When the Queen of the North ferry sank in British Columbia waters in the early hours of March 22, 2006, the entire province held its breath. Two people went missing that night; they remain missing to this day. The new book The Queen of the North Disaster is captain Colin Henthorne’s account of the sinking, and it will make your blood run cold.
Reading the book, I could hear the sound of the ship’s propellers being torn out from the boat’s hull; I could see the sight of passengers—some of whom were sopping wet from the cold seawater that had come into the cabins—being loaded into lifeboats; this all comes through in Henthorne’s words, which are delivered with a good balance of fact and opinion.
Henthorne, who says he had brought up concerns about equipment safety and ship upkeep with BC Ferries prior to the North’s final voyage, does his best to shoot down the rumour that two people were having sex, instead of navigating the ship, moments before the crash. (Henthorne describes the bridge of a ship as being prone to bumpiness and far from an ideal place to have intercourse with anyone.)
Henthorne—who was sleeping below deck at the time of the crash—says he ultimately believes that equipment failure and bad weather conditions were part of the cause of the crash. (The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said in 2008 that they found the cause to be unsafe practices on the ferry.) He gives a detailed account of what he believes Karl Lilgert, the fourth mate who was navigating the ship at the time, was doing leading up to the cold steel of the North hitting jagged rock. Lilgert says he saw a ship in the North’s path—a ship that was never accounted for in any records and has since been referred to as the “phantom ship”—and that that’s why he didn’t make the due course change on time.
(Lilgert was arrested in 2010, convicted of two counts of criminal negligence causing death, and sentenced to four years in jail in 2013. The judge ruled that Ligert’s relationship with Karen Briker was one of many factors in the sinking. Henthorne is very clear that the media often assumed that this meant that they were having sex when the ship sunk, but he strongly believes that this was not the case.)
Whatever really happened that night, Henthorne’s words in this book capture the sinking and the extensive legal aftermath in a way that will haunt sailors and enthusiastic readers alike.