How one determined man found a sunken treasure

Shipwrecks tend to attract unusual characters. Jeff Hummel, who lives in the Seattle area, is a tall and lanky 58-year-old with the methodical disposition of an engineer—not a roguish, hard-living treasure hunter who dives for gold between beers. He is more scholar than salvor.

His calm bearing, however, belies a profound impatience. In his search for the SS Pacific, a steamship that sank somewhere off the coast of Washington state in 1875, some days would begin at 4:30 a.m. and he wouldn’t make it home before 10 pm. He managed costly equipment and impossible timelines, working with investors eager for a share of up to 6,000 ounces of gold—worth millions today—that reportedly went down with the vessel.

Hummel and his friend Matt McCauley grew up hunting for a different kind of treasure in Lake Washington, east of Seattle, with a mask and snorkel. The pair met in a lifeguard training class in their first year of high school. Around the age of 19, McCauley, with Hummel’s help, rebuilt a five-metre ski boat they hauled up from the bottom of the lake using flotation devices.

The pair showed enormous ingenuity in their salvage efforts. “We’d go around to gas stations to ask for their old air hoses, then splice them together,” McCauley, now 58, explains. The hoses supplied air to the pair from a boat on the lake’s surface during their dives.

In high school, Hummel and McCauley started talking in earnest about searching for the wreck of the Pacific, which had a mythic status among treasure hunters. But university, and then jobs, got in the way. McCauley moved to the East Coast. Hummel, who designed maritime navigational software, stayed in Seattle, pecking away at the mystery of the Pacific in every spare moment.

The SS Pacific first arrived in British Columbia in 1872, shortly after gold was struck in the Cassiar region, in the province’s northwest. The ship, built in New York in 1850, had spent its early years ferrying prospectors from around the United States and Central America to the gold rush city of San Francisco. In 1871, the ageing vessel was retired and left to rot on the mud flats of San Francisco Bay.

After the Cassiar region gold find, the ship was hastily resurrected by the shipping company Goodall, Nelson and Perkins to haul San Francisco miners and speculators hurrying to Victoria. From there, they travelled by land and sea to the Cassiar region in the Stikine Valley, which had yet to be colonised by Europeans.

To David Higgins, editor of Victoria’s Daily British Colonist at the time, the Pacific was a “bad ship, and an unlucky one.” Before it had been retired the first time, it had sunk in the shallows of the Columbia River. On another voyage, 45 passengers were lost to cholera.

The makeover that Goodall, Nelson and Perkins gave the Pacific was purely cosmetic, according to Higgins. “She was innately rotten—the paint and putty thickly daubed on to cover the rottenness,” he wrote in his memoir, Tales of a Pioneer Journalist.

The vessel was also notoriously leaky and had just five lifeboats, not enough for the Pacific’s official capacity of 203 people. That so many boarded it likely unaware of its gross inadequacies calls Virgil to mind: “O accursed hunger of gold, to what dost thou not compel human hearts!”

When the Pacific steamed southbound from Victoria on November 4, 1875, it was on its first run to San Francisco in a month.

No one knew for sure how many people were aboard when the Pacific set out. Accounts suggest 350. But Higgins—who visited friends on the ship before it sailed—saw crew hammering in new bunks and believed the doomed vessel was carrying 500 people. Among them were a lumber baron, circus performers, an equestrian troupe and a large group of gold miners made wealthy by the Cassiar.

John Sullivan, the gold commissioner for the Cassiar district, was a passenger; the miners aboard were paying him and another man, Francis Garesche, to protect their finds during the passage to San Francisco. Garesche, an agent for Wells Fargo Bank, had financed the Cassiar gold rush. In addition, several Victoria banks had chosen the November 4 sailing to ship large quantities of gold to San Francisco.

As the Pacific steamed out of Victoria mid-morning, witnesses later recalled, it was leaning to starboard. To counteract the list, Captain Jefferson Davis Howell ordered the lifeboats hanging on the ship’s port side to be filled with water.

That evening, the Pacific was met with rain and dark, overcast skies when it reached open ocean off the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

As fate would have it, a 1,100-tonne clipper named Orpheus was, at that moment, sailing north to pick up a load of coal on Vancouver Island. Somehow, on that wide expanse of water, the two ships were being pulled together like magnets.

The captain of the Orpheus was below deck when his crew mistook the Pacific’s masthead light for the lighthouse at Cape Flattery on the northwestern tip of Washington state. Realising their mistake, they turned hard to port to avoid a collision with the Pacific. The maneuvre caused its sails to lose the wind, leaving the ship dead in the water.

When the crew of the Pacific saw Orpheus suddenly appear, they frantically reversed the engines. But it was too late. Sometime around 10pm the steamship hit the clipper on its starboard side, causing it serious damage. But the Pacific’s own wounds were fatal.

“I woke up with the crash,” Neil Henly, the Pacific’s quartermaster, later recalled. “Jumped out of my bunk, the water rushing through the bow; all was confusion.” He could barely believe the sight before him: The bow was torn open. The port-side lifeboats—filled with water—were useless.

The 69-metre steamer sank within minutes. Just before it went under, it broke in half, hurtling hundreds of souls into the frigid water.

The Orpheus, meanwhile, stayed afloat and made its way to Vancouver Island. The captain, who ignored the pleas of his crew to rescue people from the Pacific, was later tried for abandoning the scene of the collision, but was found not guilty.

On the water, survivors desperately tried to stay afloat. One passenger, Henry F Jelly, recalled seeing a group of miners crying out as the water closed over them. Then all fell quiet.

Jelly, a rail surveyor from Port Stanley, Ontario, lashed himself to the wreckage of the pilot house and was picked up by a passing ship about 48 hours after the sinking. According to the Daily British Colonist, Jelly was haunted by the sounds of crying passengers, “including a woman whose child had been killed during the panic.”

Jelly and Henly, who was found floating on a piece of the ship’s upper deck, were the Pacific’s only survivors.

With telegraph lines downed by the storm, it took four days for the tragic news to reach Victoria, before racing across the continent. It was the first tragedy to hit British Columbia after it became Canada’s sixth province in 1871, and remains one of the Northwest’s worst maritime disasters.

Following the sinking of the Pacific, debris and corpses began washing ashore. The body of Fannie Palmer, the 18-year-old daughter of a professor and a socialite from Victoria, ended up on San Juan Island, a 180-kilometre journey that brought her within sight of her family home.

A white plank came ashore on the southern end of Vancouver Island a month after Fannie Palmer’s body was found. Written boldly on it in pencil were the words: “S.P. MOODY. ALL LOST.” In the frantic moments before the ship broke apart, Sewell P Moody, who owned a lumber mill in Burrard Inlet, British Columbia, managed to dash off the message in the hope that the board might be found and his fate known.

A Victoria coroner’s jury delivered a verdict that put the blame for the disaster on the Orpheus for crossing the bow of the Pacific. But it pointedly noted that the “very slight blow” should not have damaged the steamship “if she had been a sound and substantial vessel.”

Whenever he was asked what haunted him most about the Pacific tragedy, Higgins would mention the “bonnie, blue-eyed boy” he’d carried onboard the steamship on the morning it left Victoria. His mother had been struggling up the gangplank, and when Higgins returned the babe to her arms, the little boy reached back for a kiss, waving his chubby hands.

More Than a century later, Jeff Hummel continued his search for the Pacific. While travelling for work, he visited obscure archives in New York, Washington, DC, Victoria, San Francisco and Tacoma, Washington, looking for accounts of the sinking in newspapers stored on microfilm. He hunted down tidal currents for 1875. Steamship specifications helped him determine the Pacific’s likely speed. With this information, he narrowed the search field to roughly 1,100 square kilometres off the Washington coast.

A turning point came with the discovery of a crucial document in the early 1990s: Testimony from Sullivan’s successor as gold commissioner suggested that as much as ten times the reported amount of gold had been loaded onto the ill-fated craft. For the first time, Hummel realised that he might be able to convince others to share his passion for the project.

To narrow his parameters, Hummel began making contact with Washington fishermen, meeting them at seaside greasy spoons at 2am and asking if they remembered pulling in something strange in their nets. One showed Hummel a piece of coal he’d hauled up, with a load of hake and cod, years earlier. An Alberta lab found that the coal was likely fuel for the Pacific: It came from the Coos Bay, Oregon, coal mine that belonged to the ship’s owners.

The discovery helped reduce the search field to 50 square kilometres, an area filled with underwater canyons, crags and grottoes.

in 2019, Hummel began examining the area with two sonar drones he had designed and built. By this time, McCauley, now 58, had rejoined the project, taking a leading role in supporting the search from shore.

On October 8, 2021, the team went on their last possible search for the year. At 4:30pm, as the seas grew rough and stormy, the Pacific passed across Hummel’s screen for the first time, at a depth of 500 metres. 

“That is the ship,” Hummel told his crew. He could see what looked like the straight lines of a sunken vessel. “That is the engine—100 per cent.” On the next pass, though, Hummel had second thoughts. “It just looked like a blur,” he said. It was an agonising nine months before the team returned to the site to confirm that they had, in fact, found the Pacific.

When it comes to treasure hunting, the only thing more important than good research is a good lawyer. If people are willing to put in the work—and expense—of tracking down a wreck that the original owner has abandoned, maritime law says they have full rights to whatever they find. There may still be some outside claims to the Pacific’s gold, such as from descendants of the original owners.

In the autumn of 2022, Hummel went to court to convince a federal judge that he had found the wreck. As proof he submitted two items that had been pulled up using a robot submersible: a soot-stained fire brick they believe came from the ship’s boiler and planking from its hull. In November 2022, US District Court Judge James L Robart issued an order that restricted competing salvors from entering the area, which is in US contiguous waters. The Coast Guard has orders to detain any vessel that enters the area.

When the Pacific hit the ocean floor with massive force, a cloud of clay and mud rose from the seabed and settled over the wreck—effectively sealing it, McCauley explains. “What’s there is beyond anyone’s possible imagination,” he says. “It’s in exceptional shape.”

Hummel and McCauley plan to display artifacts recovered from the Pacific and a model of the ship itself in a purpose-built museum in Seattle—offering a time capsule of frontier life. McCauley heads up their non-profit arm, the Northwest Shipwreck Alliance, which aims to launch the museum that will be devoted to the Pacific.

They still don’t know exactly how much gold went down with the Pacific, partly because bad weather slowed efforts to explore the wreck in 2023. They plan to resume the search this August when the weather is best.

Once the gold has been recovered, they will share the spoils with the investors and people who worked on the project, who kicked in $2.4 million to finance the search.

Since 1987, Hummel, who is now president of salvage company Rockfish Inc, has conducted 27 ocean searches to find the Pacific, each one lasting weeks. He noticed that often when they returned to shore, the crew would silently watch him, as if expecting him to call it all off. “We’re not gonna stop,” he’d tell them.

“I knew it was findable because we had coal from it,” says Hummel. “It didn’t just vanish into thin air.”

It’s impossible not to see in the search an echo of what led to the Pacific’s wreck in the first place. The insatiable impulse for gold that drove prospectors to the wilds of British Columbia also sent Hummel to the ocean’s depths. Indeed, he considers the stampeders who went down with their fortunes aboard the Pacific kindred spirits.

“I like to think they’d be happy to know it took me so long to find it.”

© 2023, THE GLOBE AND MAIL. FROM “GOLD DIGGERS IN A COLD SEA,” BY NANCY MACDONALD, THE GLOBE AND MAIL (AUGUST 26, 2023), WWW.THEGLOBEANDMAIL.COM