Ghosts and Gold: An 1875 Shipwreck and Its Lost Gold Resurface
“Long will be remembered the year 1875, when Death, clad in all his hideousness, rode the wave; and, while the restless sea has supplied Northwestern history with many pitiful tales of disaster, this fatal year has never been equaled in the number of lives and amount of property sacrificed. No greater calamity was ever visited on the people of this Coast than the loss of the steamship Pacific…”
– Edgar Wilson Wright, Lewis & Dryden’s
Marine History of the Pacific Northwest (1895)
Jeff Hummel, the founder and president of Rockfish—the company that discovered the shipwreck of the Pacific—appears in his element while sharing stories from within his “secret robot headquarters.”
“[The Pacific] is on the level of the Vasa or any of the other really well-preserved wrecks … it is so remarkable,” says Hummel. His headquarters is a collection of shipping containers on Seattle’s Salmon Bay maritime hub, and they’re expected to be declared seaworthy and loaded onto a vessel soon. One holds a full machine shop, another is packed with large screen monitors, computers and video-game consoles, which will function as a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) piloting hub. According to Hummel, future expeditions will deploy two completely custom, in-house-built ROVs 24/7 with a rotating pilot crew of dozens.
“This shipwreck will end up being one of the most iconic wrecks ever found in the world,” explains Hummel. “[The wreck] is preserved in a state that no one will ever believe, just because of where it landed … five hundred meters one direction and a couple hundred meters the other direction it wouldn’t have happened. It’d be a completely different story and the ship would’ve been found a long time ago.”
Hummel, Rockfish and the Pacific made international news in the winter of 2022 by announcing their discovery and legal claim to the wreck site. A blitz of media coverage ensued, zeroing in on the multi-million-dollar gold prize. For Hummel, it’s been a hunt with roots to the late 1980s during his college days. For the Pacific—a ship that went down in 1875—it’s a story almost 150 years in the making. And while Hummel insists that his passion is the challenge of the hunt, historical preservation and a bold vision for nonprofit educational opportunities, Rockfish’s efforts are supported by investors keen for their returns. Hummel believes there is $10 to $12 million, or more, to be found. “There are people who will get many millions of return,” he says. “The one thing we’ve never really talked about very much, and we don’t put a lot of emphasis on, is what the actual value of the wreck is. But it far exceeds anyone’s expectations.”
The side-wheel wooden steamship Pacific was built in 1850 and put into commercial service in Panama, Nicaragua, and ultimately the Pacific Northwest and California. She was 224 feet long, 33 feet wide and displaced 876 tons. For the wild “Graveyard of the Pacific” waters off the Pacific Northwest, November 4, 1875 would be her day of infamy. On that day, 131 ticketed passengers were originally listed for a standard run down to San Francisco. At a dock in Victoria, British Columbia, the ticketed, which included a number of prominent and wealthy west coasters joined a few dozen through-passengers already aboard, an unknown number of unticketed walk-ons (at least forty unidentified Chinese men designated “unnamed” were in the mix), and 52 crewpeople. Small children sailed free and weren’t even counted. It’s estimated upwards of 300 souls were aboard.
The ship’s precious cargo included the popular Rockwell & Hurlburt trick horse show with their prize stallion Mazeppa. Hops, oats, hides, furs, cranberries, opium, coal and about thirty tons of miscellaneous goods were also transported. Notable also was a considerable haul of prospector gold from miners from the Cariboo gold fields of northern British Columbia.
The Pacific was mastered by Capt. Jefferson Davis Howell. They cast off from Victoria at 0930 and reportedly experienced a rough passage where they struggled to maintain an even keel due to a list. The crew made a fateful choice to fill the lifeboats with water to counterbalance the list. She entered the Pacific Ocean, passing Tatoosh Island at about 1600 hours.
Meanwhile, the 1,272-ton sailing ship Orpheus under Captain Charles Sawyer was northbound from San Francisco to load coal in Nanaimo, British Columbia. As night fell, the southbound Pacific and northbound Orpheus headed toward one another near Cape Flattery. While details, such as the possible lack of lookouts on the Pacific, would be posited and debated post-disaster, the dance ultimately resulted in the steamship colliding with the Orpheus just forward of her main mast on her starboard side, scraping against the length of the hull. The boats drifted apart and there was no further communication between them. But there was consternation aboard Orpheus that the unidentified steamer didn’t stay in the area to lend assistance. After repairs to her rigging and with no sign of the steamer, Orpheus continued onward in fair condition, too.
Within an hour though, the Pacific’s plight devolved into the worst-case scenario. The only firsthand accounts are from the two sole survivors, Neil Henly and Henry F. Jelly. Henly was the ship’s quartermaster and was even at the helm earlier in the evening. Jelly was a 22-year-old Irishman, a railway surveyor by trade. The heart-rendering accounts from these two men describe the futility of loading the lifeboats—many still containing ballast water. Ultimately, Pacific went under after the vessel went into a death roll. Henly reported that the ocean was filled with “a floating mass of human beings, whose screams for help were fearful, but which soon ceased.”
Henly and Jelly clung to separate floating debris, initially with fellow survivors who all eventually washed away or succumbed to exposure in the days ahead. Jelly was rescued on November 6, Henly on November 8. Hundreds of floating bodies were scattered across the waves. Some were found and identified as the nation mourned the deadliest wreck in the area’s history.
Jeff Hummel first broke onto national news with fellow Eagle Scout and University of Washington sophomore Mathew McCauley in March 1984, when the duo hoisted what remained of a US Navy Curtiss SB2C-1A Helldiver WWII dive bomber from the depths of Lake Washington as a passion project. The Helldiver is extremely rare, with about 8,600 built during WWII and only ten or so existing today. The duo achieved their success thanks to good old-fashioned research and a sidescan sonar they bought with funds earned from a car-crash settlement. “We saved it from the scrapheap,” says Hummel. But the exuberant salvagers attracted the ire of Uncle Sam, who claimed the plane, which the Navy had dumped in the lake, still somehow belonged to the U.S.A. “When I was nineteen years old, I was being sued by the federal government, United States v. Hummel et al. We prevailed, very few people end up in a situation where they are nineteen years old and get sued by the federal government and win. I’m guessing … I don’t know, but we might be the only ones.”
The Helldiver was ultimately restored and displayed at the Museum of WWII Aviation in Colorado Springs. “Ours will be the second one that’s flying,” says Hummel. “We’re hoping that next year it’ll actually be flying in the skies around Seattle. That’ll be very cool.”
Perhaps there was something addictive about the thrill of the salvage and rebellious, stick-it-to-The-Man legal victory, because Hummel kept on in the salvage world. His initial interest in the Pacific was partly sparked by the book Lewis and Dryden’s A Maritime History of the Pacific Northwest, published in 1895.
“In that book, the Pacific had $89,000 in treasure,” says Hummel. “I thought that sounded pretty good. There are not a lot of other treasure ships out here, I’ll go find that.” It was during this time around 1986-87 that Hummel connected with his first Pacific partner. “This guy named Don McKay, he was a real-estate developer in L.A. and he had found out about this thing. Got the passion for it, funded it, spent a lot of money looking for it, and never found it. I got involved. I was like a deckhand who worked on the boat a couple of times.”
While Hummel’s first involvement with bona fide Pacific chasing was unsuccessful, his resolve only deepened. “I was never overly impressed with the research they had done,” says Hummel.
Hummel’s next frontier was, again, the library. He hit jackpot with a single journal he found in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkley in 1992. The diary was written in 1878, three years after the Pacific sank. “In that diary, they mentioned some very key information,” explains Hummel. “This isn’t thirty years later or some speculation … these are people, firsthand accounts, that knew exactly what was going on.”
The diary described what was aboard the Pacific and corroborated information from secondary sources like newspapers. “I was doing the research and I requested the microfilm, got it, took it to the public library in Everett. I’m reading it and can’t quite understand what it’s saying, it’s written with a quill pen and I get the librarian over to read it to me and I go, O.K., wow.” Hummel began crafting a working theory of where the wreck really was. An important revelation was that there was more gold aboard than previously believed. Much more.
“It is a really strange circumstance that so much gold ended up on the Pacific,” says Hummel. “It was by far the single largest shipment to go out of Canada that whole year, just that one particular ship sank and this incredible coincidence of events.” He realized that this job was going to be a challenge and brought on William Mathers, a well-known wreck-salvage expert who earned his name salvaging the galleon Concepcion off the Spanish coast. If this story sounds familiar, it was in a feature story published in National Geographic in 1990. In 1993, the duo teamed up with a company called Oceaneering and went after Pacific with the latest in equipment at the time, including a towable AMS60 purpose-built sidescan sonar.
The result? Nothing.
“We went out on survey … went right past the wreck,” says Hummel. “I think we actually did see it,” he describes a promising reading while on watch that wasn’t followed up or logged. “I don’t know if it’s actually true, but in my mind, I’ve made it into truth that actually happened.”
Years went by and the project lay dormant largely due to budget constraints. The Hummel-Mathers duo went at it again in 1999 with another company called Odyssey. A chartered vessel, two surveys and about 10 million dollars later and again … nothing.
Ultimately, Hummel and Mathers terminated their legal arrangement, but to this day, Hummel believes they passed within detection range of the wreck.
The Pacific remained on Hummel’s back burner for much of the 2010s. His career took him to Issaquah-based Nobeltec where he was the first employee of the company. He developed Passport Charts, at the time one of three databases of recreational electronic charts in the world. Hummel also contributed to bringing radar overlay to electronic charts for recreational boaters. But while his career in marine technology was going well, the Pacific itch needed scratching. He got back on the hunt by raising money and sharpening his scientific understanding of navigation. For inspiration he looked to predicated log racing, a hobby for die-hard boat navigation aficionados.
“It’s a big deal,” says Hummel. “The art of navigation, this is the highest point of the art. And the thing is when you hang out with those guys you learn that you can predict pretty accurately where you’re going to be. If you know the current and you know the speed, man, these guys are spot on.”
Hummel combed contemporary newspapers, gleaning information from reported Victoria and San Francisco arrivals and departures. He looked at every trip the ship steamed for its last two years and started to get a better grasp on the truth. The Pacific traveled more quickly on the southbound trips, probably due to the Japanese current adding half a knot.
“They were in competition with these other vessels,” says Hummel. “They wanted to show how smart they were and how fast they could get there.”
Hummel came up with what he reckoned was Pacific’s average speed. He even tracked down a paper chart from 1854 that would’ve been used by navigators of the era. “I tried to look at that and say ‘what was the course the captain would’ve steered?’ And I’ve got two survivors.” Henly was at the Pacific helm two hours before collision for a two-hour watch. He reported the ship’s speed and course in testimony. Hummel’s inner predicated log-racer rejoiced.
Hummel even tracked down a Capt. Raynaud who had gone to sea for the first time in 1912 before radar and gyrocompasses. “Here’s the guy closest to that era in navigation. How would he have done it? He gave me some pointers to help me in my analysis,” says Hummel.
Hummel also cultivated another line of hard evidence through the commercial fishing community. He learned that other shipwrecks have been discovered by tracking coal dragged up by bottom trawlers. “I was working for Nobeltec and one of our prime markets was commercial fishermen because they wanted to keep track of where their tows were,” he says. “It’s very important. Hey, I towed my net here, it snagged on something on the bottom. So these guys would do hundreds and hundreds of tows. After a while getting to know these commercial fishermen as part of my regular job selling stuff to these guys, I eventually got them to give me copies of their data.”
After reviewing thousands of tracks, certain areas began to stick out as locations of frequent bottom trawl snags. Hummel got in the habit of asking fishermen who snagged these locations if they ever brought up coal. Time passed until a series of coincidences, or fate itself, intervened. A serendipitous fishermen’s barbecue chat and an ex-wife’s storage unit delivered Hummel lumps of coal fished from the bottom. The fisherman who caught the coal previously snagged his trawl net in the area too—the suspicious snag not only resulted in the fisherman cutting his expensive gear, but quitting the profession altogether.
Hummel sent the coal to the Bertly Coal lab of Alberta, Canada, expecting to trace its origins to Vancouver Island. Turns out the coal was from Coos Bay, Oregon. Hummel couldn’t make sense of this development, but later research revealed that Coos Bay was a leading regional coal producer. The owner of the Pacific even owned a Coos Bay coal mine. Remarkably, Hummel managed to determine his fished coal wasn’t directly from the owner’s mine, but it stood to reason that the Pacific onloaded coal from neighboring Coos Bay mines as needed. Hummel’s new round of research, predicted log-racing methodology, fishermen’s accounts, lumps of coal and more culminated in a 70-page research paper proposing a location for the Pacific wreck to investors.
Sometime during his coal-obsession phase, Hummel decided to move away from chartering boats and into owning his operation. A government buyback program was in effect for commercial licenses and boats were an equitable way to reduce overfishing in a given jurisdiction. Hummel ended up with a venerable fiberglass fishing boat, the 85-foot Seablazer. The Desco-built, 1977-vintage trawler had fished for tuna out of Hawaii and shrimped out of Warrenton, Oregon. Hummel bought her for less than the value of the diesel in her tanks.
Of course, boat owners know there is no such thing as a free boat. About $300,000 later, a ton of sweat equity and many marine-industry insider deals later, and Seablazer was fit for wreck hunting. The fish hold became a machine shop, stowage space and berths. Blue shag carpeting was purged. An expanded house with enclosed space for crew to gather and work on robots was built out. A generous aft deck with a winch and an A-frame would serve for deploying gear.
“The nice thing about Seablazer is it’s completely paid for and you couldn’t replace it for four million dollars,” says Hummel. “It’s just been a really reliable workhorse.” The hull is “massively overbuilt” with some areas bearing 2.5-inch-thick fiberglass. She’ll soon be tricked out with twin thrusters fore and aft with dynamic positioning, allowing for excellent station-keeping abilities.
Finally, backed by investors, his 70-page thesis with target area and a loyal crew, the able Seablazer hunted for the Pacific under the Rockfish flag.
Between enduring foul seas and being weathered out completely, the Seablazer crew eventually picked up promising signatures that appeared to resemble the Pacific’s paddle wheels. But it turns out they were instead long-lost, bottom-dwelling crab pots—which became a particular scourge. Hummel compared his strategy to George Washington’s in 1776, i.e., just staying in the fight after losing battle after battle was a win in itself. Then, after nearly a dozen missions, their fortune turned with a positive signature on the sonar. “We found the original site in September of 2021,” says Hummel.
Hummel’s ecstatic crew, however, had to get a sample in order to “arrest” the Pacific’s wreck site and make a claim to the salvage in Federal Court. A friendly octopus, later dubbed Lilly by Hummel’s granddaughter, would become an unwitting assistant a full year and a month later. The crew was utilizing an ROV with video feed as foul weather approached. “We probably have three or four hours before we [had] to get the hell out of there. We always stay long and we always get the crap beaten out of us when we’re out there.”
One of the ROV operators came upon a giant Pacific octopus and paused upon the popular creature as she rested in her den of empty shells. The Seablazer soon continued, unable to secure a wreck sample for the arrest. However, when Hummel reviewed the footage of Lilly the octopus, he noted she was holding a massive metal spike in one of her arms. The spike, bent at about 85 degrees, looked exactly like nautical construction spikes from the Pacific era.
The Seablazer rushed back to Lilly’s coordinates only to find she had moved out, spike and all. “As far as she is concerned, she was visited by a UFO. There were bright lights and she’s telling all her friends about it and they don’t believe her and she’s moving out,” jokes Hummel. “Fortunately, about twenty feet away we found this chunk of wood and that we brought up. And we used that for the arrest because we had a video of going up to the surface, down to the site, getting the wood and coming back up, fully documented.” A brick recovery was also a part of the arrest.
Since the 2022 site arrest, Rockfish has been trying to decipher the true nature of the Pacific wreck. The crew has revisited the site, even chartering a larger vessel with top-of-the-line multi-beam technology, to finally nail down the wreck’s orientation.
“There are certain things about the wreck that we haven’t revealed and that’s because we want to reveal them in the TV show,” says Hummel. He hopes an MGM-produced show will begin filming later this year. “There are some parts of this whole thing that are just beyond belief. From the very beginning, we have not revealed certain information and one of them is the exact nature of the ship.”
“The wreck is perfectly happy to deceive you,” adds Hummel. “It’ll reveal just enough to keep you confused.” A major puzzle was locating the large debris field to the northeast of the wreck, which was finally mapped properly in March of 2023.
“There’s literally hundreds and hundreds of objects in the debris field,” says Hummel. He has also been trying to recreate the events of the sinking itself. Hummel utilized historic pictures with firsthands and wreck data to render a digital model of the Pacific with CAD software. It just so happens that the recovered brick corroborates accounts of a large boiler explosion.
According to Henly’s account of the sinking, there was a tremendous noise from the hold, probably because contact with freezing seawater caused the boilers to explode. Hummel also cites the recovered body of one of the female passengers of the Pacific. Examiners at the time noted the body showed signs of scalding and a laceration on her leg as if hit by a jagged piece of iron. When combined with historic testimony, Hummel’s working theory is that the women were mustered amidships right above the boilers when they exploded—a horrific event.
Rockfish consulted with a maritime insurance expert who explained that it appears the ship rolled on its side because of the explosion, causing the paddle wheels to fall off. The brick was so far from the hull because it was blown into the air by the explosion as the ship sank.
“With just tiny little facts like that, you can put together the model of this ship that’s really accurate and compelling,” says Hummel. He believes that after the boilers blew, the Pacific rolled over and shed her paddle wheels. Buoyed by wooden supports, they floated for a time before the supports tore off. The heavy metal wheels tipped and fell in different locations.
“The one further to the west is the port one, and the other is the starboard one,” explains Hummel. “On the bottom where they landed, they are in exactly the right arrangement.”
At the time of this writing, the Seablazer crew is prepping for more trips before the fall and winter weather drives them back to port. A hunting-strategy crossroads has emerged. Search the interior of the wreck or the relatively vast debris field? Statistically, Hummel deduces that in the spirit of salvaging the first load of precious cargo, the debris field search is more likely to reveal pay dirt. That first gold bar or handful of coins he hopes will further commit investors and be yet more validation of a quest that began decades ago.
“We figure there’s $10 to $12 million just in the debris field,” says Hummel. “It’s gold and coins. Gold bars. There are things called Doré bars, the guys melted the gold down in the field. That’s the whole idea of mapping the debris field. We’re going to go back with another piece of equipment in the debris field and examine it more.”
He points to CAD renderings of a new ROV they are manufacturing. “We’ve got to get these robots done, get metal-detection suction equipment done,” he says.
While mapping the debris field and recovering the gold will be the major focus near-term, Hummel is most excited about the long-term dream to build a Seattle waterfront maritime museum. It would house all non-gold artifacts recovered from the wreck under a nonprofit umbrella. Ideally, the Pacific herself would be the centerpiece.
“It’s going to be about a 200-million-dollar facility,” says Hummel who has proposed the idea to state legislators. “We’ve gotten support from business leaders. We’ve had a couple meetings with the mayor. Everyone likes the idea and it requires a huge amount of energy to make that happen.”
What’s more, many fascinating lost wrecks remain beneath the waves that don’t contain notable precious cargo. Without big gold-rush paydays for investors, this historical treasure trove will remain lost forever. The museum and associated nonprofit efforts would change the game, partly with a student-led concept of Hummel’s to bring in graduate and post-graduate students as project leaders. The vision is inspired by his Eagle-Scout experience, to give young people real leadership opportunities.
“They will focus on submarine technology and [the program will] give them leadership opportunities to go out in the field where they are actually in charge of something … and use that technology with the goal to recover a shipwreck project for somebody else,” says Hummel. “They are historical projects that need to be done in an archaeological fashion.”
His ambitions extend beyond the Pacific Northwest. “Let’s say you’re a nonprofit in Bulgaria and there’s something in the Black Sea you want to do, but you don’t have the money to get millions of dollars’ worth of equipment out there,” explains Hummel. “We [the nonprofit] have the equipment and we’ll have the funding to go out there and they’ll apply and say, hey, we’ll show up on this day with this equipment and we’ll do your project. And these will be students who are basically in charge of this. It’s those young leadership roles that create leaders in the future, right? Giving people all responsibility at an early age, that creates leaders.”
The next phase could prove even more challenging and complex than the decades-long Pacific hunt. But if Hummel and company maintain their dogged persistence and streak of good fortune, perhaps the Pacific, her secrets and those of other ships around the world will be revealed.
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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