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Nature of Casualty
Crushed between grounded floe and moving pack ice. Vessel sank less than an our after being carried
off by ice. Crew escaped over ice. Tornfelt, Evert E., Burwell, Michael, Shipwrecks of the Alaskan Shelf
and Shore, U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region, 1992
The five northernmost ships, the Roman, Comet, Concordia, Gay Head, and George, were completely
surrounded. Slightly to the south the John Wells, Massachusetts, Contest, J. D. Thompson, Henry
Taber, Fanny, Monticello, and Elizabeth Swift were not as tightly gripped... The next day, September 1,
it began to blow out the southwest. It was a light wind, but enough to set the ice in motion. The
Roman, northernmost of the fleet, was anchored off Point Franklin, protected by a piece of ice and
cutting in a "stinker," a decomposing whale. The southwest wind began to raise the water level, as it
does on that coast. (On the northwest coast of Arctic Alaska the tidal range is only about half a foot;
winds have far greater effect on the height of the water, westerlies raise it and easterlies lower it.) Soon
the Roman was naked, her protective ice floes having drifted north in the current. The men moved her
behind another grounded floe. They moored here [sic] there in fifty-two feet of water, but the current
soon broke that floe apart and at 11 A.M. the drift ice drove in with such force that it not only stove in
her stern but it went right under the hull, raising the ship, driving her over and stoving in her whole side.
The crew worked frantically. They lowered her three port boats onto the ice and dragged them out of
the way as her spars fell. Forty minutes after the first contact, only a little of the ship was left above the
ice. Bockstoce, John R., Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic,
University of Washington Press, Seattle Washington, 1986:154-155
NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program: West Coast Region Research Provide
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