At ten o’clock at night, October 23, 1918, the Princess Sofia with over three hundred passengers on board steamed out of the Skagway Harbor in Alaska on its way to Seattle. The first part of their journey lay through the seventy-mile-long Lynn Canal. Captain Locke, a long time veteran of shipping in the Pacific Northwest, was at the helm.
Most passengers were in their berths sleeping when at three o’clock in the morning there was a screeching of steel and a tremendous jolt which sent many of the sleepers out of their beds and rolling on the floors. The Princess Sofia, steaming along at cruising speed, had suddenly run aground on submerged rocks which make up part of the Vanderbilt Reef. The double plated steel hull of the ship had become firmly wedged into the space between two rocks. To the credit of the shipbuilders, the ship held together in the impact, and crew members were relieved to discover the ship was not breaking up in the water.
Captain Locke sent out a call for help over the ship’s radio which had been recently installed. The message asked for all ships in the area to come to their aid. Within a few hours, a couple of nearby vessels had reached the stricken passenger ship. Captain Ledbetter, in the dawn’s early light, brought his vessel as close as he safely could in the rough seas. On board his ship he had all the ropes necessary to set up a pulley system between the two ships by which they could transfer the passengers one by one. From the pitching deck of his ship he called out through a megaphone: “Do you want to transfer the passengers from your ship to mine?”
Captain Locke gave the request serious consideration for a minute before shouting his response back: “No, we will wait for the weather to get better.”
The ships which had come to rescue the passengers off the stricken ship backed off and began to cruise slowly in a wide circle. For a day and a night they circled nearby hoping for the weather to change. It did change. The next day the winds grew so fierce that the rescue ships had to seek shelter for themselves behind nearby islands. The weather grew so bad that a rescue operation like Captain Ledbetter had suggested was out of the question.
The rescue ships were nervously waiting behind the islands when they received an urgent cry for help over the radio: “Come and save us! The room is taking on water!” The transmission was abruptly ended. The rescue ships headed out into the stormy night. They went to the spot where the Princess Sofia had been stranded. In the darkness they could find nothing, but by the light of the dawn the next day they discovered the grim truth. The Princess Sofia had sunk in the night with all the crew and passengers aboard. Only the topmost part of the mast was visible above the waves.
“Do you want to transfer your passengers to my ship?” Captain Ledbetter had offered.
“We will wait...” came the fateful reply. And what followed was the worst maritime disaster in the history of the Pacific Northwest.
To a world of sinners trapped in darkness and tottering on the brink of eternal disaster, God is offering a full and free salvation. Through the preaching of the gospel He is calling out to men and women everywhere, telling them that if they repent and believe in Christ, He will deliver them from all the trouble they have gotten into through sin.
God is offering to save you from your sins and give you the gift of eternal life. If you are wise, you will realize the danger you are in and believe on Christ at once. There is no reason at all to wait to receive the gift of eternal life. “We will wait” was the reply from the Princess Sofia, and it was a fatal decision. Waiting was foolish in their case, and it is foolish in the case of anyone who hears the gospel message but puts off receiving Christ until a more favorable time. Don’t let another hour go by without making sure of your eternal safety by accepting the lifeline being held out to you by the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember the sure promise: “Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)).