“The Old Man’s drowned. Let’s pull out the living ones,” spoke up the carpenter and he went down the beach to salvage more of the men. Frank Muir was as devoted to my father as a son. He didn’t heed the carpenter, but dragged the apparently dead body to the shelter of a rock and tried to revive him. It seemed a thankless task. The Captain was gone. If he couldn’t save him he would at least bury him away from the others, and Frank Muir carried Father higher up to a little table of rock in the cliff. There he rolled him and pounded him until a glow of life came into his battered, frozen body.
By late afternoon no life could be seen in the surf. My father was so crippled and frozen that he couldn’t walk. He crawled around on all fours directing his men in reviving the others. No rest for any until, beyond any doubt, all were rescued that it was possible to rescue.
“We won’t give up until we find all of us,” said my father, and the twenty-seven survivors agreed to a man.
They set about to search the wreckage that was piled high on the beach for bodies. They found several groups of men, dead men, so entangled and twisted together by the churning of the sea that they couldn’t be pulled apart. Dismembered bodies were strewn on the rocky coast like driftwood. Arms and legs and headless trunks washed back and forth in the foam. One living being was found in the mess, a Japanese. He was buried in a hill of salmon cases. The men had to burrow to get into it. He was very weak through loss of blood from a gash extending from his temple the length of his chin!
By dragging wreckage together the men built a huge fire around which they snuggled for warmth. Instead of relief the fire was only an added torture, a Dante’s Inferno, for the thick smoke from the damp wood blinded them.
In the morning the bodies of the white men were gathered, and shallow graves dug for them in the rocky shore to keep the wolves from eating them. Over the graves Father ordered the men to pile heavy debris so that the sea washing up couldn’t snatch them back to a watery grave.
The lot of the survivors was almost as bad as that of the lost men, for there was no sign of rescue, and the coast was barren of habitation for hundreds of miles around. The icy wind made existence almost impossible.
The next day one of the tugs returned. Her captain was surprised to see the men ashore for he had not dreamed that supposedly dead men could live to tell the tale. It was too rough to send a boat in, but the tug hove to until the following day, when the crew took aboard the survivors and returned to Wrangel. The survivors were so incensed against the tug crew for cutting the hawser and sending one hundred and eleven men to their death that they started to murder them. Father stopped the violence. He said the law would deal with the tug people when the facts were made known. At Wrangel the survivors were furnished clothing from the cannery store and sent by steamers to San Francisco.
Several days after the wreck, the company’s tugs were sent with a crew to dispose of the bodies on Coronation Island. They found an indescribable confusion of corpses, provisions and debris covering the shore for a depth of many feet. Pieces of human bodies were mingled with the sides of hams and bacons and canned goods which the sea spewed up from the ship’s holds. Instead of segregating the bodies, the rescue crew drove picks into them and dragged them into heaps. After they had made piles of human wreckage they poured oil over them and set them afire like so much rubbish. Then they did something that is almost beyond human comprehension. After they had burned the bodies, they salvaged the hams and bacons and other foods they found mixed with the dead men and took them back to Wrangel where they sold them to the Eskimos.
What became of the few survivors? They were scattered by the company that owned the tugboats so that they couldn’t be used to witness against them. Those whose injuries prevented employment were treated in hospitals—the others were placed on various ships.