The Tragic Sinking of the Good Ship SS La Crescenta

Besides being a fan of local history, I’m also a maritime history buff. In this column we turn away from local history to look at an anomaly, that anomaly being the sad fate of an English oil tanker, incongruously named “La Crescenta.”

The SS La Crescenta was built in 1922 at the Haverton Hill shipyard in the north of England. She was owned by the Crescent Navigation Company and, I suppose, thus the name. As we know, our La Crescenta’s founder Benjamin Briggs made up the name, adding a “La” and an “a” to make “crescent” sound Spanish. Perhaps the Crescent Navigation Company made the same leap of linguistics as it’s unlikely the town of La Crescenta was known in England.

The SS La Crescenta was a big oil tanker, 400 feet long and 53 feet wide, powered by a steam engine. She had the classic look of an oil tanker of that era: a high bow followed by an area of low freeboard fore and aft where the oil tanks were loaded. In the very center of the ship was a high deckhouse containing the crew quarters and the navigation bridge.

The ship exhibited some instability in heavy weather right from the start. In 1925 in a moderate gale she took on water in the lower center section of the ship and, in the same conditions in 1930, the engine room was flooded and deck fittings carried away. She was described as “slow to rise” when waves came over the bow.

In 1934, she left Los Angeles Harbor and docked at the Union Oil docks at Port San Luis (today’s Avila Beach above Santa Barbara) to take on a load of fuel oil for Japan.

The ship was being stressed by the economics of the time. Her normal crew count of 41 had been reduced to 29 and she was being regularly overloaded. The captain was aware of the danger and had written to his wife that he would not allow overloading for fear of his life. But a letter from the company spelled out in no uncertain terms that he was to overload this cargo of oil or face dismissal, so the captain did as he was told.

The SS La Crescenta left port in November 1934 heavily overloaded and dangerously low in the water. On Dec. 5 she was mid-Pacific in big swells. A nearby ship exchanged radio greetings with her in the morning, but calling back that night got no response. The SS La Crescenta never arrived at Japan. One month later a ship passing through the ship’s last known position reported a two-mile wide oil slick, but no debris.

It’s assumed that the heavily loaded ship buried her bow into the face of one of those swells. Being too heavy, she simply kept going down. It would have happened in an instant with no chance for the 29 crewmembers to get out the latched doors. She would have continued nose down and probably fully intact until she hit the bottom. As she headed down, the pressure outside the cabins would have built until the bulkheads collapsed, instantly killing the terrified men inside.

A court of inquiry laid the blame squarely on the shipping company for overloading, but company officials gave the usual “I don’t recall” excuses. As often happens, they were simply fined the court costs and a small payment to the 29 families. Today the ship La Crescenta and its crew lie undiscovered thousands of feet below the Pacific.

But there is another ship seemingly named for a CV location. The USS Montrose (APA-212) was an attack transport built in 1944, named for Montrose County, Colorado. It unloaded troops in landing craft at the battle for Okinawa and participated in the Korean and Vietnam wars. It was scrapped in 1970 and Montrose, Colorado has a memorial for the ship. Nonetheless, in the 1960s when the Montrose was ported in Long Beach, crewmembers visited students at Montrose Elementary to celebrate their faux namesake.

Two ships seemingly, but not really, named for our local towns.