SEATTLE — After a dozen expeditions and decades of searching, it was a couple of pieces of waterlogged wood and a fearful octopus that helped two inventive mariners find the wreckage of the SS Pacific.
The legendary steamship sank in 1875 somewhere between British Columbia and San Francisco. The 220-foot vessel was carrying gold worth $5 million today, 230 tons of coal and more than 325 passengers when it was struck by a schooner that mistook it for a lighthouse. Only two survived.
Nearly 150 years later, a few miles south of Cape Flattery, as Jeff Hummel and Matthew McCauley used submergible drones to zero in on what they believed was the Pacific, they spotted an octopus with a tentacle wrapped around an object seemingly made of copper, maybe from the ship.
