The Sinking of Los Angeles
'More horrors than can be described'
Most of the passengers aboard the steamship Los Angeles were tucked away comfortably in their cabins, retired for the chill April evening of 1894. It was the end of another day at sea along the California coast. L.W. Denison, the ship’s stewardess, enjoyed some off-the-clock free time in the ship’s casino with a friend. Hungry for snacks, Denison ran downstairs to the pantry when a violent bump staggered her. Moments later a hideous jolt threw her to the floor.
Almost immediately, the calm of the evening turned to screeching calamity. Denison managed to maintain her composure; she herded passengers to the deck and helped women and children into life preservers. Many of the panicked guests were still in their nightclothes.
It had been an uneventful voyage until then. The Los Angeles, a passenger boat operated by the Pacific Coast Steamship Co., had departed from San Pedro two days earlier — Thursday morning, April 19, 1894. It picked up passengers along the way, at ports in Hueneme, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and San Simeon. Monterey would be its next port.
The jolt that jostled Denison – and that bolted passengers from their cabins – was the Los Angeles hitting a submerged rock off the coast west of Point Sur. The collision knocked people and items to the floors of their cabins. The heavy lamp hanging from the casino ceiling swung wildly and shattered into fragments as it slammed back and forth against the top of the room.
“There was no mistaking what it was,” Denison would say later. “The first crash was followed in an instant by a second, and the whole vessel seemed to rise far out of the water and plunge back again upon the rocks.”
The horror of perishing in a cold dark abyss — the mysteries of death by drowning — has forged a unique mythology in the human psyche. But the sinking of the Los Angeles captured the public’s attention on the West Coast like few others. Reporters from San Francisco and Los Angeles hurried to the scene, and they dispatched breathless reports describing harrowing terror.
It became evident rather quickly that the sinking of the Los Angeles had been a sensational exercise in human tragicomedy. The third officer was obviously to blame for the navigational screwup, and much of what happened after the boat hit the rocks was a series of blunders and bad luck, punctuated by acts of valor and marvels of human resilience.
Traumatized survivors told reporters it was a miracle the wreck hadn’t killed them all.
“It is a story so harrowing, so blood curdling, that those who witnessed the tragedy on the water shudder to tell it, and those who would listen grow cold and turn away in horror,” according to Sol Sheridan Jr., a reporter from San Francisco.
It was, added the stewardess Denison, “an experience that has more horrors than are to be described.”
LIQUID GRAVEYARD
As the stewardess assigned to Los Angeles, Denison had personally come to know most of the 49 passengers on the boat. Their final stop would have been San Francisco; many of the passengers had been talking with excitement about attending the California Midwinter International Exposition, the World’s Fair that had recently opened at Golden Gate Park.
Denison was especially fond of Sol Sheridan, a white-haired old invalid the ship picked up north of Los Angeles, at the port in Ventura. The old man had made a career in law enforcement, but he was such a sweet spirit that he was known as Uncle Sol around Ventura. Uncle Sol told Denison he was en route to San Francisco to visit his son, the newspaper reporter also named Sol. Denison also chatted with a nice young man, a 21-year-old named Willie Curtin who accompanied his mother on the cruise. And of course Denison came to know the eight or nine children on board, including a couple of sweet orphan boys she was responsible for while on board; they were en route to a Catholic school in Watsonville.
Thirty-six crew members staffed the vessel captained by H.D. Leland, an old hand who had been navigating the waters off the coast of California for 25 years. The Los Angeles was a converted government “revenue cutter.” The vessel was described by the Los Angeles Times as an “old standby of the coasting trade,” which means it was not a first-rate vessel but it was seaworthy enough for passengers and freight.
The Pacific Coast Steamship Co. was one of several passenger services that transported passengers up and down the West Coast before the turn of last century. Its two steamers, the Los Angeles and the Eureka, ran regular alternating routes from Southern California to the Bay Area and back, an eight-day round trip.
California’s coastlines are mostly rugged, so of course the waters have a long weird history of shipwrecks. In Monterey County, they always happened around the points, boats hitting rocks in the blank darkness of foggy nights: steamships, passenger cruisers, cargo and ships filled with merchandise or contraband. There was even an airship — a military dirigible called the USS Macon — that fell out of the sky and sank off Point Sur in 1935.
Since 1808, at least 463 vessels have gone down in or within 15 miles of the area now covered in what is now known as the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, from Marin County to an area around Cayucos, in San Luis Obispo County. That’s according to a “Submerged Cultural Resources Study” completed in 2001 by the sanctuary staff. The sanctuary covers about 6,094 square miles of Pacific Ocean, an area that stretches from Marin County in the north to an area around Cayucos, in San Luis Obispo. The research team surmised that there might be hundreds of other vessels for which no written record exists.
Captain Leland and the crew aboard the Los Angeles certainly understood the dangers. The nautical chart on the ship included precise locations of hidden rocks and reefs. Leland knew where they were, and so, presumably, did the third mate in charge of the vessel on the night of April 21, 1894. Or maybe not.
The panic that immediately followed the realization that the ship hit a rock was understandable. But it didn’t help when passengers and crew rushed up to the deck to find Leland — the ship’s captain — frantically running about and yelling, “My God! My God! We are lost.”
Within a half hour, the bulk of the Los Angeles was submerged. Most of the passengers and crew had been pulled off the boat by then, and they bobbed about on the dark Pacific in one of four lifeboats or in an inflatable raft, desperate for rescue, and shivering under a rainstorm. Seven other men hung back — there wasn’t enough room on the rescue boats for everyone — and they clung to the ship’s rigging or the masts as the vessel’s body completely submerged, hoping for a miracle before hypothermia did them in.
The sinking of the Los Angeles killed five people; another passenger was never found.
MISSING THE BOAT
Evacuating women and children from the swamped ship was the first order of business. The operation was conducted efficiently, mainly due to the valiant work of Denison and Captain T.J. Maginnis, another nautical professional who happened to be on the boat as a passenger.
Maginnis was one of the heroes of this saga, according to the survivors. Ironically, he was the captain of a “wrecker,” which are ships pulled into duty to salvage recent shipwrecks. Maginnis was hitching a ride on the Los Angeles, possibly returning from an assignment. He managed to calm Leland after the captain’s initial overwrought reaction, which had been witnessed by passengers and crew. Now, thanks to Maginnis, Leland had recovered his wits enough to take a significant role in the rescue effort, according to witnesses.
With quiet efficiency, life jackets were distributed and the frightened passengers were placed into the rescue vessels before the ship disappeared into the depths for good. Ranking crew members were assigned to take charge of each lifeboat before the rescue vessels cast away.
But it took a while to lower Sol Sheridan Sr. into a boat. At the age of 74, Uncle Sol had needed help boarding the ship in Ventura and he was now unable to help himself into a lifeboat. So the crew quickly jury-rigged a harness with rope and they lowered him gently into the last lifeboat. At the same time, the man at the lifeboat's oars furiously fought against the vortex caused by the sinking ship.
Whether a myth or not, it was a long-held nautical belief that the tremendous whirlpools caused by sinking ships pull down everything around them. Frantic to get as far away from the doomed ship as quickly as possible, the crew member placed in charge of the lifeboat pushed away from the Los Angeles before Sheridan reached them.
“Instead of saving the invalid he was lowered down to death, for on feeling the line slacken when the form reached the water, the rescuers thought that Mr. Sheridan was safely in the boat and therefore did not haul him back on board the steamer,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
SLIP-SLIDING AWAY
From the sound of the chilling hiss that emanated from the belly and soul of the boat, Captain Leland knew the escape pipe had burst. It was the hiss of supreme distress, which seemed to be in dark harmony with the shriek of a crumbling ship.
Once most of the passengers had been off-loaded from the boat, Leland used a sounding line to gauge the depth of the water. “I did not take particular notice of the exact depth, but it was enough to swallow the ship,” he told the jury at a coroner’s inquest in Monterey a few days later.
Immediately after that realization, the ship plunged stern first as if it was suddenly in a hurry. By then all the rescue vessels were out to sea, but about seven men remained, including a couple of passengers.
“We had no earthly chance of escape, seemingly,” said a crewman, who was not identified by the newspapers despite his long and detailed description of what took place on the boat before and after it went down. The anonymous crewman added that the second mate called out: “All hands to the rigging, and every man for himself.” The men who remained on the vessel grabbed ship ropes and held on tight, as waves washed over them.
“Our prospects were rather gloomy,” Leland testified later.
The wrecked ship settled precariously on another rock, and for a time only the top 15 feet of the steamer’s two masts remained above the surface. Leland and six other men held on for dear life. A couple of them climbed the masts and strapped themselves in to conserve their strength. The drenching chill of rain and the sea numbed the extremities, and it was a struggle to grip the ropes, even as their lives depended on it.
One of the crew members, a steamer firefighter named Timothy Nolan, pleaded with Leland for help. But the captain could do nothing. Nolan said “goodbye,” and then he slipped into the water. A passenger, young William Curtin, also bobbed away to his death. Curtin, known as Willie, had accompanied his mother on this voyage, and he gave up his seat on a lifeboat for others, even as his mother sobbed and implored him not to leave her side.
“The sight of the poor men drowning before my eyes was simply horrible,” said a crewmate who survived the ordeal. “We all would have given anything to save them.”
Leland and the others hung on for about 90 minutes before a lifeboat with Maginnis aboard returned. It had successfully deposited survivors on an island that had formed at low tide in front of the Point Sur Lighthouse knoll. Maginnis returned to rescue the rest of them, dragging the desperate men on the boat. Two of them had lost consciousness, and one of them died before they reached the beach.
LOCAL HERO
The scene along the shoreline below the Point Sur Lighthouse became increasingly gruesome. The death and detritus of a lost ship littered the beach. About 40 exhausted and traumatized survivors staggered about the sand in the dark, in the rain, dropping here and there with exhaustion.
As it happened, the lighthouse keeper, John Ingersoll, and his wife had been entertaining a couple of visitors — government engineers — at the lighthouse complex for the weekend and they all rushed down the knoll in rescue mode. A scattering of nearby Big Sur residents also gathered at the beach to render aid. The dead were quietly laid on a bed of straw against a couple of bushes.
“A great deal of praise is due for the kindness and aid extended to the shipwrecked passengers and crews,” remarked the reporter who covered the disaster for the Monterey Cypress. “About 40 people, cold, wet and hungry and some with very scant clothing, were thrown on (Ingersoll’s) care, and dry clothing of every description was freely given up by the kind hearted people till there was nothing more to give. After a hearty supper the tired shipwrecked crowd sought some kind of place where they could find a little rest after their terrible experience.”
On the shore, survivors were dreadfully aware that another lifeboat and a raft were still missing. From their own experience, they knew that fighting the sea that night was a death-defying experience and they knew they were lucky to be alive. It would not have surprised anyone if the missing vessels — and the people they held — were lost forever.
Meanwhile, someone was dispatched to nearby Post Ranch with the express intent of summoning John Gilkey and sending him to Monterey for help. Gilkey was a farmer at Post Ranch, young and in possession of a worthy horse.
Shipwreck, he was told. People are dead. Others are missing. Find a doctor. And an undertaker.
Gilkey quickly mounted his horse and rode through the rainy night. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter described his arduous journey: “The road from Point Sur to (Monterey) is a rocky and dangerous one, the way being hewn out of the rock, with precipitous sides, and one misstep of the rider’s horse would have precipitated him headlong into an abyss hundreds of feet below. Yet in the face of this peril, Mr. Gilkey (was) willing to risk his life to aid and succor the many souls whose lives were in imminent danger.”
He arrived in Monterey at 1 a.m. The news he shared “threw this whole community into a wild state of excitement,” according to the Monterey Cypress.
NIGHT HORRORS
The fearsome noise of the distressed ship turned to an eerie silence as the Los Angeles finally slipped completely into the deep. The quiet was punctuated occasionally by the wailing of distraught passengers aboard lifeboats cast off from the sinking ship. Still others called out into the night, hoping to catch the attention of a passing ship. It was known that the Eureka, the other vessel on the Pacific Coast Steamship Co.’s San Pedro-to-San Francisco route, might soon be passing in the southbound sea lane. It had departed from its Monterey port earlier in the evening.
The second lifeboat contained 10 passengers and the chief steward. The steward rowed toward the Point Sur Lighthouse but he was unable to navigate the high breakers; the tide was also higher than usual, and the steward hauled in on a small island the high tide formed near the lighthouse. The shore would be accessible by foot once the tide lowered.
The second lifeboat was jammed with 15 men, women and children. Chief Officer Wallace took charge of that dinghy, and he pushed out in the other direction, toward the sea. He explained to his passengers that the Eureka should soon pass by.
Wallace rowed for about three hours until lights from the Eureka were seen in the distance. But as the Eureka neared, a dark cloud “obscured the moon and enshrouded the waters,” according to one account. Denison, the stewardess on the Los Angeles, was among the passengers on Wallace’s boat. She desperately tore the bottom of her skirt and tried to light it to signal the Eureka. Her box of matches were dry enough, but the soaked cloth would not burn. The steamer glided past, and the cries of the shipwrecked went unheard.
Wallace then directed his boat toward the shore, trying to calm his shivering and frightened human cargo. But he too was unable to penetrate the powerful waves along the shore, so he headed back out to sea. “Off into the night they drifted with sunken hearts and dejected spirits,” according to the account in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The folks aboard the inflatable raft were having their own problems. They were unable to control the vessel against the tide, and it drifted far from shore, and to the south. As luck would have it, the raft drifted into the Eureka’s path. This time the Eureka’s crew noticed them and they pulled in survivors. Learning from the raft survivors what had happened to the Los Angeles, the captain of the Eureka immediately turned the steamer around, hoping to find more survivors. He was also anxious to learn the fate of the Los Angeles’s captain, because H.D. Leland was his brother.
Meanwhile, the Wallace lifeboat had drifted farther north, away from the shoreline.
“Our boat leaked frightfully,” said Denison. “We had to knock the compass box loose to bail out the water or we would have been swamped in half an hour. Then the rain began to descend in torrents and the men had to keep bailing the water out all night.”
The boat hit a patch of kelp, so they fastened the boat to the thicket of seaweed and, according to Denison, “braved the fury of the storm and the horrors of the night.” The Eureka continued its search but had sailed about 10 miles north of Point Sur without finding signs of survivors. It circled back one more time.
Finally, the light of day offered a glimmer of hope to the load of humanity aboard Wallace’s lifeboat. In the distance they again saw the Eureka approach, and this time their cries were heard.
The men, women and children on the lifeboat had survived 10 horrifying hours adrift at sea. “We were rescued just as every one in the little boat was ready to die of exposure and exhaustion,” Denison told a reporter. “None of the people who were in our boat ever came so near to death before. Had our rescue been delayed another hour, I don’t believe a soul would have lived to tell the fate of the rest.”
MRS. CURTIN’S CANARIES
Augusta Curtin and her son Willie were among the passengers on the ill-fated Los Angeles, en route to San Francisco the third week of April in 1894. The reason for their journey is lost to history.
Mrs. Curtin was a widow living in Los Angeles at the time. Willie was 21; he had clerked at a small grocery store in Oakland for a bit before returning to Los Angeles to live with his mother. He was, according to one newspaper account, a “consumptive,” which means he suffered from some debilitating “wasting” disease, possibly pulmonary tuberculosis.
In addition to her son and her luggage, Mrs. Curtin brought three caged canaries on the boat.
When the vessel hit the rocks, Willie helped his mother to the deck and made certain she secured a seat on a lifeboat. She was wearing only her nightclothes, but she deliberately grabbed the birdcage as she hastily left her cabin.
Willie opted to stay on board, presumably to make room for others on the lifeboat. By several accounts, Mrs. Curtin was disconsolate, pleading with her son to join her. Her melancholy sobs echoed across the sad night.
Willie was among the men who remained as the Los Angeles sunk. He clung to the rigging, alongside Captain Leland and Thomas Nolan, the ship’s fireman. The young man held on for more than an hour, but his body had grown numb in the cold dark water. He cried out to Leland for help, but the captain was as helpless as the rest of them. Willie quietly let loose the ropes and drifted into the abyss.
His body washed ashore several hours later. His mother survived aboard the leaky lifeboat with about a dozen others. After three hours at sea, she and the others were on the first boat picked up by the crew of the Eureka.
All Mrs. Curtin had left in the world were the canaries she managed to save.
A day later, the Los Angeles Evening Express included the following paragraph:
Mrs. Augusta Curtin, mother of the lad who was drowned, came to San Francisco on the train yesterday. She had carefully preserved three canaries in a cage. Her eyes rolled in her head. She groaned and groveled on the car floor, pressing her temples and moaning, “My boy, my boy.” She could hardly talk intelligently, but the stewardess ascertained that she lived on Buena Vista Street in Los Angeles. She said her drowned son had $700, all their savings, in his pockets when he was drowned. It was deemed best to send her to the German hospital.
THE FLYING CADAVERS OF BIG SUR
Thomas Oliver, undertaker and sexton for the Protestant cemetery in Monterey, woke his assistant after hearing Gilkey’s news from Point Sur. Together they prepared the wagon, hitched the horses and started their 36 mile journey down the rugged coastal trail. They were among the first Montereyans to arrive, and they encountered a grisly sad tableau.
The beach around Point Sur was littered with wrecked humans and washed-up cargo. Oliver and his man, a fellow named Duarte, were there to tend to and retrieve the bodies. They waited until the coroner showed up. Coroners typically conducted their inquests at the scene of the disasters and crimes, usually with a hastily assembled jury of men.
But word eventually reached Point Sur that the coroner was out of town for the weekend and the sheriff might eventually arrive in a day or two from Salinas. Even if the coroner arrived post haste, it was doubtful that a panel of twelve impartial men could be assembled for a jury. A decision was made to move the corpses to Monterey.
So Oliver and Duarte loaded three bodies in the undertaker’s wagon and set of for Monterey about 7 in the morning. They didn’t get far before the brake-rod broke and the horses became unmanageable.
“They took down the steep grade at breakneck speed, passing some of the sharpest curves ever laid out on mountain roads,” read an account in the Los Angeles Evening Express.
Soon the tongue of the wagon broke in two. The hub of a wheel hit a stump, propelling the wagon off the road and down a canyon. Oliver was thrown about 30 feet, and Duarte, still holding the lines of the runaway horses, was dragged a considerable distance.
Cadavers flew out of the wagon every which way.
Oliver and Duarte suffered painful bruises, but were otherwise uninjured.
THE BUTTERED STEED
Not everyone who showed up at Point Sur in the immediate aftermath of the disaster was there to offer assistance. Some of them showed up to help themselves.
Shipwrecks “meant a new influx of supplies for the Big Sur coast residents,” according to the historical account authored by the Central Coast Lighthouse Keepers, which currently helps maintain the lighthouse at Point Sur. As ships broke up, the cargo was eventually deposited on the shoreline and the “local population flocked to the beach to gather lumber, foodstuffs and trade goods.”
In addition to the bodies and the anguished survivors, the beach around Point Sur was littered with the Los Angeles’s shivered timbers, kitchen flotsam, luggage and trunks, nautical gear and boxes laden with cargo.
The Los Angeles had its passengers, but it was also loaded with the usual merchandise for delivery to San Francisco markets. The purser for the Los Angeles reported the steamer was loaded with about 240 bales of wool, boxes filled with cheese, a large quantity of dressed veal, and more than 300 boxes of butter. Much of that merchandise washed ashore when the ship went down.
Lawmen who arrived at Point Sur said the shoreline was strewn with wreckage for miles north and south. “Many people are availing themselves of the cheese, oranges, lemons, fish and thousand other things that are constantly coming ashore,” according to the San Francisco Examiner. The flotsam included 200 large crates of empty beer cases and barrels, two gang planks and pieces of the upper deck.
Sheriff John Matthews deployed several deputies to patrol the beach, with orders to arrest anyone taking anything from the wreckage.
Contemporary news accounts of the nautical disaster included the story of a thief who wrapped several large boxes of butter in gunny sacks and strapped the packages to his horse, with the expectation that he would sell the butter to stores and restaurants in San Francisco.
Unfortunately for the thief, he failed to account for the radiant heat of a horse trudging along the hillside trails of Big Sur. He didn’t get far before his mount was completely slathered in butter.
BLAME THE PUTZ
The looters hanging around Point Sur in April 1894 weren’t just stealing cargo. Apparently some damn “ghoul” was also on the scene, robbing the dead.
But there were also rescue angels on the scene, and their mission was to tend to the survivors and the dead. When they determined that Uncle Sol was indeed deceased, a couple of men arranged his body on a pile of straw against a sandhill and away from the survivors. During that sad procedure, a rescue worker found a buckskin purse in one of Sheridan’s pockets and saw it held a significant amount of gold. He returned the purse and the gold to the pocket.
The body remained in open repose overnight, until the undertaker arrived. And when Thomas Oliver and his assistant Duarte checked the body the next morning, the gold was missing.
This macabre detail was included in the only story with a byline published by the 10 or 12 newspapers that covered the tragedy of the Los Angeles. The byline belonged to Sol Sheridan Jr., a reporter for the San Francisco Call and Post and the victim’s son. His account of the entire disaster reads like an angry screed directed specifically at Roger Ryfkogel, the third mate who was in charge of the Los Angeles when it hit the rock.
It is rather unusual for a reporter to cover a disaster that had killed a family member, and the circumstances under which Sol Jr. came to write the story were not explained to readers. It is likely that he immediately traveled to Monterey because he knew his father was aboard the Los Angeles, and only wrote his story after learning about the criminal mess the incident had been. But the story seems odd in that the writer never mentions that the S.N. Sheridan he refers to was his father.
Whatever the case, his indignant rant was included with about a dozen different stories about the disaster published across the first two pages of the San Francisco Call and Post on April 24, 1894. His story was headlined “WORSE THAN MURDER.”
“S.N. Sheridan was murdered if man ever was,” according to the story.
Sheridan Jr. accused Ryfkogel of professional negligence so profound that the crime deserved a punishment of death by hanging. While Sheridan might have been a bit biased on the matter, he was not alone in his assessment. Practically everyone on the ship that night knew that Ryfkogel had screwed up — and screwed up badly. In fact, it’s the first thing most of them said when they were asked by reporters for an account of their experience. They blamed Ryfkogel directly for the calamity that had killed at least six men. What’s more, Ryfkogel was responsible for traumatic scars that would haunt the survivors for years.
“Everyone feels intensely bitter toward Roger Ryfkogel, the third officer,” said Denison, the stewardess. “He is solely to blame for the disaster.” She said he had a record of incompetence, and had a reputation of “hugging the shore” when placed in charge of the ship.
She told a reporter that Ryfkogel “is intensely disliked by officers and crew.”
Ryfkogel was a “hangdog-looking fellow,” Sheridan wrote. After Ryfkogel was blamed for a near-calamitous incident several months earlier, his captain, H.D. Leland, told the rest of the crew he deserved to be fired but he wouldn’t do it because “he has a family to feed.”
This time, after taking over from Captain Leland for the night watch, Ryfkogel disobeyed orders, miscalculated the location of the boat and changed its course without Leland’s permission. And because of that, Sheridan wrote, six men were dead.
Denison told reporters that the last thing she ever heard the ship’s fireman Timothy Nolan say, during the frantic moments when the two of them helped get passengers off the sinking ship, was: “Well, stewardess, Riff has done it this time. I hope to God he will go down with the vessel.”
Ryfkogel survived. But Nolan didn’t.
Denison was incensed with Ryfkogel, but Sol Sheridan Jr. lobbied openly for the death penalty.
“Only when the story turns upon the acts of Third Mate Ryfkogel does the hot blood surge,” Sheridan wrote, “and men here at Monterey were talking of a rope to-night, not loud, but low and deep.”
RYFKOGEL’S FATE
Roger Ryfkogel didn’t have a friend in the world and he didn’t have the wherewithal to find an attorney, much less pay for one. He admitted as much when he was hauled into court to face charges of criminal neglect and carelessness.
After the last of the bodies had been collected in Monterey, a coroner’s inquest was hastily convened in Bagley Opera House on Alvarado Street. A jury of 12 upstanding Monterey citizens was empaneled. Ryfkogel immediately took the hit.
“If my orders had been obeyed no accident would have occurred,” said Captain Leland, the first witness. “But they were disregarded so here we are.”
Leland testified that he had set the course for the ship before retiring to his cabin for a quick rest and leaving Ryfkogel in charge. Leland knew Point Sur was about five miles away, and he told his third mate to summon him once the ship approached Cooper Point, a couple miles south of Point Sur. He said he rushed up to the pilot-house after the ship hit the rock and could see that the boat was well past Cooper Point. When asked why Ryfkogel didn’t call him as instructed, the third mate said, “Well, we ain’t up to Cooper Point yet.”
So, in other words, Ryfkogel didn’t know where he was. And then he altered the ship’s course, apparently because he worried about an unusually high tide. In his defense, he said he “obeyed my orders to the best of my ability,” but he also admitted he should have called the captain before changing directions.
After the jury heard from Leland, Ryfkogel and about four other witnesses, it determined the third mate should be charged on a criminal complaint. He was arrested later in the day, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled several weeks later in a Salinas courtroom.
As he awaited trial, Ryfkogel said he couldn’t afford a proper defense and that he had no friends who might lend him the money to hire a lawyer. He gamely refused to say anything during his prosecution that would implicate others. Blaming his mates wouldn’t be the “manly” thing to do, he said.
Ryfkogel, doleful and resigned to his fate, acknowledged to a reporter that the whole world is clamoring for his conviction. “I will take my medicine like a man,” he said.
Stunningly for such an easy scapegoat, the charges against Ryfkogel were dropped by a judge about two weeks later after a preliminary hearing. Justice George Roadhouse ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Ryfkogel.
That same week, government inspectors who investigated the shipwreck revoked Ryfkogel’s license, which was hardly a surprise. But the two-person panel stunned the shipping community when it also revoked Capt. H.D. Leland’s license.
“The end of it all is that Captain Leland and Mate Ryfkogel will run no more vessels on the rocks, and the people will know all the facts of their last fatal venture,” the San Francisco Call and Post concluded.
— Story by Joe Livernois
— Illustrations from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner
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The list of the dead:
Sol N. Sheridan, Ventura
William Curtin, Los Angeles
W.F. Fitzpatrick, Santa Barbara
George Sherman, San Pedro
Thomas Nolan, Los Angeles
Missing:
Jim Bock, Cayucos
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Sources:
The San Francisco Call and Post
The San Francisco Chronicle
The Los Angeles Times
The San Francisco Examiner
The Los Angeles Herald
The Ventura Weekly Post and Democrat
Monterey Cypress
The Ventura Free Press
The Los Angeles Evening Express
The Oakland Enquirer
The Oakland Times
The Sacramento Union
The Salinas Californian
Noticias del Puerto de Monterey
Institute for Western Maritime Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley
Pointsur.org
Central Coast Lighthouse Keepers
Wow, Joe! I had chills the whole reading! Great research and writing work!
Dave Whipple
Great article. The song, "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzerald," keeps playing in my mind as I read this. This wreck needs a song, too. . . I think the central coast needs more sea shanties.