During a recent trip to Alaska, Margaret Murphy took in an exhibit on a 100-year-old shipwreck at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau when a voice in her head told her, “There’s a story here.”
The exhibit concerned the Princess Sophia, a Canadian Pacific coastal liner carrying 367 human and 29 animal passengers that crashed into a reef in Alaska’s Lynn Canal during a storm on Oct. 24, 1918 and sank the next day, killing all aboard.
“I started digging a little further and found out that there’s a lot to this story that hadn’t been explored,” said Murphy, a founding member of Nanaimo’s Around Town Tellers.
Murphy said that while there are historical accounts of the nautical disaster, there are some details left to conjecture. In her telling of the story, Murphy follows the one character who saw everything: the Sophia herself.
“I’ve done a lot of storytelling, I’ve been storytelling for 20 years, but I’ve never taken an inanimate object and personified it in that way,” she said. “So I’m giving this object this sort of omniscient view. It’s the narrator for this story and so that’s quite interesting because the ship herself has the full story.”
Murphy will be presenting her take on the Princess Sophia saga at Unitarian Hall on Sunday.
“My show is called The Princess Sophia Remembered because that’s basically what storytelling is about: honouring,” she said.
Murphy’s research took her to the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria and she also read books on the sinking and her story includes the historical facts gleaned from those sources.
“The ship herself knows exactly what happened, so I’m putting history with the conjecture together and presenting the story that way,” Murphy said.
WHAT’S ON … Margaret Murphy presents The Princess Sophia Remembered at Unitarian Hall, 595 Townsite Rd., Sunday, Nov. 18 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $10, for more information, click here.
arts@nanaimobulletin.com
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