❖ STAR OF Bengal 1898--1908 ❖

STAR OF BENGAL 
Courtesy of the State Library of Queensland.

"The ship tragedy that shook the world was the loss of the Star of Bengal. This vessel was originally built of iron at the Harland & Wolff yard at Belfast, Ireland in 1873. She measured 262 feet in length and was 1,877 tons. After trading worldwide for several years she was transferred to the flag of Hawaii and from 1898 to 1900 traded the islands and California under the J. J. Smith house flag. In 1900 the Bengal received U.S. registry and six years later was purchased by the Alaska Packers Assoc. Her awful demise came on 20 September 1908.
      Though the details surrounding the tragedy have never been made clear, it appears from the facts that there was a gross miscarriage of justice as an outcome of the hearing into the matter.
      

Captain Nicholas Wagner
and his author/daughter Joan Lowell.
He was master of the Star of Bengal
when she was lost in 1908.
Original photo from the archives of
the Saltwater People Log©.
Click image to enlarge.

In Joan (Wagner) Lowell’s best-selling but controversial book, The Cradle of the Deep (1929,) Captain Nicholas Wagner who was master of the Star of Bengal, is believed by some to have used his daughter’s book as a sounding board for his account of what actually happened. Though he took the full brunt of the blame and had his papers removed, a portion of justice was restored when he received amnesty several months later and returned to sea.

           His cause, however, was not necessarily aided by the book; it was the story of the captain's daughter who was reputedly raised aboard her father's schooner from the time she was a baby until the full bloom of youth at age 17. So authentically was it written that no sailor could have initially denied that there could have been a possibility of deceit. But as it turned out, Joan Lowell like any other young lady had spent most of her childhood in her hometown (Berkeley,) receiving the usual education through high school. She must have sat at her dad's side for endless hours hearing of his experiences as master of the schooner Minnie A. Caine and the ship Star of Bengal. Based on fact but mixed with a generous seasoning of fiction, salty cuss words and sex, the book was released by the publishers as purely non-fiction and was sold with that understanding. When the author was exposed by local residents a few months later, the whole thing blew up like a firecracker, the book had already gone through several printings, the cry of "foul play" forced the publishers to offer the money back to any disillusioned purchaser. The added publicity only tended to promote the book more and it was the year's best seller. 

      The generally accepted true account of the wreck as told at the hearing follows:

      The Alaska Packers Association bark Star of Bengal was en route back to San Francisco from Wrangell when the tragedy occurred on Coronation Island on 20 September 1908. She was commanded by Captain Nicholas Wagner with Gus A. Johnson as mate. The iron-hulled vessel departed from Wrangell with about 50,000 cases of salmon in her holds and carried scores of cannery workers being brought home from the company canneries in Alaska. They were mostly Orientals.

      The steam tenders Hattie Gage, Captain Dan Farrer, and the Kayak under a Captain Hamilton, handled the towing hawsers as the vessel was led through the dangerous Alexander Archipelago toward the open sea where she was to drop her lines and spread her canvas.

      Captian Farrer was in overall charge of the two tugs, which were actually cannery tenders owned by the APA. As long as calm weather prevailed they encountered no difficulty with the Bengal but at midnight when a brisk wind arose and turned into a gale two hours later, the trouble began with a capital T. The Kayak which had little draft aft caused most of the strain to be placed on the other tender. The Kayak soon became completely unmanageable and the tugs were working against each other instead of together. Convinced that to keep up the strain would have meant outright disaster for all three vessels, the tug skippers ordered the lines cut and made a run for it, leaving the laboring Bengal at the mercy of the storm.

      Before the tenders abandoned the scene, Captain Wagner, in desperation, had let the anchors go to thwart the drift toward the desolate island. The bark brought up in about ten fathoms, 50 feet from the beach. The tugs had sought shelter at Warren Island some 12 miles away, where temporary repairs were made, after which the Hattie Gage steamed back to Wrangell seeking assistance from the government cable ship Burnside.

      In the terrible blow, the Star of Bengal and her terrified company waited in miserable solitude. Straining on her cable the ship was fully open to the storm off exposed Helm Point of a lee shore with precipitous cliffs.

      Four courageous men, Henry Lewald, Olaf Hansen, and Fred Matson, able seamen, and Frank Muir, a cannery cook, volunteered to get a line ashore. Their boat was smashed to bits in the surf but they succeeded in gaining the beach and making the line fast. In the interim, the straining Star of Bengal parted her cables and struck the rocks. Within the hour the vessel broke up, only her mizzen topmast marking the spot of the grave. As the hull split open the steady flow of salmon cases and heavy steel drums were swept into the voted interspersed with the b bodies of struggling humans. The giant walls of water combed the devastating scene of man's losing b battle against the sea. It was mayhem.

      Later Captain Wagner who was among the handful of survivors gave this official account:

      "When the final shock came, the Star of Bengal appeared to heave up her entrails in three sections. As I was thrown into the water I saw the amidships beams of solid iron come out in a tangled mass. The force necessary to produce this is scarcely conceivable. So strong had been preceding gusts that a five-inch iron davit was snapped short off. After I was thrown into the water, any attempt to swim appeared ridiculous. As I struggle only to keep afloat, I was hurled toward shore among a thousand cases of salmon and hundreds of metal drums that constituted our cargo. I was practically unconscious when I reached the  beach."

      Though there has been some controversy as to how many were actually aboard the Star of Bengal most accounts placed the total at 132. Only 22 survived and they were picked up many hours later by the errant Kayak after the storm abated. There were reputedly 74 or 75 Orientals aboard and all but two perished. The Caucasians that drowned were mostly the ship's crew.

      Captain Wagner was extremely bitter, charging criminal cowardice on the part of the tug skippers, who insisted that they would have accomplished nothing but the destruction of their own vessels and crews by hanging on longer. The inspectors of the Alaska district agreed with them apparently, for they were not censured, while Captain Wagner who was in no way responsible for the tragic episode had his license suspended, as an unjustifiable act which was later rescinded by chief inspector Bermingham at San Francisco."

 Jim Gibbs. Pacific Square-Riggers.      

❖ JOAN LOWELL and her HOAX WITH A MORAN BROS. SCHOONER ❖

Fiction creeping into the Non-fiction: 
Readers were "had." 

Actress, author, Joan Lowell (1902-1967)
and father Capt. Nicholas Wagner
with Capt. Jack Apple on board their 48-ft
Schooner BLACK HAWK.
Original photo from the archives of S.P.H.S.©

Words by legal historian Molly Manning.
From: The Legal Historian.com 14 May 2012.
The theatrics are from New York and California; for a connection to home, the schooner was built by Moran Shipyards, Seattle, WA.

Schooner MINNIE A. CAINE
Launching 1900 
at Moran Brothers Shipyard, Seattle, WA.
Photographer unknown,
Washington Rural Heritage site.

      "In 1929, Simon and Schuster, along with a myriad of readers and reviewers, developed a keen interest in Joan Lowell, whose recently published a book––Cradle of the Deep––told of her harrowing adventures on the high seas as she traveled with her father in his glorious four-masted ship. Her book's foul-mouthed accounts of being the only female on a ship full of hardened sailors, of learning life's lessons (including how to swim, which occurred after she was literally thrown into the ocean to see whether she would sink or stay afloat), and fighting for survival was shocking, engaging, and page-turning.

      When the New York Times reviewed the book, it sang its praises. The book was deemed a "jolly yarn," told with "dash and ardor" and a "vocabulary as replete with expletives as one will encounter at sea or in a highly modern Broadway show." Although the Times noted that the book seemed plagued with dramatics as Lowell described "each and every calamity at sea--shipwreck, scurvy, fire and so on," the reviewer was quick to add that he did not "question the veracity of the sea-going author."
      Oh, but he should have. Nautical experts who read the book found "innumerable flaws" in Lowell's account, including facts that any amateur sailor would not have mistaken. Some were so enraged that it was said that they 'called upon Heaven, Homer, and Herman Melville to witness that she didn't know her ship's lee scuppers from a marlinspike."'The truth was soon revealed that Lowell grew up exclusively on dry land in California, not on a ship.

Simon and Schuster 1929

Schooner MINNIE A. CAINE, 1929.
A pictorial refutation of one of the two statements
made in Joan Lowell's Cradle of the Deep.
The schooner is moored to her dock in Oakland, CA,
 that proved the ship did not burn and sink,
  as related in the book.
Original World Wide photo dated 8 April 1929.
From the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

      Lowell's publisher and her readers had been "had." Not knowing before publication that it was entirely make-believe, Simon & Schuster was forced to offer a refund to its fooled readers (as the first printing was 75,000 copies, the refund was a costly punishment). Further, since the book's true nature was not discovered until after the Book-of-the-Month Club recommended it to its members, the hoax's repercussions leaked into the courtroom as this book club was publicly ridiculed and criticized by powerful figures in the book world, which resulted in litigation.

Joan Lowell
Aboard BLACK HAWK, 1 April 1933,
attempting a circumnavigation with her father
Capt. Nicholas Wagner. They got as far as Guatemala.

      Lowell seems to have escaped her mischief unscathed, as she continued to write and even starred in a movie of her own making. In 1934, her film, Adventure Girl, was shown in theaters; the movie supposedly re-enacted her adventures with her father and his crew while on board a schooner headed for the West Indies and Central America. Lowell was said to have created the film to lend credibility to Cradle of the Deep––but there was no redeeming the latter after it was exposed for the hoax it was. Lowell never abandoned her tales of navigating the seas; it almost seems that she spent most of her life trying to revitalize her first fictitious book about such adventures. She even married a sea captain in 1936 and sailed with him to Brazil, where they built a home in the jungle. Her attempts to escape from her hoax were unavailing--even twenty years after its publication, the book- world still reeled from her shenanigans--Cradle of the Deep was declared "one of the most violent literary controversies of modern times" in 1952.
      Should Lowell's hoax be considered harmful or hilarious? Should it be taken seriously or with a sense of humor?"

Below, Anne Colby writing for the L.A. Times, 2008:

In an interview at the time, Lowell maintained that a writer's primary obligation was to provide readers with color and excitement: "Any damn fool can be accurate––and dull."
She never admitted deceit, and though the scandal followed her, it didn't put a halt to her literary adventures.
1936: Lowell moved to the jungles of Brazil where she died in 1967.