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[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: The Brother Jonathan and other steamships like it were one of the primary means of transportation for American fortune seekers.

It was a source of opportunity and a scene of great heroism when tragedy struck.

You had the Brother Jonathan sinking like the Titanic.

It is one of the largest peacetime maritime disasters in West Coast history, even now.

The story was that there was gold.

Saying it was one thing, finding it was another.

WOMAN: There was a lot of stories about people finding the Brother Jonathan.

People were sure that they knew exactly where it was.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Right now, we're headed offshore to intercede with the course that the Brother Jonathan was on.

It was so dangerous out here.

There's numerous sinker rocks through here.

NARRATOR: The West Coast region of southern Oregon and northern California is home to spectacular scenery and treacherous waters.

Yeah, this is a good day to see Jonathan Rock, guys.

Low tide.

[ ♪♪♪ ] This is the site of a notorious shipwreck.

It was here, in 1865, that stormy seas created 50-knot winds and 30-foot swells, slamming the passenger steamship the S.S.

Brother Jonathan into a rock off the coast of Crescent City, California.

This is literally a pinnacle that just comes straight up.

Obstruction ahead, sir!

Much like the iceberg that sank the Titanic years later, the largest portion of the obstacle hid underwater, making it much more dangerous than it looked, ripping through the ship's hull.

In less than an hour, all of the cargo, a treasure in gold, and over 200 souls were lost.

Most of the 225 victims in the wreck were never recovered.

They erected a grave, a mass grave, in Crescent City with 66 bodies there, but only about 25 are actually even named.

The Brother Jonathan shipwreck remains one of the deadliest maritime disasters on the Pacific coast.

MAN: So the Brother Jonathan was one of the largest wooden vessels on the seas.

220 feet long, a half city block.

It had two paddle wheels on both sides.

It was called a sidewheel steamer because it also had masts for propulsion when there was wind.

[ shutter clicks ] This is the only known photograph of the ship, taken about 1863 as it sat anchored in the San Francisco Bay.

It acted as a commuter ship, transporting passengers and goods up and down the West Coast.

And bringing people from all over the world to the American frontier.

It then sinks, and it is a ghost ship.

For over a century, people spent fortunes trying to recover any lost treasure.

In the 1990s, the salvage group Deep Sea Research finally located the ship two miles south of the crash site.

Hold it, hold it, hold it there, will you?

They are some five miles from land, 300 feet down.

It's dark, with predators, cold, intense pressure, very difficult circumstances, and he saw a glitter.

In 1996, salvage crews found coins.

MAN: Oh, man!

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Are those copper?

That ain't copper, buddy.

That's gold.

The salvagers collected gold coins and numerous artifacts.

Many remained in pristine condition.

Some of those are worth $60,000 apiece.

Eureka!

We have found it.

But they didn't get to keep it.

There would be legal challenges, internal fighting, and growing costs that ultimately halted the salvage work, leaving the ship and its remaining treasure on the ocean floor.

All right, let's go look at artifacts.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Many of the recovered artifacts are in the care of the Del Norte County Museum.

This is our gold coin.

It's a $5 Liberty Head gold piece from the wreck of the Brother Jonathan.

This is Captain Samuel DeWolf.

He was captain of the Brother Jonathan.

This is the shoe.

This is the shoe.

It's made of rubber.

It had to be a waterproof shoe.

It definitely was a crew member's shoe.

This is the little bottle of soothing syrup.

All right, we're making our way down here.

[ whispers ] I think this is the best room in the whole museum.

Here it is.

[ groans ] Bulletin items... Brother Jonathan music.

Songs were written about the Brother Jonathan.

Did you know that?

Here's the song right here.

It's called "The Sunken Rock."

[ piano playing ] "A rock, a rock, our ship has struck a rock sunk in the sea.

The white spray from the dashing wave rolls onward, bold and free."

The Brother Jonathan, at the time of 1865, it was a passenger and equipment steamer that went from San Francisco to Vancouver.

Even today, the Pacific Northwest coast remains perilous, claiming ships and lives.

MAN [ over radio ]: Clear the bow and keep your radio on you.

Just given the topography of the coast, ports are rare.

They're hard to see from the water.

The winds are tricky.

Probably the worst thing is the fog and the storms.

So it's just a dangerous place before you have buoys, lighthouses.

The coast has been mapped starting in the 1840s, but it's not super well mapped.

Despite the hazards, ocean steamers regularly traveled in and out of West Coast ports, creating economic hubs min otherwise isolated areas.

KAREN: Crescent City had a natural harbor.

It was one of the largest natural harbors, and it was the biggest port, actually, between San Francisco and Seattle at the time, if you can believe that.

A little tiny town like this with an amazing harbor.

Crescent City sits just 20 miles south of the Oregon border, surrounded by rugged basalt cliffs and towering redwood forests.

The sailing ships played a huge role because there were no railroads, there weren't a lot of roads.

And here, especially in the Northwest, where you have really dense forests before they were logged, most of us today don't realize how dense those forests were.

You have to go to an old-growth forest to kind of get that feeling.

But the waterways were the highways.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Prior to the arrival of European settlers, the Tolowa and Yurok tribes made this area their home.

But by the mid-1800s, the government forcibly moved indigenous people onto reservations, while the gold rush brought thousands of miners, merchants, and settlers.

Already there had been mining up in the hills here.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Europeans had just started to occupy Washington and Oregon, so they took logging and mining equipment up from San Francisco into Washington and Oregon Territory.

DENNIS: What people don't know is that Oregon was having huge gold strikes.

Miners overran the streambeds, picking them clean, then moved east and north looking for more.

There was a gold rush in British Columbia in 1858 on the Fraser River, and that brought thousands of Americans to the British Columbia waterways in search of gold.

And steamships were the primary means of their transport there.

The Brother Jonathan was just one of those ships to make that voyage.

[ ♪♪♪ ] First-class passengers enjoyed well-appointed, private staterooms, while steerage class crowded together in the bowels of the ship.

The main deck would be crowded with throngs of passengers from all different social backgrounds.

You would have immigrants, you would have the working poor, and you would have people of color.

An international, diverse crew made it all happen.

The maritime trades were among the most diverse occupations that Black people could be a part of.

It offered them a life of freedom, potentially, on the seas and an ability to make a living where they would be far from the communities where they might be persecuted.

On the ship, everyone is responsible for taking care of one another.

Your life depends on your shipmates, and Black people were able to find opportunity, camaraderie, in some cases even success by participating in the maritime trades.

The Brother Jonathan first launched from New York in 1850.

The ship's name came from a familiar national figure of the time.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Brother Jonathan was the crotchety old geezer who was adventurous and would watch over this new country.

He was the predecessor to Uncle Sam.

The new ship carried passengers down the eastern seaboard to Panama.

ZACHARY: In the 1850s, the fastest way for someone to get to the western United States from the eastern United States was actually via steamship.

They would disembark with all of their luggage and then be transported across the isthmus of Panama to the Pacific side of the country, where they would board a second steamship and then be transported on to the western United States.

The Brother Jonathan was one of those Atlantic-side steamships.

In 1852, wealthy industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt bought the ship and brought it to the West Coast.

DENNIS: Cornelius Vanderbilt came in and said, "Ah, that's the ship I want."

It could handle 1,300 tons of cargo and up to a thousand passengers.

[ steam whistle blowing ] It was a ship of luxury.

Then he sold the ship to another entity that used it for the Pacific Northwest, where it was stopping over between San Francisco to Crescent City, into Portland, and up to Vancouver.

Portland is like the perfect place.

You've got the Willamette River, you've got the Columbia River, which connects to the ocean.

People start moving in here looking for land and farms.

[ ♪♪♪ ] All the farming that's being done in the Willamette valley, all those goods can come down-- the lumber, the fish-- they get to Portland.

All those goods can get on oceangoing ships and get sent out that way.

The Brother Jonathan was one of those ships.

In 1859, it carried the news to Portland that Oregon Territory had become a state-- the only state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution, banning both slavery and free Black people from living in Oregon.

ZACHARY: They had become marginalized in every way politically.

They had no rights to own property, to start businesses.

They couldn't bring lawsuits against white defendants.

Essentially, they made it so that Black people had no civil rights in Oregon whatsoever.

But many Black people came west anyway.

And in Portland, a small community developed.

In doing research about some of the early Black historical figures in Portland during the 19th century, I was surprised how many references came up to the Brother Jonathan, and that sent me down a path to try and figure out what is this ship and what is the story about it that connects to the experiences of Black Portlanders?

In 1865, Allen Flowers was a teenager working on the Brother Jonathan when he jumped ship in Portland.

A decision which ultimately saved his life, because the Brother Jonathan was wrecked just a few months later.

In the 1880s, Flowers traveled to Victoria to marry Louisa Thacker.

The newlyweds relocated to Portland together, and they would live there for the rest of their lives.

They started a family which would become among the most prominent and successful Black families in all of Oregon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Louisa was one of hundreds of Black Americans who had left the United States and its slavery laws for Canada.

The Brother Jonathan and other West Coast steamships of this era literally carried hundreds of Black Americans to freedom.

British Columbia Governor James Douglas invited Black Americans to leave the U.S.

and enjoy full citizenship in Canada.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Douglas had many motivations for supporting Black Americans in their cause.

For one thing, he actually had some Black ancestry.

His mother was a free Black woman from Barbados.

In April 1858, the Brother Jonathan carried the first group of Black settlers from San Francisco to what was then known as Vancouver's Island.

Black Americans were now able to go to Canada, where they could start businesses, they could own property, they could vote-- all things which were impossible for them in the United States at this time.

In the spring of 1862, the Brother Jonathan docked in Victoria, joining other ships offloading hundreds of passengers.

Within days, smallpox spread throughout most of the region's indigenous encampments.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Outbreaks were common, but that year, disease decimated the First Nation's population along Canada's west coast.

MAN: The diseases caused a huge decline in their numbers, in their power, their economics, their everything, their society.

And likely, a number of tribal cultures went completely extinct.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Newcomers kept arriving.

Settlements turned into cities, and small harbors became international ports.

On Friday, July 28th, 1865, the S.S.

Brother Jonathan joined dozens of other ships at the San Francisco wharf, loaded down with passengers and cargo of every kind, including two camels.

When we look at what was on its cargo manifest, they had 346 barrels of whiskey, 50 cases of cigars, 25 barrels of butter, a fire engine, and a huge quartz ore crusher.

It was also thought to carry a U.S.

Army payroll of $200,000, gold coins for treaty payments to Northwest tribes, and newly minted $20 gold pieces.

What they took onboard: gold.

More gold.

Actually two Wells Fargo strongboxes of gold.

As well as whatever money and valuables the passengers brought.

The Brother Jonathan was a floating bank for the passengers as well.

The ship's purser kept passengers' valuables inside a locked safe, and it's believed one woman carried gold bars.

She was a madam.

And she was moving to Vancouver to join her husband.

She went ahead and sold off her operations for $5,500 in gold bars.

Other passengers included Anson G. Henry, a physician at the Grand Ronde Indian Agency.

DENNIS: This is 1865.

The Civil War had just ended three months before.

Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated just a few days after the end of the war.

As a close family friend of the Lincolns, Dr.

Henry cared for the devastated First Lady.

Henry had a longstanding feud with another passenger, Victor Smith.

I've read some things that called them archrivals.

Just weeks before, Smith had been stranded on a Caribbean island after the wreck of the Golden Rule.

Smith reportedly had been carrying a large payroll on that trip and may have had some of it with him.

Also onboard was General George Wright.

Just a few years before, during a battle, he had orchestrated the brutal slaughter of 800 Native Americans' horses near present-day Spokane.

He was the commander of the Pacific for the Union forces.

He was going up to take on his command at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River.

In total, it's believed there were 190 passengers and 54 crew members.

They left San Francisco Harbor bound for Crescent City, Portland, and Victoria.

Almost immediately, they hit stormy seas.

KAREN: The passengers were getting seasick.

They were pretty miserable.

A lot of them were in their berths.

After 34 hours of rough seas, the ship pulled into Crescent City Harbor and unloaded.

It was here that Wells Fargo agent Joseph Lord disembarked for a short time before returning to the ship.

He traded with someone so that he could be on the Brother Jonathan during this voyage.

His wife and his child were visiting her parents here.

He got off the ship to go say hello and to kiss his wife and his little girl, and the plan was that they would meet back in San Francisco again.

At 9:30 Sunday morning, the ship cast off again, sailed through the rocky harbor and out to sea, where winds and waves had worsened overnight.

But the captain pressed on.

That would be like hell.

Fifty-knot winds.

That would've been horrendous.

I don't know.

Was he on a time schedule?

[ man reading on-screen text ] He turned around because he was making no headway and he was at a reduced speed.

What I believe happened was he came to the outside of Jonathan Rock and turned around to the inside... which proved to be fatal for them.

[ woman reads on-screen text ] You had bodies floating in the sea.

You had crumpled lifeboats.

You have the Brother Johnson sinking, like the Titanic, by its bow, stern up in the air, people sliding off into the sea.

[ man screams ] Over 200 people died here, probably soon after slipping into the frigid waters.

[ woman reads on-screen text ] Several people reported seeing the captain go down with the ship.

DENNIS: General Wright with his wife, Margaret, his major, Eddie, with Captain DeWolf.

They were locked in arms as the seas came.

And the last person who wrote about it said, "And then they disappeared."

James Nisbet was on the ship.

He was a reporter from San Francisco, and his story was that he actually wrote his will and wrote some goodbye letter to his family while the Brother Jonathan was actually sinking.

He puts it into an oilskin container, puts it in his jacket.

His body washed up some weeks later where they then found the will.

Over the next few months, bodies washed ashore along a 100-mile stretch.

A single lifeboat escaped the wreck and made it safely back to Crescent City with just eight passengers and 11 crew members.

Some went unnamed.

On all the survivor lists, it just says "a Chinese woman and child."

It's like they had no identity.

Most lists also include four Black seamen, credited with piloting the surviving lifeboat to shore.

ZACHARY: So I tried to do some research about who these four unidentified Black sailors were.

Some of the early reports of these men said that they were members of a whale ship crew which had been burned by the Confederate ship Shenandoah earlier that year.

I was able to find crew lists, and I feel pretty confident that three of them were Portuguese-speaking people of mixed ancestry who had been a part of these whale ships, and another was one of their Black shipmates from the United States.

Captain Samuel DeWolf's widow insisted the ship was overloaded and not seaworthy.

KAREN: We have some of Marie DeWolf's diaries.

She said that he had a terrible feeling about the whole trip.

An inquiry found the wreck to be accidental but also advised for changes to maritime safety regulations.

The disaster also spurred the construction of the St.

George Reef Lighthouse, about eight miles off the northern California coast.

It was the most expensive, most remote lighthouse in the history of this country... 20 times more expensive than the typical type of lighthouse.

Constructed by the same builder who worked on Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, located more than a mile off the northern Oregon shore, both were considered to be incredible feats of engineering on isolated, rocky outcrops.

Over the years, debris from the wreck washed ashore, including the ship's wheel.

KAREN: Oh, yes, the bell from the Brother Jonathan.

I don't know how it came back to us, but it did.

There were even reports of a fisherman finding gold bars and regular attempts to find the wreck.

SCOTT: Working underwater is expensive.

It's hard.

The deeper you go, the harder it is and the more it costs.

The wreck was eventually discovered with manned submarines 280 feet below the surface.

I got the main safe.

I need the battle wheel.

[ men exclaiming ] Legal battles followed.

SCOTT: Technically, you could recover treasure, but you have to do it under an archeological permit.

The laws have tended towards protection.

It's very hard for somebody to find a ship and then say, "I'm going to salvage it as treasure" if it's more than 50 or a hundred years old.

Ultimately, costs became too much to continue salvage operations.

But the initial recovery still amounted to over $4 million at auction, most of which went to investors and legal fees.

DENNIS: When the smoke cleared, the salvagers had to buy coins they found at the auction.

Very prophetic.

Today, the Brother Jonathan shipwreck is protected under the National Register of Historic Places and remains just one of thousands of ships now resting under the waters of the Northwest Pacific coast.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] Leading support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Additional support provided by the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.