(light music) - [Jeff] With shipwrecks, they sort of encapsulate that sense of hope.

(bell dinging) And then when a ship wrecks, what becomes of those hopes and dreams?

- [Coll] There's a claiming that takes place there.

A sense of we died for this, so it now belongs to us.

Our dead are buried off the coast now, so this is now our cemetery.

This is our place.

- [Tony] Anything that came ashore on our lands was in our jurisdiction.

- [Ron] If these stones could on the stories they would tell.

(light somber music) [Julia Triezenberg] - All right, good morning, everyone.

Welcome to Columbia River Maritime Museum.

Today we are welcoming Coll Thrush and he's here to talk about his book, "Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific."

So without further ado, please welcome Coll Thrush.

(audience applauding) - One of the things that I tried to get across in this book is the idea that these ships continue to sail.

Their stories don't stop when the wreck happens, that they have after lives.

(soft string music) So the Graveyard of the Pacific is the Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island coasts, and there have been more than 2,000 wrecks in that zone.

It's one of the most treacherous areas of water in the world.

And the factors that lead to that danger are many, fog as we see here, tide, surf, human error, storms, wind.

One of the real tensions or dissonances that exist in the history of shipwrecks on the northwest coast is the dissonance between tragedy really and disaster and violence and then nostalgia and fun.

The people behind me sort of enjoying the beach around the shipwreck.

Peter Iredale was a much beloved ship in Astoria.

One of the things you see in the "Daily Astorian" newspaper is you see constant references to, "Oh, Peter Iredale is coming into port today."

But then in 1906 it backed into the beach accidentally and got stuck.

It's become essentially the most photographed shipwreck in the world as far as I can tell.

(camera shutter snapping) Because it's so accessible.

We're just parked 300 feet over that way, right?

It's very convenient to get to.

And so, it's become really an iconic piece of Northwest history.

Everybody knows this ship, everybody has a claim on it, which means everybody has a claim on this place.

- This one knows Chinook and knows commands, and that one knows nothing.

Carl!

(speaks indigenous language) (Tony chuckles) (dog barks) To talk about shipwrecks, we really need to think about or talk about this deeper way that our folks think about what's offshore and what ultimately comes ashore.

(soft string music) You know, during whale migrations, our chiefs would send people with particular powers or spirit powers to be on the beach to sing to those whales with the knowledge that certain individuals could sing a whale ashore.

So when we see a whale on the beach, by the way, there's a way to mark it to say that it's been found and that person that was the original finder gets the really, you know, prime cuts of blubber and meat.

That tradition has a relevance to the way we thought about shipwrecks or anything else that came ashore.

You know, folks from other places or other countries or the owners of these vessels, or maybe it's the investors in these vessels had their own visions of what ownership was.

You know, when those things came ashore here, they fell under the jurisdiction of our sovereign nation.

- The idea that a lot of colonists brought with them that Indigenous people would disappear.

And that was a really profoundly powerful idea that many settlers and colonists, even fur traders brought with them to this coast.

But we all know that that's not true.

- [Tony] You know, sovereignty springs from the land and it springs from our ancestors.

The Chinook Indian Nation, despite all of the headaches that came from not agreeing to the treaties that were proposed to us, you know, despite all of that, we have never quit our land and our connection to our ancestors.

(waves breaking) - It's an absolutely powerful meeting of both the river and the ocean.

The currents in both are intense, so when you have two currents that are really, really strong and really, really big waves and lots of sand, it's just a recipe for disaster.

(poignant string music) So the Columbia River Bar is a series of sand bars beneath the surface of the river, and we have three main areas of the bar that are dangerous.

So we have Peacock Spit, which is on the north side of the river, so heading towards the Long Beach Peninsula, Clatsop Spit, which is on the south side of the river, which is heading towards Oregon.

And then the middle, we have the Middle Sands, which makes sense.

And any of those three would be something that ships could wreck on 'cause they would shift and move into any of the navigable channels before we started dredging and had the jetties.

- No one ever sits and talks in those stories about, "Oh, and then we were on the Mighty Columbia River Bar."

That's not the way the stories are told.

All of that was matter of fact.

We were one and the same in a way with our place, and that includes our water.

They talk about the survivability of, you know, being in our ocean water as just really short amounts of time.

But for our people, it's an entirely different thing.

(poignant string music continues) - One of the things I'm really interested in in my work is how people feel about belonging to a place.

And that could be Indigenous people, that could be settlers.

And so one of the things that comes across in a lot of the shipwreck stories, especially when there's a lot of loss of life, is this sense of kind of almost a funereal claiming of the coast.

Just as Indigenous people have claims on the coast, non-Indigenous people increasing are making claims on the coast as well.

(rain crackling) - When I took over the cemetery from Wally Bales, a gentleman, Wally Bales was in charge at the cemetery for years, and he used to say that there was numerous customers up here that we didn't know who they were.

And the speculation always was that these were shipwreck victims that came ashore, no identification, anything, and they brought 'em up here and buried ‘em.

(gentle string music) There's four cemeteries on the peninsula.

This is the oldest cemetery pretty much.

- Yeah, this is the original one - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- By far more graves here than there are at those other places.

But still, it's pretty amazing.

- [Coll] I've read a few stories of survivors who ended up staying and marrying into the community and.

- Well, you know, in the old days, this area, Tom knows it better than I do, how isolated this place was, there wasn't a lot of ways in or off the peninsula.

(gentle string music continues) - [Coll] It was one thing to come here as a researcher and just be looking around.

It's another thing to be here with someone with a real connection to it.

- [Ryen] Well, you know, I always talk about all the years I've been part of the cemetery.

If these stones could only talk, the stories they would tell.

- [Coll] It's an archive.

- [Tom] It is an archive.

It's history.

(waves rushing softly) - By the early 19th century, the Northwest coast actually had a reputation as a place of violence because of some incidents that did happen during the fur trade.

The Indigenous rescue far outweighs those incidents, but still, the idea of this place as a violent coast led, actually, to a lot of violence against indigenous people on the coast in the wake of shipwrecks.

- One story early on that comes to us from indigenous stories, and that is the wreck of the William and Ann, which was a Hudson's Bay Company ship, I believe.

(soft music) The crew died.

At the time, the people at Fort Vancouver thought that the Indians had killed the crew, and so they sent another ship down to retaliate.

It was later determined that the crew had died because of the wreck.

The Indians did not play a role in that.

Unfortunately, the Hudson's Bay Company sent this other ship down to retaliate and make a point, and they attacked a Clatsop village and killed a bunch of Indians and destroyed the village and burned it.

- There is a long history of helping folks that had become shipwrecked.

In some cases, there are also rough stories about situations that just did not, you know, work out.

But that history of bringing people into the community predates any European contact here.

When you all ask about, you know, things that happened in those moments, we know of a shipwreck that happened where some of the sailors survived.

We were able to get things off of that ship, and some of the things that came off were weapons, were guns.

And in that particular case, we compelled the survivors to show us how to work them.

And so, you know, that's our very first experience with guns, and it happened via a shipwreck.

(soft string music) - Do you have any particular shipwrecks that you think of as your sort your shipwrecks here?

- Well, I'm rather fond of the Vaslav Vorovsky, a Russian freighter in 1941 that ran aground out on the bar.

When the crew was getting off the ship, they were so grateful.

They gave gifts to the Coast Guardsmen, and this one particular Coast Guardman was handed a fistful of spoons.

This woman came to the museum one day and asked innocently at the front desk, did we have any information about a Russian freighter that ran afoul at the bar.

She explained that her husband had been in the Coast Guard, and I said, "Well, as a matter of fact, we have an exhibit."

And she said, "Yes, that's the one.

In fact, that's my husband."

There was a photograph showing the rescue, it was well documented at the time.

And I told her, "You know, if you ever find those spoons and want to give 'em a new home, we'd be happy to have 'em here."

Well, five weeks later, I get a padded envelope in the mail, and here are these five spoons with a note from her, and they've been added to our exhibit now on shipwrecks.

- We know that we had metal that we were accessing from Asian shipwrecks, you know, 1,000, 2,000 whatever years ago, you know, that was happening.

But when these European ships were first coming, you know, we were really anxious to trade our canoes for their lifeboats.

We cared nothing about the lifeboat.

The lifeboat was not a great vessel, in our opinion of watercraft, but what it was is something that had straps of metal, it had nails, right.

We just took those and took them apart for the metal.

- There's a tradition of items being found on the beach and brought in and used by the residents here, because you're out in the middle of nowhere basically during the early days.

- Yeah.

(gentle string music) - My family had, back in the shed, there were these big boxes.

There were wooden crates with lard in them.

I found out by asking that, you know, "Well, where did the lard come from?"

And it came from a shipwreck and it was a Russian ship, the Vaslav Vorovsky, that had all this lard aboard, and they used it in munitions.

But I remember my grandma using the lard until it was gone, and she made really good pies.

Her favorite was apple pie, and that was my grandpa's favorite too.

So that's mostly what she made.

- Yeah, any rhubarb?

- My grandma didn't like rhubarb.

I think that's where I got it, I don't like rhubarb either.

- Oh, well, let's not talk about that anymore.

- Oh, okay.

- I'm a big rhubarb person.

- Oh, okay.

We weren't as connected to the outside world as we are now.

Families in the past were used to living off of what they found or what they could get.

It's kind of a mindset, I guess, that people are pretty hardy that are from this area.

(soft string music) - When I was young, there was a wreck on the Washington Coast called Catala.

It was a steamship that wrecked ashore in 1965, and we used to go razor clamming on the beaches near there, and every time we would go razor clamming, we'd go and see the wreck.

And I feel like even today I can still kind of remember the smell of the rust of that ship, and it just captured my imagination.

And so as a young kid, I started reading books about the Graveyard of the Pacific.

So it's a very long standing interest of mine.

- I think a lot of people see it as being romantic, that there's a lot of tragedy associated with that.

- We just have so many shipwrecks in the Graveyard of the Pacific.

All of these different options and stories all throughout time, even modern day where we're continuing to have shipwrecks and vessels lost out here, I think there's just this fascination of why.

- Nobody writes books about car crashes or, well, sometimes plane crashes, but not to the extent that you have a whole genre of shipwreck lore.

It transforms into something that has a different life that continues.

And like the Peter Iredale, I mean, it's still sitting on the beach over 100 years after it landed there.

And every vacationer that comes to Clatsop County and goes out there, encounters it, and has a personal connection with it.

It's something that becomes part of another person's life, for good or bad, I mean, it's there and it lives with us.

- I started doing research into who Peter Iredale, the man was.

He was the ship's builder and owner and its namesake.

He died a few years before it wrecked in Liverpool.

And it appears, from a biography that was found by his own descendant, that he was actually he had made his money off the last years of the illegal slave trade off the west coast of Africa.

And so that really changes what this thing means, I think, what this object means, it connects us to a much darker history, a much more complicated story than just kind of tourist nostal There's something else going on here beyond that.

- The history of shipwrecks and these European shipwrecks that, you know, that lend the name Graveyard of the Pacific or whatever here in our place, that is also just a blink of an eye in our history, and it is a part of a continuum.

It's incredibly important for us to remind folks that, you know, these ships that came ashore, whether they came ashore, traded, and left, or whether they were wrecked on our beaches, were under our jurisdiction.

- "The tidal and tempestuous after lives of these ships are the echoes of past eras.

Just like lost times, they're never fully in the past.

They're revenant remains telling stories, the final results of which are yet to be seen."

Thank you for coming today.

(audience applauding) (soft string music) (water sloshing)