The next time you walk along Moody Avenue, or stroll through the recently created Moodyville Park area, or drive along the Low Road past the imposing grain elevators, give a thought to a young, ambitious and savvy Yankee Trader named Sewell “Sew” Prescott Moody who developed and expanded the successful Moody Sawmill Company. He also established the first non-indigenous community on the shore of Burrard Inlet, Moodyville, where the grain elevators sit today with no evidence of the settlement. Fate intervened in his successful life and Sew went from being in the right place at the right time to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Photo of Sewell Prescott Moody. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 13370
Photo of Moodyville. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 8139
On November 4th 1875, the SS Pacific, a steam-powered paddle ship, set off from Victoria bound for San Francisco. The Pacific was packed with, at the very least, 275 passengers and her hold was crammed with cargo that included livestock, oats and hops, coal and gold. The passengers included women, children, businessmen, Chinese labourers and gold miners. One of the passengers was Sewell Prescott Moody.
Darkness falls early in November, while strong winds from the Pacific Ocean are a familiar hazard for sailors on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Cape Flattery, named so by Captain Cook in 1778, is situated in American waters at the entrance to the Strait opposite Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. There was no guiding radar in 1875 and in the stormy blackness, the SS Pacific collided with the SS Orpheus, a ship on a coal run heading north to Vancouver Island. Within twenty to thirty very long minutes of confusion, panic and increasing inevitability, the SS Pacific was swallowed into ice-cold depths close to Cape Flattery. There were two survivors and neither one was Sew Moody.
Fast forward to December 2022. It was all over the news that a shipwreck believed to be the SS Pacific has been located 300 metres below the surface, 65 km south of Cape Flattery. Salvage rights are with a Washington State Company that, through three decades, has been searching for the remains of the wreck, and possible gold. In 2017, fishermen in the area found some coal in their nets; analysis of their find linked the coal to the SS Pacific and allowed the search company to narrow their search area and to discover a wreck.
Photo of SS Pacific, SS Salvador, and bark Harriet Hunt docked at Yesler’s Wharf, Seattle, 1875. Unknown author. Source: Wikimedia.org
The SS Pacific had been a bit of a wreck before that fateful night. In 1861, in the wee hours of the morning of July 18, on the Columbia River north of Portland, she hit Coffin Rock suffering substantial damage, loss of cargo but no loss of life. The ship was repaired, although some argue the repairs were superficial, and the SS Pacific continued in service until she was retired in 1872 and left to rot in mudflats in the San Francisco Bay area. At the time, the ongoing B.C. gold rush resulted in the need for a passenger ship service between Victoria and San Francisco for gold miners, speculators and businessmen drawn by the lure of wealth, and that demand put SS Pacific back into service in April 1875 after being refitted and deemed seaworthy.
On the night of the collision, it was later reported by one of the survivors, the ship’s load had shifted causing her to list to starboard. To offset this, lifeboats on the port side were filled with water to reduce the listing. And then, when they were most needed just a short time later, they became a hindrance to survival rather than an aid. And, it is written, there were insufficient lifeboats for the number of passengers and crew and that the cumbersome winter clothing of the day, especially the women’s attire, became rapidly waterlogged and they succumbed to the sea.
So, what do you do in the twenty long minutes between the ship’s alarms sounding after the collision and the ship going down? Sewell Prescott Moody took the time to take a piece of wood, part of a state room stanchion, to write, “S.P. Moody All Lost” and remarkably, despite the distance from the disaster, it washed up six weeks later on the beach below Beacon Hill close to his Victoria home where his widow, his Scottish born wife, Janet MacAuslyn Watson, and their three children resided. The family confirmed his signature and they kept the artifact for many years but it now belongs to the Vancouver Maritime Museum collection.
Sewell Moody's "All Lost" Vessel Fragment. With permission from Vancouver Maritime Museum. Object ID: 2004.1163.0001. https://vmmcollections.com/Detail/objects/12921
Sew Moody was so very young when he drowned in November, 1875. His birthdate is unclear, being suggested as between 1835 and 1840 making him anywhere between 35 and 40 when he died. In his short life he established the beginning of BC’s international lumber trade, a trade that remained the backbone of the B.C. economy for many years. As with first settlers, our homes are constructed with wood and our forests continue to fuel the international lumber trade, a trade that expanded world wide with Sew’s initiatives.
Moody, Dietz and Nelson Moodyville Sawmill. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 265
When Sew Moody first set eyes on the North Shore’s magnificent, irreplaceable old growth forests, he probably saw stands of timber waiting to become lumber and a fortune to be made. For that to happen, it required a well-run organization that included lumberjacks, an efficient mill with millworkers, longshoremen and vessels with the capacity to ship the lumber around the world.
Photo of Stevedores (longshoremen) at Moodyville. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 13378
Sailing ships moored at the Moodyville Sawmill. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 3779
After taking over the financially struggling Burrard Inlet Mills in 1865, Moody not only developed and expanded the mill into a thriving business, but he also developed a supporting community that grew to accommodate the workers. What started then as skid roads and logging flumes to move the timber to the mill would years later make a transition into roads we know today.
Flume and Skid Road through North Shore Forests. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 25
Moody was joined in 1866 by two partners, George Dietz and Hugh Nelson, after whom Nelson Street in Vancouver is named as is the City of Nelson. Hugh carried on managing the mill after Moody’s death. In 1872, three years ahead of Sew’s demise, the community became officially known as the company town of Moodyville. This small company community on Burrard Inlet boasted a schoolroom, church, hotel, library and newspaper The Moodyville Tickler. There was also a jail, a post office, a ferry named the Sea Foam and a telegraph line that Moody installed at his own expense. Moody is said to have been a fair but strict boss who forbade alcohol within the community. Reportedly, among those who worked at Moodyville, there were First Nations, Chinese, Hawaiians and Europeans. In 1882, seven years after Moody’s death, Burrard Inlet’s Moodyville was the first community north of San Francisco to have electrical power installed, six years before Vancouver. It was used for night time lighting and visibility in the loading of lumber onto ships.
Photo of ships at Moodyville. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives, Inv 187
If only the SS Pacific had been visible to the SS Orpheus on the night of 4th November 1875, lives could have continued including Moodyville’s Sew Moody. Before the collision occurred between the SS Orpheus and the SS Pacific, it is said that, “the night was overcast and rainy, and especially dark. The Pacific had three inexperienced crewmen on duty that night, and was running without port and starboard lights – only the white masthead light could be seen.” (Source: BC Magazine “The Sinking of the SS Pacific”)
Fast forward yet again to today. While nothing remains of the original Moodyville, the newly developed multi-purpose community-friendly area on a bluff above the original community has been given the name Moodyville Park. And could Moody Avenue have started out as a skid road or flume originally?
The SS Pacific carried Sewell Prescott Moody to his death. The ship’s large cargo was varied but it seems that what it carried of utmost importance was not lumber, livestock, oats, hops or coal but gold. And, the lure of gold still holds. The Washington State Company with salvage rights is hoping to find gold in the murky depths.
Interesting to note that Moody’s nephew Sewell Moody Dalby, the youngest son of his sister, Sarah Jane Robinson Moody Dalby, was also the victim of a shipping disaster when the SS Princess Sophia sank 25th October 1918, going down between Juneau Alaska and Victoria, with no survivors.
Moody’s granddaughter, Jean MacAuslyn Greenwood, born in Victoria in 1909, lived in West Vancouver for many years and was respected as a talented artist and active community volunteer. For some of those years, she lived in a now demolished house next door to the Music Box and the Silk Purse. After her death in 2006, a celebration of her life took place at the Silk Purse situated on the edge of the shoreline just a few miles west of where a young and enterprising Yankee, Sewell Prescott Moody, established Moodyville.
Acknowledgments, Resources, and Notes:
MONOVA, North Vancouver Museum and Archives
Vancouver Maritime Museum https://vmmcollections.com/Detail/entities/2768
https://globalnews.ca/news/9354640/victoria-bc-gold-shipwreck/
A History of the City and District of North Vancouver. Thesis October 1943. Kathleen Marjorie Woodward-Reynolds. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0098663
B.C. Magazine Article October 12th, 2016. https://www.bcmag.ca/the-sinking-of-the-ss-pacific/
Canadian National Historic Sites CNHS - Sewell Prescott Moody - North Vancouver, B.C. https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm3V0W_CNHS_Sewell_Prescott_Moody_North_Vancouver_BC
North Shore Heritage Blog, Street Names, 8 July, 2022 https://www.northshoreheritage.org/blog/2022/7/8/street-names-in-north-vancouver
Spelling: Sewell Prescott Moody was known as Sew or Sue – I have used Sew.
Janet Mcauslyn Watson, wife of SP Moody, 1849 – 1901 born in Greenock Scotland. Grandmother of Jean MacAuslyn Greenwood. I have used the latter spelling of the surname in the blog post.