Jenya Anichenko speaks with Borough Manager Mason Villarma (left) and fellow Star of Bengal enthusiast Gig Decker after her talk at the Nolan Center on Oct. 14. Decker and Anichenko are part of a dive mission to explore the ship that sank in 1908. Anichenko was the keynote speaker at the center's 20th birthday party.
Jenya Anichenko just wants to know what happened.
In 1908, the Star of Bengal - an iron-sided sailing ship carrying 138 people - sank off the coast of Southeast Alaska's Coronation Island. The ship was carrying 106 Chinese, Japanese and Filipino salmon cannery workers, and 32 white crew members. The crew's survival rate was over 50%, but just nine percent of the Asian cannery workers survived.
Anichenko's talk explored possible reasons for the racial discrepancies in the survival rates, as well as ways to better understand the sinking of the Star of Bengal - a story the underwater archeologist described as "instantly cloaked in controversy." Anichenko was the keynote speaker at the Nolan Center's 20th birthday party Oct. 14.
The night opened with remarks from the center's director, Jeanie Arnold, and a subsequent land acknowledgement with representation from both Raven and Eagle clans. Borough Manager Mason Villarma and Mayor Patty Gilbert spoke afterward, crediting the positive impact the Nolan Center continues to have on the Wrangell community. Afterward, Gig Decker, a Friends of the Museum board member and part of the team that dove on the Star of Bengal, introduced the keynote speaker.
Anichenko explained that Alaska is an untapped gold mine for shipwreck researchers. She said of the 10,000 shipwrecks, only around 1,000 have been deemed "historic or significant," and just a dozen of those have been investigated. She referred to Decker as the "heartbeat" of the research into the Star of Bengal and said so many Alaska shipwreck explorations only happen because of passionate individuals like Decker.
When Anichenko first heard about the Star of Bengal, she was enthralled. Not just because of the spectacle or the controversy of the tragedy, but because of the interest in the wreck still present in Wrangell 116 years after the ship went down.
"There is a lasting sense of historical trauma here because of the racial injustice," she said. "This story still lives in people's hearts and minds."
Former Wrangell resident Ronan Rooney launched a five-part podcast series on the wreck back in 2022. Anichenko applauded Rooney for his award-winning podcast and credited him for being a knowledge base during her research.
Rooney's podcast is available at his website wrangellhistoryunlocked.com.
The underwater archeologist's research into the ship's sinking is far from over. In 2025 she plans on diving the site again. Following the sinking, there were unconfirmed reports that the crew had locked the cannery workers in the ship's hold. Anichenko believes diving into the ship's still-intact hold could confirm such reports.
Additionally, she wants historians fluent in Chinese language (as it was written in the early 20th century) to join the project. So far, historians have only been able to identify one of the cannery workers: Tsu Bong, a Chinese international. None of the names of Filipino workers (who were American internationals at the time of the ship's sinking), nor the names of any Japanese workers have been identified.
Anichenko wants the investigatory work being done in Wrangell to spark global interest in the shipwreck.
Coronation Island is about 80 miles southwest of Wrangell, off the coast of Prince of Wales Island in the outside waters.
"My hope is people who work on this project will go back to their communities and be the seed for this story wherever they are from," she said.
The archeologist closed her talk by taking audience questions. Afterward, a performance by the Wrangell dancers - the Ḵaachxana.áak'w - closed the celebrations. The festivities marked not just the Nolan Center's birthday party but also Indigenous Peoples' Day.
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