Writing 33 Lost:
Researching Tragedy, Heroism, and the Gray Space In Between
Writing 33 Lost:
Researching Tragedy, Heroism, and the Gray Space In Between
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Researching Tragedy, Heroism, and the Gray Space In Between
This project started—like many of my plays do—when I stumbled across a few online articles about a century-old maritime disaster. The bullet points alone sounded like a play:
a ship destroyed at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1913
a rescue attempt in weather so brutal that the men who tried it were nearly killed themselves
3 men saved but 33 lost.
Those were the foundational facts—the basic narrative, the timeline, the weather, the names of some of the people involved, and the official verdict about what caused the accident. But facts alone don’t tell a story.
What Isn't in the Record?
What Isn't in the Record?
One of the biggest challenges of dramatizing history is imagining what isn’t there. Official records tend to be dry, concise, and unemotional. They’re designed to record events, not feelings. For example, the official account in the 1913 Annual Report of the U.S. Life-Saving Service (the forerunner of today’s Coast Guard) notes simply that the lifeboat crews made multiple attempts to reach the wreck and were thrown back by “mountainous seas.”
What those reports don’t capture is the fear. The stubborn brotherhood. The gut instinct to keep trying when every rational bone in your body says stop. They don’t tell you how salt water tastes in your lungs when you think you’re drowning, or what it feels like to watch fellow sailors die within sight of land.
Those are the moments playwrights live to imagine.
And the more I dug into the historical record, the more I realized: there was a play here. A big one. A human one.
Finding the People Behind the Headlines
Finding the People Behind the Headlines
Because many of the major figures in this story were real—Oscar Wicklund, Johnstone Quinan, Captain Rimer, Otto Wellander, survivors like Fred Peters and Johan Slinning—I wanted to know who they were as people, not just as names in print.
So I went down the rabbit hole of genealogical research: census records, city directories, archived photographs, and grave markers. I wanted to know where they came from, what kind of lives they lived before and after the tragedy, who they loved, who loved them back.
It takes hours of staring at scanned documents and piecing together incomplete records for this kind of work. It's finding out that people don't fit neatly into heroic story tropes or all come with memorable, easy names that hint at their personalities. This kind of research isn’t glamorous, but it’s where character lives.
And slowly, little pieces began to surface. A sentence of two quoted here. A contradictory fact there. Someone's name that's only found in an offhand reference in an article about something else entirely.
And a question that refused to resolve itself.
The Myopia of the Present
The Myopia of the Present
I spent days combing through dozens of newspaper archives from January and February of 1913—digitized microfilm full of blurry text and sensational headlines. I hunted for survivor testimony, statements from lifeboat crews, comments from tugboat captains who attempted to assist, and even small side articles about the supposedly jinxed history of the Rosecrans itself.
It’s easy, looking backward through the lens of history, to say:
“Obviously the USLSS rescue crews were heroes, and the
loss of life was simply a tragic accident.”
But history isn’t obvious when you’re living it.
The best part of using newspapers for research is that they were written in the moment: the morning the SOS went out, the day rescuers launched, and the days of grief and anger that followed. Some were factual, some emotional, some contradictory—but all were only working with the information they had right then, not with the full data and the detachment of later historians.
There was an official inquiry into the Rosecrans disaster, conducted by Johnstone Quinan of the U.S. Life-Saving Service headquarters. And inquiries don’t happen unless the truth is in question. They mean doubt. Blame. Anger.. Reputations on the line. Competing narratives. In short, conflict.
That uncertainty—that tension—is the heart of the play.
Why this Story
Why this Story
33 Lost isn’t just a retelling of a maritime tragedy. It’s about:
What ordinary people do when faced with impossible choices
How we decide who is a hero and who is at fault
How grief and anger shape perception
How history remembers some things and conveniently forgets others
And yes—it’s also about huge waves, freezing water, broken boats, and courage that borders on madness.
The more I’ve learned, the more humbled I’ve become by the real people who lived this story. I hope the play honors them—not by turning them into flawless legends, but by letting them be human.
Thanks for following along on this journey.
More soon, as 33 Lost continues to take shape.
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