A Summer Without Cruise, Steam Ships - Story

 

A summer without cruise, steam ships

(originally published on 7-12-20)

By Dave Kiffer

For the Daily News

With the recent announcements by Norwegian, American and Lindblad cruise lines canceling their remaining cruise ship seasons, Ketchikan will now have its first cruise ship/steam ship free season since...well, since Ketchikan became Ketchikan 130 years ago.

After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, monthly boat service began between Portland, Oregon and Sitka, with occasional stops in the other established community in the region, Wrangell. The initial service was mail and other communications by naval ships, but within a couple of years several different private steamships began making their way up the coast, some also stopping at Fort Tongass, the brief military post established near the Canadian border.

An early visitor on one of those steamships was none other than Alaska purchaser William Henry Seward who visited the Alaska territory in 1869 on a Seattle based steam ship, The Active, shortly after resigning as Secretary of State. Seward gave a speech in Sitka in which he promoted the idea of an eventual Alaskan statehood and he also visited Fort Tongass.

In 1881, the Pacific Coast Steamship Company of San Francisco took over the mail contract for Alaska and with it brought several familiar steamers intro the region including the Eureka, the Idaho and sidewheeler, the Ancon. With the development of the cannery at Loring in the early 1880s, the Ancon particularly became a familiar site in "Tongass Narrows" as it approached Loring. Soon,"Tongass Narrows"  or sometimes just "Tongass" was listed as an "as needed" stop on the PCSC schedule, even though there was no community yet in the area around a large salmon stream then called - appropriately enough - Fish Creek. By 1887, the first cannery was operating in "Tongass Narrows" and ships were stopping to drop off supplies or passengers.

Stories about visiting Alaska were also appearing in national magazines and newspapers and PCSC noted at the time that around 25 percent of its Alaska business was tourism related. By 1891, there was a wharf in the growing community of Ketchikan - still sometimes spelled Kichikan - and ships were stopping monthly in the community. Over the next decade, as Ketchikan grew, steam ship visits became more frequent and businesses developed in the"downtown" area to cater to their needs. Early curio and jewelry stores popped up along the waterfront.  Multiple steam ship companies entered the market including the newly formed Alaska Steamship Company. With weekly steam ship visits now the norm, the local tourism industry continued to grow. The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98 caused a boom in the steamship travel to Southeast Alaska also led to Canadian-based steamships entering the market.

For the next half century, the steam ships (and their diesel-engined counterparts) became the primary way that people came and went from Ketchikan. Some days would actually see multiple steamer arrivals, northbound and southbound. As Ketchikan's canned salmon industry took off in the 1920s, the multiple downtown wharfs were constantly busy with steamship traffic, especially during the summer months. While the majority of traffic remained cargo shipping and resident travel, tourism business was taking up just about half of the space on the ships, as companies continued to promote visiting Alaska.

In 1923, the Alaska Steamship Company inaugurated service of a 350-foot primarily passenger vessel, the Alaska II, on the Inside Passage run. While it wasn't the first passenger vessel on the run, it was the first ship to devote more space to passenger accommodations than the cargo storage. In 1932, she received new turbo electric powered engines and cut the travel time from Seattle to Ketchikan to under 40 hours for the first time.

The Great Depression of the early 1930s put a damper in pleasure travel and for those years most of the steamer traffic to Alaska was supplies and people coming and going from the Territory. But after World War II, there was another push to increase tourism in the Last Frontier.

It was in this period, that the first "cruise" ships began arriving Alaska. Initially, they were converted "high end" ships like the Corsair IV, a luxury yacht once owned by the J.P. Morgan family that operated as a "cruise vessel" in 1948 and 1949.

But elsewhere, particularly in Europe and the Caribbean, companies were turning surplused military troop transports into low-cost cruise ships. This was also the period in time in which traditional steam ship service to Alaska was coming to an and.

Many of the ships that had been used for passenger and freight service to Alaska were requisitioned by the government during the War and used heavily, and not always well maintained, according to the steam ship companies. In fact, that government control over the ships remained in place until 1949 further limiting the resumption of full steamship service to the Inside Passage.

Further more, the War had brought new airports to many Alaskan communities, including Ketchikan and Sitka. When faced with a choice between a three-day ocean voyage or a three-hour flight, those that could afford the planes took them, which further cut down on the "higher end" revenues the steamers relied up. In 1954, the Alaska Steamship Company ended passenger service to the region. For the next three decades, the only steamship service to the area would be on ships of the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National lines such as the Prince George and the Princess Patricia.

In 1963, the Alaska Marine Highway would begin to operate and pick up the remaining passenger traffic for the region. In the meantime, though, smaller cruise ships, like the Polar Star and other Westours ships,  continued to visit the area, but it wasn't until the late 1960s and the rise of the modern cruise ship era, that the industry truly began to dominate the Ketchikan waterfront.

The watershed moment was in 1970. when the P&O Lines Arcadia and it's 1,300 passengers arrived. It had to anchor in the Narrows because it was too big for the docks. Soon, Princess Cruise line ships were arriving and then Holland America. The growth was slow and steady over the next two decades, but in the late 1990s there was a significant increase and then in the mid 2010s it exploded.

Ketchikan was expected to get between 1.2 million and 1.3 million cruise passengers in 2020. Instead, it will get zero.

When the lines return in 2021, it is estimated that capacity will be somewhere between 50 and 75 percent, meaning somewhere between 600,000 and 800.000 cruise visitors next year.