The Ill-Fated Voyage of the Steamship Mexico
A bustling Puget Sound steamer, laden with coal and passengers, runs aground in the thick fog near Nanaimo, leaving the crew and longshoremen to face a watery disaster.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
At an early hour last Tuesday morning, the steamship Mexico, Captain Huntington, arrived here from San Francisco with freight and passengers. After discharging, she proceeded to Tacoma and from there went direct to Nanaimo, B.C., to take on a cargo of coal, intending to return to Seattle in time to sail for San Francisco at 1 o'clock Friday afternoon. She did not return, and the wires being down, no tidings could be learned of her until Saturday evening at 5 o'clock, when a special dispatch announced that the Mexico was wrecked. Captain H. S. Tibbals, American pilot for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, who had turned the ship over to Captain Dan Morrison, the English pilot, when she left Port Townsend for Nanaimo, reported the ship went on Kelp Chain Reef, some miles south of Nanaimo. The ship is probably a total loss. Charles Baker, a longshoreman on the Mexico, stated: 'There were 23 longshoremen from Seattle on board, and counting the officers and crew, we had 102 persons, all told. I had only turned in about 15 minutes when the ship struck. The weather was very thick and snowy. We went on the rocks about a quarter to one o'clock Thursday morning. The concussion threw me out of my bunk. We were going about 12 knots an hour. We fired cannon, signaling for assistance, and we were taken by the Princess Louise to Victoria.'
“The weather was very thick and snowy. We went on the rocks about a quarter to one o'clock Thursday morning. The concussion threw me out of my bunk.”
Maritime travel in the Pacific Northwest has always been a precarious dance with the geography of the Sound; just as the 1887 wreck of the Mexico disrupted Seattle's crucial supply lines, modern travelers still find themselves at the mercy of the temperamental waters and ferry schedules that bind Washington cities together.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.