The Ghost Ship of Puget Sound
While a steamer crew vanished into the waves, Port Townsend customs officials sat in their offices waiting for 'official notification' before launching a rescue, fueling public outrage.
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.
Collector Brooks offers the weak excuse: 'I have never been officially notified that the St. Stephen is, or has been, in want of assistance.' And, pray, from whence does Collector Brooks expect to receive such official notification? Does he expect it from the Treasury Department? Does he expect a proclamation from the President? It may almost be said that every man, woman and child on Puget Sound has known for weeks that the St. Stephen was lost in the dreadful storm of April 1. What becomes of her crew, whether any of them escaped a watery grave, or whether any relics of the good ship were washed ashore, nobody knows. Perhaps officers and crew were starving and freezing on inacceptable rocks while Collector Brooks sat in his comfortable office and waited for an official notification that the ship was in distress.
Deputy Collector Harned, who was not absent at the time, quotes the customs regulations, and blandly says that if the cutter had gone to the assistance of the St. Stephen, she 'might have interfered with the business of the tug companies.' Such an explanation is enough to make the blood of an ordinary citizen boil. When a vessel is known to be in distress, when her crew are perhaps battling for their lives against wind, wave and hunger, the revenue cutter lying idly in the harbor must not be sent to their assistance because she 'might interfere with the business of the tug companies.' It is apparent that either utter incompetence or criminal negligence reigns supreme in the Port Townsend Custom House.
“To say that the explanations offered by the Collector and his deputy are puerile and inadequate, scarcely expresses the truth. They are absurd to the point of childishness.”
This 1887 report on administrative inertia in the face of a maritime emergency echoes the modern frustration with bureaucratic 'red tape' and civic failure. Just as 19th-century citizens were outraged by the prioritization of tugboat profits over human lives, today's residents often grapple with how private interests and fragmented civic power can delay urgent, life-saving public responses.
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