In 2002 I did something that just about every serious shipwreck diver has imagined doing: I discovered a deep, intact, untouched passenger liner shipwreck. The Alaska Steamship Company vessel Aleutian struck a pinnacle rock and sank off the coast of Kodiak Island, Alaska early on a May morning in 1929. The alternating thrills and heartbreaks that have followed my discovery have taken me on a financial and emotional roller-coaster that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Even though I've lost the Aleutian as a physical object, no one can take away what the discovery has meant to me and in that sense, I still think of it as "my shipwreck."

Just as the wreck of the Aleutian continues to settle, rust and disintegrate, the ship will find itself in the news again during our lifetimes. As I process all that has happened, and begin to distance myself emotionally from the psychological effects of the lengthy federal court battle surrounding the Aleutian, I will work to tell the story of the ship's history, its unfortunate loss, and amazing discovery and exploration by technical divers.

Like the man said, "Good luck with that!"

Wreck of the S.S. Aleutian

The liner Aleutian was built in Philadelphia in 1898 as the Havana. Three hundred seventy-five feet long with a 50-foot beam, the iron-hulled vessel was operated by the New York and Cuba Steamship Company until 1905. In August of that year, the ship was sold and renamed Panama. For nearly 22 years the 5,708-ton ship steamed the Atlantic route between New York and Panama.

In February 1927 the Panama was purchased by the Alaska Steamship Company and moved to Pacific service. Renamed Aleutian after the string of volcanic islands that make up Alaska’s southwest coastline, the vessel received an extensive remodel in Seattle before entering the company’s Alaska trade with regular freight, passenger and mail service between Seattle and points northward.

On the morning of May 26, 1929 the Aleutian was carrying mail, 115 tons of freight, five passengers and 111 crew members as she steamed a course south into Uyak Bay. Sea conditions were calm and visibility was good. The Aleutian was making 14 knots and drafting 21 feet.

Without warning, a tremendous shudder reverberated from the ship’s hull far beneath the waterline. The Aleutian had struck a submerged pinnacle of rock lying unseen just beneath the icy water.

“I stopped the engines and then put her full ahead to beach her,” Captain Gus Nord later testified. “She was sinking so fast that they told me from the engine room they could do nothing on account of the water coming… The vessel was sinking bow first with a heavy port list.”

Mortally injured, the enormous ocean liner settled lower as thousands of tons of seawater rushed through the gash in her hull. The captain gave the order to abandon ship and lifeboats were hastily lowered. Most of the passengers, officers and crew made it off the stricken Aleutian in lifeboats, while others leapt into the water and were plucked out of the swirling maelstrom.

Just seven short minutes after the collision, the Aleutian disappeared beneath the gentle swells of Uyak Bay, a sheen of fuel oil and a mass of floating debris all that remained to mark her grave. An editorial printed the day after the wreck reads, “It seems to have been a case of too large a ship for too small a bay.” The great ship, valued at $1 million in pre-Depression American dollars, would lie hidden and forgotten for more than 73 years.

Discovery of the S.S. Aleutian

In 1998 Anchorage-based author and shipwreck historian Steve Lloyd resurrected the story of the lost Aleutian while researching another Kodiak shipwreck story, the Farallon wreck of 1910. Lloyd visited the National Archives in Seattle and obtained a copy of the transcript for the Marine Board of Inquiry hearing that had been conducted after the Aleutian sank in 1929. He learned that the steamer was reported to have sunk in very deep water—perhaps 300 feet or greater—and that salvage had never been attempted.

A chart of Uyak Bay shows depths approaching 400 feet near the reported site of the sinking, a depth Lloyd knew would place the wreck effectively out of reach, even for experienced deep-wreck technical divers. From testimony given 70 years earlier by the Aleutian’s captain, pilot and first mate, Lloyd reconstructed the bearing, course and speed of the ship in the moments before she impacted the hidden pinnacle of rock.

In August 2002 Lloyd utilized side-scan sonar and a magnetometer to search the seafloor in a large V-shaped grid beginning at the rock that had claimed the liner—now marked with a navigation aid and renamed Aleutian Rock in honor of its victim. Making calculations for the speed of the Aleutian, the state of the tide on the morning of her loss, and a variety of other factors, the searchers located a very large target on the sea floor more than 200 feet below.

Every member of the search group was filled with excitement, but the discovery could not be confirmed until a diver had descended for a visual inspection of the target. Steve Lloyd donned scuba equipment and followed the dive boat's anchor line down into the icy darkness of Uyak Bay. There on the bottom, with her masts still standing as if reaching for the light she would never again see, lay the proud steamship Aleutian. On August 14, 2002, Lloyd became the first person to visit the resting liner since that morning 73 years before when she plunged into the depths.

The sunken Aleutian rests upright on the bottom in 220 feet of water. Depending on the state of tide, the top of the ship’s superstructure rises to within 165 feet of the surface, and the tops of her twin masts are covered to a depth of 110 feet. Significant portions of superstructure—including the bridge, social hall, smoking room, and first class staterooms—are collapsed in a confusing tangle of debris. The lifeboat davits sit empty, the capstans and other deck equipment silent. Giant ling cod and black rockfish guard the staterooms and crew quarters.

Everyday artifacts of shipboard life lie everywhere: portholes, door hardware, light fixtures, and china emblazoned with the Alaska Steamship Company logo. White porcelain sinks from the Aleutian’s staterooms reflect white under the glow of a diver’s powerful light. Iron deck beams and rusting cargo hatch coamings drop away into the inky blackness of unexplored passages. Ghostly white metridium sea anemones blanket the masts, bow and stern of the ship where the powerful tidal currents of Uyak Bay sweep nutrient-rich water in an endless cycle of influx and outflow.

The Aleutian is disintegrating under the unstoppable forces of time and saltwater corrosion, but the ship is remarkably intact and recognizable, considering the violence of her sinking and the decades she has lain underwater. Her resting place is an unforgiving environment that can be visited only by experienced deep-wreck scuba divers with the training and equipment necessary to conduct their dives safely and responsibly.

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