Beth McBride of Port Angeles remembers her grandmother as “a tiny little lady with a lot of spunk.”
Florence Hawthorn demonstrated that spunk with courage and the conviction of her Christian faith the night she and her sons survived the wreck of the SS Governor, when eight souls met their fate in the chilly spring waters of Admiralty Inlet.
The Governor sank after being hit by the West Hartland in the wee hours of April 1, 1921.
Hawthorn had in tow her two sons — McBride’s late father, Franklin, and uncle, Felix — then just 4 and 7. She was taking them to see her sister, Katie, in Powell River, B.C.
McBride, who lives between Port Angeles and Sequim, said her grandmother wasn’t even supposed to have been on the fated ship, having booked passage to Victoria from San Francisco.
But Hawthorn was denied entry into Canada because she had only $20 on her.
The customs office in Victoria told her she would have to have $250, so she had to return to the Governor for the final leg of its journey to Seattle, where she arranged for her husband to wire the required funds.
The long voyage started out with ominous signs that could be easily brushed off as mere coincidences but when taken together seemed like warnings to Hawthorn against making the journey.
But she hadn’t seen her sister in 20 years, and she was determined to introduce her young sons to their aunt.
This in spite of stepping on an 8-penny nail that nearly thrust completely through her foot while getting coal for her house heater, despite Franklin’s rash that was feared to be measles; despite the flat tire of her neighbor’s car when they gave her a lift to the train station in Tulare, Calif.; despite not having a sleeper cab after changing trains; and despite the boys’ seasickness once they boarded the Governor.
“It seemed Satan was always present and tried to hinder us from going,” Hawthorn wrote some years later in a recollection McBride has held onto long after her grandmother’s death in the mid-1990s.
While McBride has long associated Port Townsend with her ancestor’s near-tragedy, it wasn’t until 1975, when she moved to Port Angeles, that the depth of the calamity sunk in.
“When going out of Port Townsend in a boat and looking over the city, it’s hard to imagine being out there in the middle of the night and having the ship rammed and having to jump off it,” McBride said.
“It’s amazing.”
Indeed, Hawthorn’s story was so amazing that a newspaper recounted her recollection of the wreck in a clipping McBride holds onto.
She also has her father’s and grandmother’s “Passenger Identification Check.”
In the photo with the clipping from the unidentified newspaper, Florence and her sons looked dazed, as if they had just come off the passenger steamship.
The family had tried to get to sleep during the final leg to Seattle, and for some reason, Hawthorn had her children lie down in the bottom bunk.
She later recalled that was miraculous, because she believed she wouldn’t have been able to reach them in the top bunk.
She had gotten up to rub ointment on Franklin’s chest.
“Then it happened,” she wrote. “I was half-dazed and I felt the boat shivering.”
The door of Hawthorn’s cabin was locked from the outside because of the fear of measles. So she and the boys couldn’t escape on their own.
They yelled and beat on the door but could well have gone down with the ship because they weren’t supposed to be on it.
The cabin steward had no reason to check a room that should have been empty, “but the Lord told him to go down and see, so he came and helped us out,” Hawthorn wrote in her recollection.
Once freed from the cabin, she hustled her young sons on deck.
“I didn’t stop for anything,” Hawthorn told the newspaper.
“I knew instinctively that the ship was going down, so I just picked up my sons and ran. When I got to the deck, I saw the prow of the West Hartland into our side.”
“I don’t know what made me do it — I just acted on that impulse and jumped,” she said.
The SS West Hartland was steaming out of Port Townsend, bound for India, just after midnight April 1, 1921.
The Governor had departed Victoria a few hours before and churned on toward Seattle as it passed Port Townsend, apparently oblivious to the collision course.
The freighter struck hard amidships, trapping half a dozen people in their cabins below deck.
The West Hartland’s captain, only reported in press accounts by his surname, Alwen, kept the freighter pushed against the Governor to allow time for passengers to leap off the doomed passenger liner.
The Governor sank in just 20 minutes once the West Hartland pulled away.
It went down in 240 feet of water, where it rests today, a haunting reminder of maritime disasters of the period.
The Pacific Steamship Co., owner of the Governor, provided Hawthorn passage to Seattle and a room in a hotel, as well as $75 cash.
When her sister learned of the calamity, she contacted the company’s Vancouver office, where she learned Florence and the boys were safe.
She called her sister in Seattle and asked if she was still coming to visit.
“I said, no. I had all I could take. She said she would come and help me if I would come, so I said that I would,” Hawthorn wrote.
McBride said she can’t be certain whether she heard the story in person from her grandmother because “it wasn’t her only story.”
“She was pretty incredible,” McBride reflected. “It’s interesting how life takes you down different paths.’
Even ones taking you to a doomed ship you weren’t supposed to be on.
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Philip L. Watness is a freelance writer and photographer living in Port Townsend. He can be reached at whatnews@olypen.com.