Last spring, Luke Marquardt walked along the beach next to the Small Boat Harbor at low tide when he spotted an old, rusty anchor in the mud flats. But it was what rested nearby that really caught his attention: two shoe soles of different sizes, one appearing to belong to a woman, and the other to a man. 

“They’re leather-soled shoes with copper nails holding them together, which is really old. It’s a man’s shoe and a woman’s shoe and they were right next to each other like that. It was so weird it was like ghosts or something,  like a couple that had drowned,” he said. 

Marquardt thinks the shoes date back at least to the 1800s, given the style of sole that would have been secured to the shoe with copper nails. He speculated that they could have belonged to the ill-fated passengers who sailed on the Princess Sophia, an ocean liner that was grounded on Vanderbilt Reef near Juneau in 1918. The ship eventually sank, killing all 364 people aboard. The event marks the worst maritime disaster in the region and is one of the most well-known. 

The leather soles are clearly worn by time, and the mysteries of the ocean’s erosion effects. The heel of the larger sole is complete, but only the sides of the leather remain on the rest of the sole. The smaller sole is more intact, but more worn on the toe end, with rust-colored patches covering the surface like algae. Many of the nail holes are surrounded by little piles of blue corrosion, like tiny animal burrows in beach sand. 

“(The shoe soles) look like they were walking across the ocean, as if they were worn, which makes it even more eerie. I know that ships can move across the bottom of the ocean. I think it’s possible those are from the Sophia,” Marquardt said. 

Captain Warren Good tracks Alaska shipwrecks and created the website alaskashipwreck.com, a database and historical archive of Alaska wrecks. He told the CVN that by his count there have been 80 vessels lost in Lynn Canal, many during the Gold Rush. Author of the book “Alaska Shipwrecks: Waterways of Southeast Alaska,” Good said the possibilities are “almost endless when it comes to shipwreck debris,” and that wreckage can remain buried under the sand for hundreds of years before being kicked up by a storm. 

“If you really think about it, Chatham Strait is part of the same body of water as Lynn Canal so things can be blown from the entrance near Cape Ommaney,  all the way up to the top of Lynn Canal in a matter of days in a good southerly blow. That is about 180 miles. I have another 100 wrecks or more from that area too. Some are famous, but most are small fishing boats, less than 50 feet long,” he said.“Many are lost with all personal possessions.”

Marquardt said the anchor he found near the shoe soles could be more than 100 years old given its style. Tim Ackerman said he’s seen the same anchor at low tide and thinks it’s a halibut anchor from an old fishing boat. 

Marquardt says he’s lucky when it comes to finding odd, historical objects like the shipwreck debris he found that day. Five years ago, while walking along Lutak Inlet, he found the spoke to a ship’s wheel. But it wasn’t an ordinary wooden spoke, it had a metal base with metal rings inlaid along the length of the spoke. 

“This is too ornate to be a regular spoke. This is a kingpin of the wheel, where they would turn it to be pointing straight up so they know the rudder’s pointing straight. It would be possible to find out what the metal is. It’s not rusted. I think it would be possible to find out what ship it came from.”

Marquardt said he’d most like to find out where the shoe soles come from; Good said it’s possible to get a better idea of which ship the shoe soles came from with current technology. 

“Today, touch DNA may even be able to determine who wore the shoe, if the wearer was in contact with the shoe for a long period of time as they decomposed. There would usually be bones in the vicinity of where the shoe was found.”

Marquardt plans to keep the soles and other items unless someone with more expertise comes along who wants to help identify which wreck they possibly came from. 

“There are quite a few shipwrecks that a lot of people don’t know about,” Marquardt sad said. “It’s interesting.”

Besides notable wrecks such as the Princess Sophia or Clara Nevada, Captain Good’s list of shipwrecks from his book in the Northern Lynn Canal before 1930 includes small vessels most people are unlikely to remember. The City of Astoria, for example, was a 72-foot wooden towing steamer, sunk after hitting a submerged rock in 1989 near Sullivan Island. The Mocking Bird, a wooden mail and passenger vessel, was lost in Dyea Harbor in 1899 after an ice sheet sliced a hole in the bow.