Rod Scher received his MEd from the University of Oregon. He is a longtime boating enthusiast and former English teacher, as well as an experienced writer and editor with multiple books and dozens of magazine articles to his credit. The former editor of Smart Computing magazine, he is also the author of Sailing by Starlight: The Remarkable Voyage of Globe Star and Leveling the Playing Field: The Democratization of Technology, and the editor/annotator of editions of Joshua Slocum's masterly nautical memoir Sailing Alone Around the World and Richard Henry Dana's classic Two Years Before the Mast.

Rod began his career teaching high school English and journalism in Oregon and California. After several years in the classroom, he left teaching to become an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in San Diego, California, where he edited a variety of humanities texts and participated in the development of computerized test preparation and textbook management products. Now semi-retired, Rod travels the country in a small motorhome with his wife, Lesley, writing and editing as the opportunity arises. When not on the road, Rod lives in Depoe Bay, Oregon.

"Combing through contemporary accounts and the official investigations conducted by local, U.S., and Canadian commissions, Scher identifies a range of cascading failures that contributed to the disaster... Readers interested in the wreck are unlikely to find a more comprehensive treatment."

"Rod Scher's Ship of Lost Souls reads like an adventure novel... The 240 pages are also peppered with interesting illustrations, photos and images from the time, along with a comprehensive index, bibliography and notes on each chapter. It's a powerful story with some positives emerging from the tragedy..."

Riveting! A stranger-than-fiction tale that memorializes the Valencia among the great lost steamships of history--and one lost in the most jaw-dropping of ways.

A fascinating story of tragedy, terror and drama that has been well researched and passionately told. Hard to put down once you start reading.

In the story of the steamship Valencia, lost off Vancouver Island in 1906, we find some of the same hubris and human error that would lead to the sinking of the Titanic six years later. With scrupulous research and a fine eye for detail, Rod Scher recreates this maritime tragedy in a compelling and highly readable way.

Ship of Lost Souls is a fascinating and highly engaging account of one of the greatest marine tragedies to strike the west coast of North America. Equally impressive is the fact that the author goes out of his way to highlight the important role that the wind and oceanographic conditions played in the tragedy. Had the vessel's captain taken into account the ship's drift associated with the strong northward-flowing, wind-driven currents known to prevail off the Pacific coast of the US and Canada in winter, the ship might have successfully entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca during the storm and the tragic loss of so many lives would have been averted.

Rod Scher's Ship of Lost Souls details the background, key people, decisions, and circumstances that led to the grounding of SS Valencia and the tragically avoidable loss of life. His book reads like an adventure novel, except that it isn't fiction. Like virtually all marine accidents, the loss of Valencia was avoidable. The weakest link in the chain of events was and continues to be the decisions of honest, hard-working, and well-experienced people. Like the Valencia, the losses and damages from the Titanic, Andrea Doria, Costa Concordia, Doña Paz, and Exxon Valdez accidents were preventable. Today's yacht and ship crews need to read this book so they can manage their decisions and avoid disaster.

A completely engrossing saga. I could not put it down! Scher combines insightful historical perspectives and weaves fascinating information on both the inventions and seafaring conventions of the time. While examining the reasons for this disaster, Scher shows how easy it is after the fact to place blame and second-guess each decision made that leads to tragedies. At turns both fascinating and heartbreaking, Rod Scher's book is a perfect addition to any sailor's library.

Through meticulous research and exacting detail, Scher builds the story of the SS Valencia and makes it come alive by putting the events and people in historical context. And he doesn't leave out the human component. He makes you care about passengers and crew--those who survived and those who didn't--and reveals both heroes and cowards, leaving it up to the readers to draw their own conclusions.

Sailing by Starlight takes what could have easily be­come one more nondescript sailing-around-the-world tale and makes it into a thoroughly researched and well-written book that's as much about problem-solving and strength of character as it is about adventure.

Rod Scher has done it again, this time with his brilliant annotation . . . . Scher's annotation reopened this classic for me. This is a careful and thoughtful work, never dry and often with a subtle twist of humor, yet always sensitive to Dana's themes. Reading this annotation brings young Dana's chronicle into sharp, poignant relief in an almost new and very exciting way.

Rod Scher is an ideally informative and amiable companion as he follows Dana on his exciting and exhausting voyage--he places Dana fully in his time and place, offering historical and cultural contexts for the writer's experiences, observations, and expressions. Scher knows how to inspire a sense of historical imagination in his readers, without forgetting who we are now. Scher can be proud of his own achievement in bringing such factual detail and humane judgment to this edition.

Publisher: Lyons Press

Pub date: 2024-11-05

Length: 256 pages