Reaching Deep

UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGIST AND CAVER JOHN POLLACK PUTS SOME OF THE WORLD’S DEEPEST AND DARKEST PLACES ON THE MAP

John Pollack has just returned from two weeks in the Yukon hunting for shipwrecks. Since 2005, the underwater archaeologist, caver, surveyor and retired forestry scientist has led the Institute of Nautical Archaeology’s Yukon River Survey, a project dedicated to locating and documenting late 19th-century sternwheelers.

During the frenzy of the Klondike Gold Rush, these steamboats helped to ferry tens of thousands of would-be miners from across North America to Dawson City, on the hunt for fortune, but more often than not meeting their ruin. More than 290 vessels travelled the Yukon River from the 1890s to the 1950s, and the region is now considered the most accessible sternwheeler graveyard on the continent. “Sternwheelers were responsible for opening up the interior of North America,” Pollack explains.

“They’re a part of our history.” Documenting Canada’s nautical past is a passion for Pollack. A former president of the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia (UASBC), he spent a decade surveying similar wrecks in that province. In 2000, his findings at 17 sites were published in Historic Shipwrecks of the West Kootenay District. Although his career has been varied, ranging from serving with the U.S. army in a radiation lab in Germany to working as a silviculturist with the B.C. Forestry Service, the “common thread,” as he calls it, has been mapping. “I was trained in surveying back in the late 1960s, and I’ve always kept it up,” says Pollack. “It’s not been my main profession, but it’s a skill, like being a good plumber.”

The skill has played a significant role in the Yukon River Survey’s success.

On Pollack’s most recent trip, he and his team focused on the stretch between Whitehorse and Dawson City, and found three new vessels—in three days. “That’s pretty good,” he quips, though he’s quick to credit the late spring low water levels for the expedition’s results. Wrecks that had been submerged during the rest of the year were suddenly exposed. One of their finds was the James Domville, an 1898 sternwheeler that lasted only a year on the river before it ran aground and was partially disassembled, possibly even dynamited to clear the channel. Working on the vessel’s location, Doug Davidge, a local team member, used geo-referencing to help locate it, placing Pollack and his crew on the shore about 15 metres away taken. After finding metal on the beach, struck shipwreck gold: part of the wreck’s hull, along with its engine mounts and bottom planking.

By documenting these vessels, Pollack and his colleagues are recording the history of late 19th-century shipbuilding.

To accommodate the enormous in flux of fortune hunters, shipyards in Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco boomed, developing “strange” new construction methods in the process. Differences in the hulls and tiller and rudder systems unique to Yukon River sternwheelers suggest that “old-time shipwrights” who had worked in the 1860s and 1870s had been called in to cobble together “anything that could float” to help cope with the demand for boats at the turn of the century. (More than 110 vessels, after all, were constructed in 1898 alone.) This piecemeal workmanship, Pollack says, means that several of the boats they’ve found “don’t look like normal 1890 sternwheelers,” and instead “look more like something from the middle of the 19th century.” And this is what makes these wrecks so fascinating to underwater archaeologists like Pollack; they are literally the products of their time and place.

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