Elizabeth Sea saved distressed boaters not once but twice

Berens Island, just off Esquimalt’s Work Point, and about midway in Victoria’s Outer Harbour, is a doubleheader. It commemorates not one but two Hudson’s Bay Company governors, Joseph Berens and Henry Hulse Berens respectively.

That’s about it as far as their personal involvement with British Columbia goes, but it was enough for Capt. Henry Kellett, RN, to honour this nondescript rock with their names in 1846. After all, there were so many landmarks to identify–and existing Native names were so hard to pronounce let alone spell.

But there’s more to Berens Island than this if you like a rousing tale of shipwreck and heroism.

Late in 1874, construction of a lighthouse was begun on the islet to help mariners navigate Victoria Harbour’s oft-befogged outer reaches. (Today, both sides of the harbour are ablaze with city lights and it takes some imagination to perceive this waterway as dark, lonely and a threat to navigation.) Berens Island lighthouse flashed its blue warning beacon for the first time in March 1875.

In the summer of 1897, unbeknownst to his superiors, new lightkeeper William Harrison was beset by rheumatism; so much so that, to keep his job, he had secretly hired an assistant, 26-year-old Elizabeth Sea. She was not only appropriately named but attractive, unmarried, industrious and, as events proved, up to any challenge.

“My mother was never one to talk much about herself,” the late Lovell Turnbull told me when I interviewed him in the 1960s, “but I remember her saying that the lightkeeper had been quite ill… Actually, if his true condition had been known, he probably would have been relieved. But he hired my mother to help with the many chores of operating the lighthouse, even having her run the light. Mostly she did housekeeping chores and that sort of things.”

But not on the storming Sunday of July 4, 1897.

From her tower Miss Sea spotted a sailboat, the Flora, capsized in heavy seas beyond Ogden Point. This was outside the relative shelter of the Outer Harbour, where the full fury of a southeasterly or southwesterly gale can be too much for small craft.

Perhaps Flora’s two occupants had been taken by surprise by the unseasonal winds; the fact remained, as the assistant lighthouse keeper could clearly see from Berens Island, they were in serious trouble. Miss Sea knew that something had to be done immediately. She couldn’t swim a stroke but this didn’t faze her from launching the lighthouse boat and rowing into the gale.

No news accounts of the day give details of what followed, the shy heroine, it seems, having declined to be interviewed by the press. But we can at least imagine how mountainous waves pounded her little boat, threatening to spill her; how hands–even those used to hard work–blistered and bled on the rough oars. How, wind and wave all about her, she fought onward. When her boat began to take on water, she could only go on, there being no way she could bail, too.

Fortune, they say, favours the brave.

She reached the overturned Flora and dragged the two men clinging to its keel into her own craft, despite their being so numb with cold that they were unable to help themselves. She then rowed safely to shore.

Making her feat all the more remarkable is the fact that it was a virtual replay of a rescue she’d made a year before, when a Seattle yachting party came to grief in these very waters.

There was no escaping the limelight this time, the Colonist calling her British Columbia’s ‘Grace Darling’ after the English heroine of fact and folklore.

Mayor C.E. Redfern, in a ceremony at city hall, presented her with the Royal Canadian Humane Association Award: “…The RCHA has unanimously resolved that Elizabeth A. Sea, of Victoria, B.C., is justly entitled to this honorary testimonial….which is hereby awarded to her for promptitude and courage in rescuing from drowning two men who were hanging to a capsized boat, Victoria, B.C., July 4, 1897.”

Miss Sea expressed surprise at the award–and continued to protect the Berens Island lightkeeper’s job by stating that she’d been visiting him when she saw the sailboat in trouble.

Elizabeth A. Sea came by her nautical skills naturally enough, her father having been a seaman and shipbuilder. A year after her second rescue she married commercial fisherman and yachtsman John Turnbull.

Berens Island light station was automated in 1965.

Other posts of interest

See also: Minnie Paterson