Dangerous Cape is a headland rising 66 feet (20 m) on the southern Kenai Peninsula, at the northern entrance to Port Graham near the mouth of Kachemak Bay, about 22 miles (35 km) south-west of Homer and four miles (6.5 km) north-west of the community of Port Graham, Alaska. The name translates from the Russian “Mys Opasnoy”, published by Captain Mikhail Tebenkov and first appearing in its present form in an 1883 US Coast and Geodetic Survey publication. The headland and reef consist of rocks from the Tyonek Formation, which developed during the Miocene and Oligocene epochs and forms part of the coal-bearing Kenai Group. The Tyonek Formation contains massive sandstone beds and low-grade lignitic to sub-bituminous coal seams up to 30 feet (9 m) thick.
Port Graham is an embayment extending south-west for about six miles (10 km) from Kachemak Bay. Captain Nathaniel Portlock originally named the deglaciated fjord “Grahams Harbour”. The Russians called it “English Bay”, probably because of late-18th-century mapping and visits by the Cook and Vancouver expeditions. Coal Cove, a small bight about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) wide on Port Graham’s north shore, was named “Coal Bay” by Portlock, who found coal there on July 25th 1786. It was the site of a small Russian coal-mining operation until 1867. Dangerous Cape Reef, a submerged extension of Dangerous Cape reaching 0.5 miles (0.8 km) south-west into Kachemak Bay, protects Coal Cove and marks the site of the 1868 Torrent shipwreck.
After the 1867 Alaska Purchase transferred the territory from Russia to America, the US Army dispatched batteries from the Second Artillery to protect American interests, garrisoning Sitka, Kodiak, Tongass, Wrangell, and Kenai, with detachments enforcing seal-hunting regulations on the Pribilof Islands. Battery F—approximately 125 officers and soldiers commanded by Lieutenant John McGilvray, many American Civil War veterans—sailed for Cook Inlet aboard the chartered sailing barque Torrent with orders to scout fort locations near Kachemak Bay. Under Captain Richard Carlton with a civilian crew of around 12, Torrent struck the reef off Dangerous Cape whilst attempting to enter Coal Cove and began taking on heavy seas. All property and records were lost when the vessel broke apart and sank, but all personnel escaped in the ship’s boats and were rescued two weeks later by Captain Snow on Milan and Captain Erskine on the steamer Fidelater. In 2007 divers found the ship’s remains, possibly the oldest American shipwreck in Alaskan waters. Read more here and here. Explore more of Dangerous Cape and Port Graham here: