The Ghost Ship of Seattle

(Note:  This article first appeared in Professional Mariner magazine.)

                              

                       “I looked upon the rotting sea,'
                             And drew my eyes away:
                       “I looked upon the rotting deck,
                         “And there the dead men lay.”
 

                                                  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

                                                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge

        

             Eleven shipmates, mostly reduced to bleached bones by nearly a year’s exposure to the wind and sun of the North Pacific Ocean, lay before Genosuke Matsumoto in May  1927 as, with hand and eye steadily giving way to disease and starvation, he wrote the final entry in the logbook of the Ryo Yei Maru;

            “…drifting with remaining sails hoisted.”

            The dying Matsumoto had made his last entry into the log of  a hellish eleven month drift around the North Pacific Ocean Gyre – north almost to the frozen Arctic, south towards the simmering Equator and eastward towards North America – to Umatilla Reef, just eleven miles south of Cape Flattery and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the entrance to Puget Sound.

            Cape Flattery is the most northwesterly point of the mainland United States. In the waning months of the year it offers fog, snow and rain as well as its normally treacherous currents. In the autumnal grayness of Oct. 31, 1927, Cape Flattery presented a macabre mystery to Capt. H.T. Payne, master of the bulk carrier Margaret Dollar.

           Margaret Dollar had just passed through Strait of Juan de Fuca into the Pacific and turned south towards California when Payne spotted a vessel apparently aground on Umatilla Reef.  Payne altered course and brought his six-year-old, 429-foot freighter close to the mystery ship.

            She was an 85-foot, two-masted, motorized Japanese fishing vessel.

            Ryo Yei Maru, “Good and Prosperous,” was her name.

            By the time the Margaret Dollar found her, she was neither.

           Ryo Yei Maru was not the first Japanese ship to be driven onto the West Coast of North America by the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. In 1831 three terrified Japanese mariners were rescued by local Indians near Cape Flattery in the first recorded such incident. Since then, many Oriental ships and their crews were found adrift or wrecked, alive or dead, along the North American coast from Mexico to the Aleutians.

           They had been blown offshore from Japan by gales or typhoons to be sucked into the infamous Black Stream.  If they were lucky, the sailors survived the months of starvation, exposure, scurvy or beri beri. The twelve men of Ryo Yei Maru had not been lucky.

           Payne sent First Officer L. A. Byberg and two seamen to investigate the derelict. Ryo Yei Maru had obviously been adrift for a long time. Her hull was sheathed in four inches of barnacles and seaweed and the sails and distress flags on her weather-worn masts had been reduced to rags by the lashing winds. Fishing gear was neatly stowed on deck, but engine parts and mechanic’s tools were scattered haphazardly about.

           Worst of all were the remains of the crew, all twelve men. Some lay wherever they fell, the bones and skulls of others were neatly and respectfully arranged on bunks or on shelves waiting to be recovered and returned to their homeland. In the cabin were the mummified remains of Capt. Tokei Miki and Matsumoto, an assistant engineer. Nearby, in a small wicker chest were two notebooks, kept first by fisherman Suteji Izawa and later by Matsumoto,  that told the pathetic story of their  final voyage.

           Ryo Yei Maru, owned by Otomatsu Hosoi, of Wafuka, Wakayama Prefecture, had sailed from the major commercial fishing port of Misaki on December 5, 1926. Things went wrong almost from the start when the engine crankshaft broke and the ship began her deadly eastward drift, away from the friendly shores of home.

           On December 23, with the wind raging at nearly 70 knots, the freighter West Isom spotted the distress signals and came to Ryo Yei Maru’s aide. Through his Japanese speaking cook, Capt. Richard Healy warned the fishermen that they were in terrible danger. He urged them to abandon their crippled vessel and seek safety aboard West Isom.

            Miki refused; he was determined to repair the engine or get a tow home to Japan. It was a foolish decision that sealed the fate of Ryo Yei Maru and the unfortunate souls in her. A broken crankshaft was clearly something that could not be repaired at sea and hoping for a vessel to happen by and offer a tow back to port was a wistful dream at best. By refusing Healy’s offer, Miki condemned himself and his shipmates to a grim, lingering death. West Isom sailed on, leaving Ryo Yei Maru 700 miles off the coast of Japan.

           Healy and his men were apparently the last to see Ryo Yei Maru’s crew alive.  They were lashed unmercifully by storm after storm. The New Year turned and by February 5, 1927, they had given up trying to repair the engine and tried to sail. But the sails were quickly destroyed by the savage winds and the ship kept on drifting ever deeper into the Pacific.

           Miki must have thought he was getting a second chance when early in February 1927, about six weeks after the encounter with West Isom, he spied another ship. But their potential savior did not see the distress signals and soon dropped below the horizon.

          It was about that time that the first crewmembers began falling ill. Chief Engineer Denjiro Hosoi was the first to die, on March 9.

           Between March 12 and 29, beri beri and starvation carried off fishermen Torakichi Mitani, Tsunetaro Naoe, Hatsuzo Terada, a fisherman identified only as Yokata and First Mate Tokichi Kuada. Suteji Izawa died on March 17, leaving the sorrowful task of journal keeping to Matsumoto.

           The food was all gone, but hope flickered briefly on April 5 when Miki managed to snare a large sea bird. The ravenous sailors devoured the bird raw, but Ryoji Tsujuichi died the following day anyway.

           A shark was gaffed and wrestled aboard, but the men were too badly weakened by starvation and disease. Yukichi Tsumemitsu died on April 19.

           A crewman, identified only as Kamite,  also died on April 19. Only Miki and Matsumoto were alive now, and both of them were too far gone to see to their vessel.

           Capt. Miki fell seriously ill on May 6 and Matsumoto noted: “The captain became seriously ill. Four days later only Captain Miki and I remain alive, both of us too weak to tend the helm.”

          Miki was probably next to die. On May 11, a day when the northwest wind was fresh, the sea rough and the weather cloudy, Matsumoto made his final journal entry, and then joined his shipmates.

           The worst was not written down in the sad little notebooks but was concluded  by the quarantine officer at Port Townsend, where Margaret Dollar brought Ryo Yei Maru. After inspecting the pathetic remains, he had little doubt that the fishermen had resorted to cannibalism in the face of starvation, according to historian James A. Gibbs. (Shipwrecks Off Juan de Fuca, Binfords & Mort Publishers, Portland, OR.)

          The reaction along the Seattle waterfront was predictable. Thousands flocked to the shores of Elliott Bay to see Seattle’s very own ghost ship. The city’s more flamboyant entrepreneurs, while they may not have done anything for a buck, never lost sight of H. L. Mencken’s dictum that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Breathtaking amounts of money were offered to buy the ship, bones and all, and turn it into a tourist attraction.

           Fortunately the Japanese hold their dead in higher regard. Locks of hair were retrieved and the remains were cremated in a proper Buddhist funeral service. Both the hair and the ashes were sent home to grieving families.

           The last hopes of free enterprise were dashed when, at the owners’ request, Ryo Yei Maru’s storm-worn hulk was doused with oil and set ablaze on Richmond Beach opposite Seattle on the southern shore of Puget Sound.  Several Japanese families came down to the waterside to witness the tragic pyre. They were struck, comforted perhaps, as a flock of white gulls congregated above the burning ship, as if waiting to escort the souls of  the twelve fishermen home.