A new guardian is watching over the treacherous waters of Lynn Canal, where several historic shipwrecks happened. Tommy, the mythical sole survivor of the sinking of the SS Princess Sophia, is now cast in bronze atop a boulder at Juneau’s Tee Harbor.
The Sophia — pronounced “so-FYE-ah” — set sail out of Skagway on October 23, 1918, carrying gold prospectors and others on the way to Vancouver and Victoria, Canada. But before the passenger liner could reach her final port, she ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef and, despite rescue efforts, sank almost two days later, on Oct. 25.
The disaster is sometimes called the “Titanic of the Pacific.”
“But like, people survived on the Titanic,” said Brian Weed, an amateur Juneau historian. “Nobody survived on this.”
More than 350 people went down with the ship, but as the story goes, Tommy the dog was able to swim through the frigid waters to reach the shore close to where the new statue now stands.
The statue was funded by an anonymous Juneau family, and quietly installed on city land earlier this month. Then Weed, who was not involved, unveiled it on his popular Facebook page, Juneau’s Hidden History.
It’s accessible via the North Tee Harbor trail, which is a short hike down to the rocky shoreline. Weed led the way recently, accompanied by his own dog, Doug, a tiny Yorkshire terrier mix.
On the day the SS Princess Sophia ran aground, rain was pouring and wind was howling as a violent storm bore down on the ship. But on the morning Weed visited the statue, it was just drizzling. Doug was wearing a blue and gray raincoat to stay dry.
On the boulder where the statue stands, a small plaque identifies Tommy as a Chesapeake Bay retriever, though the actual likeness to the breed is vague. The metal is sculpted into wispy fur, and the dog’s strangely long neck is craned towards the rocky surface of the distant reef, which just barely breaks the surface of the water.
The Tommy statue is at least the third canine monument in Juneau. On the cruise ship docks there’s a sculpture of Patsy Ann, the bull terrier who greeted ships coming into port back in the 1930s. And near the Mendenhall Glacier there’s a plaque for Romeo, a wild black wolf who sometimes struck up friendly relationships with pet dogs.
“Juneau has always been a huge dog town,” Weed said.
But our dogs have not always walked on leashes, or slept in beds or worn raincoats, for that matter.
That’s why local scuba diver Annette Smith is skeptical about the miraculous story of the dog who survived. Smith has visited the wreck of the Sophia dozens of times and has done countless hours of research on the ship’s story.
She says there was a fish cannery at Tee Harbor in the early 1900s.
“The people that worked there had dogs. And they were not groomed, right? They did not sleep in the house. They were oily and greasy,” Smith said. “That’s where I think the dog from the dog story came from – (it) was probably one of those.”
In a story published in the Alaska Daily Empire in March 1919, a few months after the shipwreck, cannery workers described the arrival of a half-starved dog, whose white and brown spotted coat was covered in oil.
Unnamed at the time, it was believed to be a thoroughbred English Setter belonging to Captain James Alexander, who went down with the ship.
Setters are decent swimmers, but to make it to Tee Harbor, Tommy would have had to paddle nearly 15 miles.
“Let’s say yes, a dog survived. Let’s say yes, it managed to fight against five-plus-foot seas, 50-mile-an-hour winds that were pushing it,” Smith said. “Where’s it gonna come ashore? Well, the first place it’s going to come ashore is Amalga, not Tee Harbor.”
To Smith, the story seems unlikely.
Then few years ago, researchers at the British Maritime Museum examined the dog’s survival story again, and they found a letter written by the administrator of the late Alexander’s estate, which instead described the dog that had been found in Juneau as a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.
Chesapeake Bay Retrievers have thick, water-resistant coats and strong paddle-like tails. It is believed that the breed descended from two puppies that survived a Newfoundland shipwreck in 1807.
That makes Tommy’s feat seem slightly more plausible. But, we’ll probably never really know for sure.
Stories of dogs surviving shipwrecks are common. Three small dogs actually did survive the Titanic, when their owners carried them onto the lifeboats. But an enduring story of Rigel, a heroic black Newfoundland who supposedly helped save people when the Titanic went down, has been proven false.
Whether they’re real or fake, these stories often get passed down. Tommy’s survival was even featured as the climax of the Princess Sophia opera, a theater production that commemorated the 100th anniversary of the tragedy in 2018. Smith understands why.
“There’s people trying to make sense of this horrible tragedy and having a dog or something survive provides some hope. Right? And gives a little bit of meaning,” she said.
But to her, the tragic human side of the Princess Sophia story is more compelling.
