Toward night the sky became overcast and the wind increased with the coming darkness. By eight o’clock a gale had arisen. It was off Coronation Island that my father noticed that the tugs were dragging his ship over to the north or dangerous side of the channel. He could hear, above the moaning of the gale, breakers crashing on the rocks! Father tried to signal the tugs of the danger, for their crews evidently had not realized it. Vainly he called through his megaphone, and vainly he sent up flares to attract the attention of the captain of the first tugboat. The condition of the men on those tugs must have kept them from recognizing the warning calls for they pulled on and on towards the shore in the face of the rising gale. Finally at the tugboat end of the forward hawser, some deck hand on the Hattie H. saw the cable slacken. They had towed the Star into a dangerous bight or indenture in the cliffs. Panic-stricken, the Hattie H. pulled off to one side leaving the Star in a straddled position between the two tugs. Neither tug was very powerful, but together and properly handled they could have dragged the ship out of danger. Instead the tugs see-sawed against each other doing nothing. Apparently those supposed to be in command did not know what to do.
Nearer and nearer the treacherous rocks the Star was driven by the wind. In desperation Father dropped both anchors to hold her. No sooner had he dropped the anchors than the tugboats, instead of fighting for the ship and the lives of the men on board, cut their towing hawsers and ran for it—deliberately steaming away at full speed, presumably for Wrangel. They didn’t even heave to long enough to see what the Star’s fate was. Later the master of the Hattie H. said he thought the Star was pounding to pieces on the rocks. (He had heard the anchor chain running out of the hawse pipe!) The Kyak steamed to shelter in the lee of an adjacent island. The Hattie H. returned to Wrangel, arriving the following Sunday morning. Her master, after the disaster, was asked why he did not stand by to assist the ship.
“What the hell could I do? She was wrecked anyway,” he went on record as saying. But had those tugs stood by what followed would never have happened.
On the Star the crew huddled on deck all night through, listening to the menacing hissing of the hidden surf crashing against the rocky cliffs. Would the anchors hold? That was fate—there was nothing they could do.
Dawn brought no hope. Scarce five hundred yards off loomed precipitous cliffs with huge waves dashing against them.
Only the anchors still held. If they should slip! But the men fought back that picture of inevitable destruction. Those tugs were surely coming back! They had only disappeared in the night to go for help! Waiting was torture. If only the tugs came back in time.
Hours passed. No tugs appeared. Then the anchors began to slip. The terrific strain of the huge waves was too great for the hooks to hold. Hours on hours! Waiting was gruesome now, as the anchors dragged and the men on board watched the jagged-toothed rocks come nearer. The heavy load of salmon in the holds shifted, and the Star listed first to starboard and then to port as each ground swell that rose lifted her high and carried her nearer the barren cliffs.
Father gave instructions to the men to make preparations for getting ashore when the ship struck. Life preservers were fastened on the Chinese who had become panic-stricken. The white officers and officials of the cannery company, realizing the added danger of a hundred crazed Chinese rioting, begged my father to batten them down in the hold like so much cattle to keep them off the decks. Father called the Boss Chinaman to him.
“Boss, you guarantee that your men not riot?” he began. “I won’t lock them down in hold. You tell them if danger come Captain tell you.”
That old Boss Chinaman had been with Father for fourteen years and he trusted him almost as he trusted his Joss god. He went back to his Chinamen in the hold and told them of my father’s promise, and they were calmed to a degree. They cramped together in their hold paralyzed with fear, but they kept off the decks.