The Waterfront Vigilante: A Seattle Harbor Scandal
A customs official and a boatman ambushed a crew of sailors returning to shore at Point Hudson, leading to a senseless shooting that left a seaman's life hanging in the balance.
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.
On Thursday evening, George Hubbard, a Custom House boatman, went to a man on Water Street and purchased a revolver. At 11 o'clock last evening, Hubbard, in company with John Williamson, a Customs Inspector, was waiting on the beach at Point Hudson, when a boat containing four men was seen coming on shore from the Swedish bark Orakai, which arrived recently, 45 days from Tahiti. The boat was hailed and ordered ashore. The request was being complied with, and when within a few feet of the landing, before a word had been exchanged, Hubbard fired a shot at the boat, hitting Robert Smith, an able-bodied seaman, in the right foot, the ball taking an upward course and crushing the ankle bones. Williamson was somewhat astonished at this unlooked-for hostility on the part of the boatman. The wounded man made an appeal for the officers to allow them to land, when the unfortunate seaman was taken to the Union Hotel. Two physicians held a consultation yesterday and were of the opinion that the man would lose his leg. Hubbard declined to have any thing to say to the reporter regarding the affair. No arrests had been made up to a late hour yesterday.
“Williamson was somewhat astonished at this unlooked-for hostility on the part of the boatman.”
This incident of unprovoked violence by authorities against a foreign crew mirrors the ongoing friction between private security, law enforcement, and the public on Seattle's rapidly changing waterfront. Today's debates over the militarization of civic policing resonate with this 1887 account of a customs agent opening fire on unarmed sailors.
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