. Even the grounding of the Star Princess, which occurred in modern times, wasn’t given the media-circus frenzy that has accompanied similar accidents in recent memory. It wasn’t until I was one of the hundreds of people queuing up to get back on my massive floating palace in Skagway that it hit me: absolutely no one who comes to Skagway by ship knows the sad, storied events that have played out right in the very waters on which they sail. Now, you could argue cruise lines don’t really want to talk about shipwrecks ― it’s a bit like showing Alive on an airplane. That’s fair. But the more I read about both accidents, the more utterly fascinated I became by the parallels between them. The Princess Sophia is the Titanic of the west coast; yet her journey into obscurity was greatly accelerated by the end of the Great War; the war that, people hoped, would be the War to End All Wars. Our knowledge of what happened onboard during those two grim days Princess Sophia spent stranded on Vanderbilt Reef comes from the passengers aboard her, and from those who had the most fleeting encounters with her crew. These included her would-be rescuers who kept their ships nearby in absolutely atrocious weather, sometimes at great risk to their own vessels and personal safety. Passengers wrote letters, some of which were discovered when the ship foundered. Wireless conversations, recorded in Juneau and preserved for all time, also provide brief glimpses into what life was like onboard. Many book