The Captain's Fistfight
A maritime dispute over a scraped ship in San Francisco leads to a brawling captain seeking surgery in Seattle.
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.
Captain Blackburn returned from San Francisco on the steamer and reported a violent encounter with Captain Oliver of the ship Louisiana. Captain Oliver had gone to the office of the Grain Improvement Company to complain that Captain Blackburn had 'scraped the side' of his ship the previous night. While Oliver was complaining, Blackburn entered the office. Oliver insisted that Blackburn had called him a liar and demanded a fight. Blackburn, hearing that the ship's crew was nearby, threw off his coat and took the fight outside. Blackburn landed a punch between Oliver's eyes, and by the time they were parted, Oliver's eyes were blackened and his nose caved in. Blackburn remarked that Oliver was a gritty man, but he was glad he got the first blow. Blackburn is now in Seattle to undergo a surgical operation on his throat, an injury he sustained years ago during a mutiny on his own ship, when a sailor kicked him in the throat and broke his windpipe.
“I saw that he was determined to fight, and I had heard someone say that the 'first lick' was half the battle, so I threw off my coat and told him to come outside.”
This rowdy maritime dispute highlights the rough-and-tumble reality of 19th-century Seattle, a city then defined by the port and the extraction economy. Like the laborers in the shipyards today, the maritime workers of 1887 existed in a world where physical confrontation was often the final word in industrial disputes.
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