Tragedy of The HBC Mount Royal
In 1907, Captain Johnson was still in charge of the Mount Royal. On the afternoon of July 6, he was returning from Hazelton and was steaming through the Kitselas Canyon, when disaster struck. A strong wind pushed her into a large rock formation named Ringbolt Island, wedging her crosswise against the current. She held while the passengers and crew scrambled to safety on the shore. Johnson assessed the situation and decided that the Mount Royal could be saved and with ten crewmen, he returned aboard. He had decided that the best way to deal with this problem was to use the capstan to winch the sternwheeler back over Ringboat Island. This proved to be a disastrous decision. The king post broke and rammed through the bottom of the Mount Royal, and she buckled as the current washed over her, then she rolled upside down and broke into pieces. Although Johnson survived, six of the crewmen drowned, including the first officer. One of the four survivors was rescued by George Little, who would later become the founder of the town of Terrace. George and a companion spotted the wrecked hull as the wreckage floated past the community of Kitselas. Curious, they paddled out to it and saw a hand waving at them from a hole in hull. The survivor was the Mount Royal’s chief engineer, Ben Maddigan, who was trapped in the bilge and filthy, but unhurt. After Little chopped him out, he commented that there must have been some air down there. The exhausted engineer replied, "I don’t know about air, but there was one hell of a lot of water!"
Captain Johnson went on to pilot the new sternwheeler built to replace the Mount Royal, the HBC's Port Simpson. Two months after the Mount Royal was wrecked, another sternwheeler was lost on the Skeena. The Northwest, which would become Bonser’s second loss, hit a rock and sank. There was no loss of life, but she was carrying the winter liquor supply for the towns along the Skeena, and her loss still caused a bit of uproar. In response to this minor crisis, the HBC refitted the Caledonia, and she ran an emergency trip up the Skeena with the much desired supplies. Bonser then moved on to the upper Fraser River in 1909, where he piloted two sternwheelers before returning to the Skeena in 1911.
Read more about this topic: Steamboats Of The Skeena River
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