[cap]S[/cap]ince 1792, over two thousand vessels and seven hundred lives have been lost in what has become known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Here, on the Columbia River bar, the hurling force of the great river collides with the mighty Pacific and creates some of the worst shipping conditions in the world.
Throughout the region, evidence of many of the shipwrecks still remains today. Some wrecks are visible to the eye as skeletons mostly buried by sand. Other lost vessels have vanished completely, but are memorialized as geographic namesakes in the region.
Here are a few of their stories.
One of the few sand bars that did not erode after the jetties were built, the Desdemona Sands got its name from a ship that grounded there on New Year’s Day in 1857. Classified as a bark, which refers to the way the ship is rigged, the Desdemona was built in 1847 and called San Francisco, California, its home port. According to Pacific Graveyard by James A. Gibbs, the ship was one of the most dependable and familiar in coastal trading. Before leaving for Astoria, Oregon, the ship’s captain, Francis Williams, made a bet with the ship’s owner, Thomas Smith: If Williams could get the ship’s cargo to the Columbia River by New Year’s Day, Smith would buy him a new Sunday suit.
Williams arrived around midnight on New Year’s Eve but decided to wait until dawn to cross the bar. At daybreak, the crew signaled for a bar pilot to guide the ship across the bar, but none ever arrived. Williams, a skilled captain with decent knowledge of the bar, decided to make the crossing without a pilot. But the ship was heavy with cargo and Williams’s charts of the bar’s ever-shifting channels were incorrect. The ship hit a shoal.
Williams, the ship’s crew, and men from Astoria worked for three days to remove cargo from the stranded ship before a storm hit and the work had to stop. After the storm, the crew returned to the ship for the last bits of cargo. In the frenzy, the scow carrying cargo and the crew, and being pulled by a tugboat was overloaded. It capsized, taking the cargo and several crewmembers with it. All but one of the crewmembers was saved.
The wreck of the Desdemona was visible for many years until one especially hard winter when it sank out of sight into the sands that now bear its name. Gibbs mentions that it is unknown whether Williams ever received his new Sunday suit.
USS Shark 1846
The quaint Oregon coast town of Cannon Beach got its name from a cannon that drifted ashore from the 1846 wreck of US Naval Survey schooner, the Shark. The ship, under the command of Captain Schenck, arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River as part of a surveying fleet in August, 1846. According to James A. Gibbs, author of Pacific Graveyard, a cook claiming to be a bar pilot came out to meet the ship and offered to guide it across the bar. The cook was supposedly a survivor of the Peacock shipwreck five years prior.
But just twenty minutes after taking over as pilot, the cook stranded the ship on a sand bar. The weather was calm and as the tide came in, the ship drifted free and escaped a watery grave for a short time. The ship was then safely anchored near the Astor Colony, and the crew began surveying the land for safe passage across the bar. Because of tense relations and anxiety over borders between the United States and Great Britain, many crewmembers began deserting and replacements could not be found. The crew’s work was rushed in order to finish the job before more men deserted.
Without proper preparation, the ship began crossing the bar on September 10. It quickly hit Clatsop Spit, Oregon, and was hit hard by breaker waves in rough weather. In an attempt to free the ship from the spit, Captain Schenck ordered all three of the masts to be chopped down and the ship’s twelve cannons to be thrown overboard. But before this job was finished, the Shark began to break apart from the constant pounding of waves. By the next day, it was completely in pieces. A section of the wreck carrying one of the cannons came ashore south of Astoria. In 2010, two more 