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| The shipwreck at Siletz Bay in Lincoln City. |
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| The J. Marhoffer |
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The remains to be seen ...
... and some that are buried, too. Two shipwrecks that still haunt the central coast
[Posted Jan. 14, 2009]
Story by Niki Price. Contributed photos (Excl. Boiler Bay, at bottom)
Do you prefer your shipwrecks well-documented and photographed, so that you may pore over every fatal error and imagine the scene in vivid detail? Or do you like a good mystery, a relic of unknown age, name and origin, lying silently and patiently beneath the sands of time?
In north Lincoln County, we’ve got one of each. In Boiler Bay, just north of Depoe Bay, low tides reveal the remains of the J. Marhoffer, a steam schooner that came aground there in 1910. Siletz Bay, in south Lincoln City, is home to the remains of what might, or might not, be the 1860 brig Blanco. We’ll start with the obvious, and leave the vague for later.
J. Marhoffer
Some people who visit Boiler Bay State Park, or drive past the cove during a winter storm, might assume it was named for the roiling action of the ocean. Early in the history of Lincoln County, locals called it “Brigg’s Landing,” after one of the pioneering families here. For the past century, however, it’s been known to all as the home of the boiler, what’s left of the J. Marhoffer.
The 175-foot schooner was one of the small freighters that by the early 20th century were making regular trips off the Pacific Coast. On May 18, the Marhoffer was bound for Portland under the command of Captain Gustave Peterson. The crew members’ accounts say that she was doing about 9 knots, pushed north by a tailwind off Yaquina Head.
The first engineer, they said, was taking a nap when the second engineer tried to light a new gas torch, an invention he had never used before. He lost control of the flame, which quickly spread throughout the oily engine room and down to the steamer. The engine continued to turn, burning so hot that none of the crew could get close enough to try and flood it. Captain Peterson gave the order to abandon ship, altering his course for the rocky shore three miles east. Peterson’s wife, the ship’s dog and half the crew were dispatched to a lifeboat that headed for shore. The captain and the rest of the crew followed in the second lifeboat a few minutes later.
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| The Beachcomber 1, at work on Siletz Bay. Contributed photo. |
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The burning ship was easy to see from Depoe Bay, and by the time it
came ashore there were people waiting anxiously onshore. Tony
Wisniewski, a long-lived Depoe Bay resident who was a boy in 1910,
described the landing like this:
“I could see a small speck drift astern of here, and I figured it was
the lifeboat with her people. Then she came charging in belching
flames, sparks and smoke like a volcano,” Wisniewski told Stan Allyn,
who later related the tale in his 1982 memoir, “Heave To! You’ll Drown
Yourselves!”
“She piled onto the rocks with a helluva crunching crash, heeled way
over to starboard, then lay there burning like a blast furnace. All of
a sudden her tanks exploded and shot timbers, chunks of steel and flame
clear up into the trees behind me, a quarter of a mile away,”
Wisniewski told Allyn.
Tony’s mother, Mrs. Andrew Wisniewski, saw the wreck from her home in
Lincoln Beach, about two miles north. Seeing the lifeboats headed for
the mouth of Fogarty Creek, she took off her red sweater and waved it
frantically. She was hoping, she told her son later, to signal a safe
place to land. The crew on the lifeboat, however, thought the red flag
meant danger. They turned around and rowed three miles south to Whale
Cove, where they landed safely on the beach. The only fatality was the
ship’s cook, who was severely burned. The rest of the crew and
passengers, 19 in all, made it safely to shore.
Nearly a century later, low tides in the former Briggs Landing reveal a
rusty boiler, about 12 feet in diameter, with two large “eyes” looking
south toward the cliff-top Boiler Bay State Park. You can see it from
the park at low tide.
During extreme low tide events, you can walk down to it from a rough
trail off Hwy. 101, just north of the park entrance. The small pullout,
with room for about three cars, is marked by a rusty iron pipe, mounted
upright in the bluff, that probably came from the Marhoffer, too.
Brig Creek?
One of the defining features of Lincoln City is Schooner Creek, which
empties into the north end of Siletz Bay near SW 51st Street. It was
so-named because, until about 15 years ago, the ribs and wreckage of a
100-foot-long ship protruded through the sands at the creek’s mouth.
No one is sure of the boat’s name or origin. The most solid historical
evidence comes from the correspondence of Ben Simpson, who worked for
the Indian agency in Siletz. In 1864, he wrote the following to H.H.
Luce of Coos Bay: “A large brig named Blanco, from San Francisco, was
wrecked a few days hence at the mouth of the Siletz River. I have just
returned from an examination of the vessel. She is a total wreck; her
masts are gone, her deck broken in, her hull is split from deck to
keel, and I fear her crew are all lost.” Simpson goes on to detail the
items he salvaged, and those he found in the possession of Indians.
In 1949, writer Ben Hur Lampman found another citation on the fate of
the Blanco, from the “Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties,”
published in 1898. It states that the brig was made in North Bend, by a
member of the well-known Simpson shipping family, in 1860. This source
confirms that the Blanco drifted into Siletz Bay, bottom side up, in
1864, and was a complete loss.
But the brig Blanco is not the only candidate. Other ships lost in the
area include the schooner Sunbeam, which disappeared in the 1880s, and
the 113-ton schooner Uncle John, lost off Cape Foulweather in 1876. Or,
perhaps it is the schooner Phoebe Fay, which stranded north of Cape
Foulweather in 1883.
It’s been difficult to do anything but wonder. Siletz Bay gets sandier
every year, and no one has seen this skeleton, schooner or not, for a
long time. But it hasn’t been forgotten; in fact, in 2004 Lincoln City
Visitor and Convention Bureau director Sandy Pfaff asked Beaverton
physicist and imaging specialist Bradley Matson to attempt to locate
the wreck.
Matson and his colleague Gerald Sandness used historic photos of the
wreck to narrow down the search location. They made a geophysical map
of the area using global positioning system coordinates, so that they
could precisely identify the area’s landmarks. Then, in the spring of
2005, they attached four magnetometers to a wheeled cart (dubbed The
Beachcomber 1) and made a checkerboard survey of the area: north to
south, and east to west. He released his findings to the LCVCB in 2008.
“The idea was, simply, to look for anomalies in the magnetic field.
These are very subtle changes, and it was our hope that we would find
subtle changes in the shape of a ship,” Matson said. “We found
something I’ll call it an anomaly in roughly the same orientation and
size of what is pictured in historic photographs. It’s in the right
place, the right size the right shape. But that’s not very conclusive.”
The only way to confirm that these readings, blue and magenta dots on
hist computer screen’s field of green, would be to start digging. But
that will have to wait for an archeological survey, which isn’t on any
scientist’s priority list. For now, this shipwreck must remain shrouded
in mystery.
“Preservation is the most important thing. This is a site of historic
and archeological significance, and it’s illegal to disturb it,” Matson
said.
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| The boiler at Boiler Bay is one of the last remnants of the J. Marhoffer. This photo was taken in early 2008 during an extremely low tide on a calm day. Don't attempt to access the boiler except in extreme low tide situations on calm days. TODAY photo by Niki Price. |
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