At 8:35 in the evening, Point Arguello told Delphy something the men on her bridge did not believe.
The radio compass station still had the destroyer to the north.
On Delphy’s chart, Point Arguello was already behind them.
Both things could not be true.
There is an appealing modern version of the Honda Point disaster in which old-fashioned sailors simply ignored a newfangled electronic instrument and drove seven destroyers onto California.
The actual record is more irritating.
Radio direction finding in 1923 was genuinely imperfect. Bearings could contain a 180-degree ambiguity. Shore installations required calibration corrections. Static and interference were real. One reciprocal bearing transmitted—or perhaps not transmitted—shortly before the wreck became disputed in the investigation itself. The men aboard Delphy therefore had reasons for caution.
They also had several bearings telling them something was wrong.
At nine o’clock, Captain Edward H. Watson ordered the squadron onto course 095.
Five minutes later, the rocks answered the question.
Fourteen ships behind one bridge
Fourteen destroyers of Destroyer Squadron Eleven left San Francisco on September 8, 1923, bound for San Diego. They were Clemson-class ships, lean four-stack vessels designed around speed and torpedo attack, and that day they were also conducting a twenty-knot engineering run along the California coast.
The formation eventually tightened into a column behind Delphy, temporary flagship of Captain Watson.
That changed the navigation problem.
One ship getting its position wrong is dangerous.
Fourteen ships using the lead ship’s movement as part of their own information is something else.
By late afternoon the weather had closed in. Visual fixes disappeared. Celestial observations were unavailable under the overcast. Delphy’s gyrocompass was out of service, and the navigators were carrying forward a dead-reckoning position from their last good visual fix near Pigeon Point, made hours earlier.
Dead reckoning is not mysterious. You begin from a known position, apply course, speed, time and estimates of wind and current, and calculate where the ship ought to be.
The troublesome word is ought.
Any error goes with you.
The station on the point
The Navy had installed a radio direction-finding station at Point Arguello specifically to help ships solve this sort of problem.
The station dated to the early twentieth century and had become part of a West Coast network of naval radio facilities. By the period of Honda Point it had direction-finding capability intended to help vessels establish their position when visibility made ordinary coastal navigation difficult.
Earlier that evening, Delphy received repeated bearings around 320 degrees true from Point Arguello.
A nearly steady bearing while the destroyers were making twenty knots should have been uncomfortable. It meant they were moving generally toward the station rather than cleanly passing it offshore.
The early bearings did not produce an obvious crisis because one of them roughly fit the dead-reckoning plot, and others were difficult to use cleanly.
Then radio traffic became crowded.
Another ship, the merchant vessel Cuba, had gone aground that morning near San Miguel Island. Communications connected with that casualty interfered with the normal flow of direction-finding traffic. Between about 6:48 and 8:35 p.m., Delphy received no new bearing from Point Arguello.
That left the bridge doing what navigators had always done.
They advanced the plot.
At 8 p.m., the flagship transmitted an official position that placed the squadron safely offshore and approaching the Santa Barbara Channel. Ships astern received that position and, reasonably enough, gave weight to it because it came from the flagship.
The wrong answer was now no longer confined to one chart table.
It had been distributed.
The reciprocal
At 8:35, a bearing arrived that seemed to confirm what Watson already believed.
According to testimony from Delphy, the station gave a reciprocal bearing of 168 degrees true after the flagship insisted it was already south of Point Arguello. That bearing would make sense if the destroyers had passed the point.
The radio-compass station later denied sending it. Its log contained no record of the transmission. Other ships had apparently recorded something resembling it. The inquiry never turned that moment into the wonderfully clean piece of evidence later storytelling would prefer.
Then came more bearings.
Around 8:39, Point Arguello again put the squadron to its northwest.
At approximately 8:58, another bearing did the same.
The court eventually cut through the argument over the equipment with unusual directness. It found nothing materially wrong with the radio compass installation and concluded that the important error was not the bearings sent to Delphy, but the judgment used in interpreting them.
The bearing was right.
The people receiving it had another explanation they trusted more.
Course zero nine five
At 9 p.m., the signal went out.
Course 095.
East.
The squadron began turning toward what its officers believed was open water leading into the Santa Barbara Channel.
The coast was hidden behind a low fog bank.
The ships immediately astern did what formation ships generally do when the leader turns.
They followed.
The second destroyer had less than a minute to decide whether there was any reason not to.
Farther back, captains had progressively more time, but they were also looking at an official flagship position that said the formation was safe. The Navy later criticized this follow-the-leader behavior, while also recognizing the operational culture that had produced it.
Five minutes after the turn, Delphy struck.
She had been making twenty knots.
Seven ships
S. P. Lee came next.
She tried to turn after the warning but struck a pinnacle rock hard enough for it to punch into one of her fire rooms. The ship came to rest listing heavily beside a steep bluff. Her crew would eventually get ashore along lines rigged between ship and land.
Young had less luck.
She ripped herself open on submerged rock and rolled onto her starboard side in roughly a minute and a half. Twenty of the disaster’s twenty-three dead came from Young.
Woodbury hit.
Nicholas hit.
Fuller hit.
Chauncey, maneuvering near the capsized Young and its men, grounded as well. Somers and Farragut touched bottom but managed to back free, while destroyers farther astern finally had enough warning to avoid the rocks altogether.
Seven ships became total wrecks.
The Navy had lost more destroyers in a few minutes of peacetime navigation than it had lost to enemy action during the First World War. The contemporary Secretary of the Navy’s report valued the lost ships at about $13 million in 1923 dollars.
The numbers are impressive.
The water was doing something much less abstract.
The upside-down hull
Most of Young’s surviving crew climbed onto the bottom of their overturned ship.
They were surrounded by surf, rocks and wreckage.
Chief Boatswain’s Mate Arthur Peterson went into the water with a line. He swam through the breaking sea toward Chauncey, roughly forty yards away according to the later narrative, and established a connection between the vessels. Around seventy men from Young were then able to work their way across to safety.
The Navy’s recommendation for decorations after the disaster records several similar acts.
Men swam lines through surf.
Others lowered themselves down ladders to pull sailors from the water between hulls and rocks.
One officer swam from his wreck to determine whether a route ashore was survivable, then went back to lead his crew across it.
This is the point where Honda Point stops being a navigation lesson.
Eight hundred officers and sailors had suddenly become shipwreck survivors on a section of coast most of them could not identify in the fog.
Some were barely dressed.
Some were injured.
Some were on ships still being dismantled by the Pacific.
The fishermen
Local people entered the story quickly.
Two fishermen, including Captain Joe Nocenti, learned of the wrecks after encountering one of the destroyers that had managed to escape grounding. Nocenti took his small boat toward Honda Point, where he found sailors from Woodbury stranded on rock and later made repeated trips removing men from Woodbury and Fuller. A later Naval Institute reconstruction puts his total at roughly 150 rescued sailors.
There was no elaborate command structure around that work.
He had a fishing boat.
People needed to come off the rocks.
So he went back and forth.
A nearby ranch family responded in much the same way. After hearing the warning sirens in the night, Mrs. James Thompson gathered blankets, coffee and provisions and headed toward the wreck site with ranch hands. Survivors reaching shore were cold enough that some eventually returned to San Diego wearing little beyond donated blankets.
The last survivor was not removed until the following afternoon.
Twenty-three men were dead.
Hundreds were not.
The distinction had a great deal to do with people who started swimming lines before anyone had finished explaining why seven destroyers were on the beach.
Watson
Captain Watson survived.
He also did something that deserves to remain in the article without being turned into redemption.
He accepted responsibility.
Naval History and Heritage Command’s biographical record says he energetically organized rescue measures after the grounding and subsequently took responsibility for the decisions leading to the disaster. His court-martial effectively ended any realistic prospect of further promotion, although he remained in naval service for several more years.
The later reconstruction of his testimony shows a man whose reasoning was not absurd.
His dead reckoning told him the squadron should already have passed Point Arguello. Unexpected set and drift had put the ships significantly farther north than believed. Radio bearings appeared inconsistent, and at least one disputed reciprocal seemed to agree with the chart. Watson believed the shore station was mistaken.
It was not.
That distinction is important because competent people rarely create catastrophes by selecting an option they know is wrong.
They select an explanation that still feels plausible after competing evidence has begun trying to kill it.
The earthquake
Honda Point has acquired another tidy explanation.
A week earlier, the Great Kantō earthquake devastated Tokyo and Yokohama. Later Navy summaries state that abnormal Pacific currents associated with the earthquake helped push the destroyers away from their expected track. A merchant ship had also grounded along the California coast earlier on September 8 after experiencing unexpected current.
I would keep that claim at arm’s length.
Contemporary and later naval accounts clearly believed abnormal currents mattered, and Watson’s defense made use of them. But the court did not need an earthquake to establish the navigational failure. Whatever produced the unexpected set, the radio bearings were already telling the flagship that its dead-reckoning position was unreliable.
That is the firmer historical ground.
Current created error.
The disaster required confidence in the error after contradictory evidence arrived.
New equipment, old judgment
The court’s response was not to declare radio direction finding infallible.
Quite the opposite.
The Bureau of Engineering stressed that radio compasses, sonic depth finders and similar equipment were useful only when properly operated and understood, and recommended continuous training in their use.
That is a more interesting institutional response than “trust technology.”
The Navy had obtained a new source of information.
Its people had not yet built the same confidence in interpreting that information that generations had built around familiar methods.
There is a natural link here to Final Vestige’s The Numbers Came Back.
Apollo 12 presents almost the inverse problem. In 1969, Mission Control temporarily lost useful telemetry and John Aaron recognized how to restore it. Honda Point had information arriving from outside the ship, but the responsible officers judged that their internal model was more credible.
One emergency needed the data back.
The other needed someone to believe it.
The wrecks became an attraction
The remains stayed visible for years.
Visitors arrived by train to see them. People collected souvenirs. The wrecks became enough of a public spectacle that, in October 1923, the Navy officer overseeing salvage recommended destroying the hulks with dynamite partly so the episode could fade from public view.
The suggestion never succeeded in making Honda Point disappear.
Surf did much of the dismantling instead. Photographs from the following year show ships already breaking into recognizable pieces—boilers, deckhouses, bows and machinery distributed along the same rocks that had stopped them.
The disaster site today lies within the boundaries of Vandenberg Space Force Base and is generally not open to casual public access. A memorial overlooks the area.
Most people will therefore encounter Honda Point the way the Navy eventually did.
From above.
Seven gray ships scattered along a coastline.
The aerial photograph looks almost like wreckage from a battle.
There was no enemy.
At 8:39 the station still had them north of the point.
At 8:58 it still had them north.
At 9:00 they turned east.
The bearing was right.
Sources & Further Reading
- U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry findings, preserved in the 1931 “Memorandum Concerning the Honda Disaster.” The most important source for the central judgment that the radio-compass system was fundamentally sound and interpretation and navigation failed instead.
- Naval History and Heritage Command, Honda Point documentary collection. Gateway to original reports, conduct memoranda, decoration recommendations, salvage correspondence, casualty lists and later Navy summaries.
- Lt. Cmdr. Richard B. Hadaway, “Course Zero Nine Five,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (1957). Detailed later reconstruction built around court material, useful for individual bearings, the disputed reciprocal, formation dynamics and rescue chronology.
- U.S. Navy, Recommendation for Medals of Honor and Lifesaving Awards, October 1923. Primary documentation of Peterson and others who carried lines through surf and removed sailors from the wrecks.
- Secretary of the Navy Annual Report, 1923. Near-contemporary official accounting of the seven lost vessels, twenty-three deaths and Navy response.
- Naval History and Heritage Command, USS S. P. Lee ship history. Recent institutional reconstruction confirming fourteen ships in the run and the five-minute interval between the course change and Delphy’s grounding.