As humans, we need to make sense of our world. A tragedy that defies explanation threatens the fabric of our understanding so we begin telling ourselves stories. We pull the threads of an event together to weave a tapestry of meaning. Within hours newspapers publish theories, the public searches for someone to blame, people’s actions are amplified so that we can imagine there is order when what we need is to sit with the discomfort of unknowing. Random tragedy is almost unbearable. So we naturally ask: Who caused this? Could it have been prevented? Who should pay? Who failed? Those are reasonable questions, but they can become more important than understanding complexity. 

Even as time passes, immediacy gives way to hindsight. We already know the ending. That can make us believe there must have been one single mistake. One wrong turn, one bad decision, one guilty person but that’s not how survivors experience the moment of tragedy. Everyone involved—the passengers, the crew, the lighthouse keepers, the telegraph operators, the rescuers, government officials, and the coastal communities—were making decisions with incomplete information. Fog. Poor charts. Weather. Exhaustion. Shock. Limited communication. Fear. Hindsight compresses these into one neat timeline. The wreck of the Valencia wasn’t neat. 

Every generation returns to the Valencia carrying different questions. Some writers are drawn to the captain and crew. Others to the rescue attempts. Others to what changed afterward. None of those perspectives are wrong. They simply reflect what mattered to the people asking the questions. Over time those threads begin to change the pattern itself. The story of the Valencia slowly becomes a story about us—what we fear, what we admire, who we blame, and what we hope would have been different had we been there ourselves.

I don't expect to untangle the Valencia into one definitive story. I don't think such a story exists.

Instead, I'm trying to return to the voices that were closest to the wreck itself—the letters, testimony, logbooks, telegrams and newspaper accounts left behind by those who lived it. Before memory settled into certainty. Before hindsight simplified what they could not yet know.

As my research has expanded outward from the wreck itself, I've become increasingly interested in the world it entered. The west coast of Vancouver Island was already alive with its own rhythms. Indigenous communities had known these waters for thousands of years. Lighthouse families tended the lights. Telegraph operators carried messages along the wire. Fishermen worked the inlets, steamers passed the headlands, and small settlements looked out toward the Pacific. The Valencia became part of that world—not separate from it.

Following those threads has led me far beyond the ship itself. Into lighthouse logbooks, government correspondence, family histories, telegraph records, weather reports, and the stories of the communities who lived along this coast long before the Valencia arrived.

Each thread helps reconstruct not only what happened, but the world in which it happened. That uncertainty isn't something I hope to remove from the story. It's something I hope readers can experience alongside the people who lived through it.