The Devil's Range
A drunken seaman's terrifying hallucination on a Port Townsend stove.
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.
Hans Senderson, a seaman, had a narrow escape from being baked alive on the top of a red-hot stove this week. He is in the Marine hospital at present in a precarious condition. It appears that while the furniture and hotel utensils were being removed from the Olympic house to the Bartlett house, a rendezvous for seamen, Senderson and two companions got possession of several bottles of whisky, resulting in all three getting beastly intoxicated. A free fight ensued and Senderson was badly beaten about the face and head. A few hours later he was found near the beach in an insensible condition and removed to the Bartlett house. The floors were wet from being scrubbed, and there was no place to put the injured man except on a large kitchen range, over which a blanket had been spread. The plumber had just set the range up and it was not known at the time that a fire had been kindled. The inmates were soon startled by blood-curdling yells from the kitchen. They rushed to the scene and beheld Senderson with uplifted arms, calling upon the Deity for mercy and laboring under the hallucination that he was undergoing punishment in Hades, shouting: 'By de powers of de Almighty, good Mr. Devil, let me out of this hell and I'll never touch another drop, oh, God, have mercy on a poor unfortunate creature.' His back was blistered from head to foot, but he is now in the hospital recovering.
“By de powers of de Almighty, good Mr. Devil, let me out of this hell and I'll never touch another drop.”
Port Townsend's historic waterfront remains a testament to the rough-and-tumble era of maritime life, where boarding houses served as both refuge and crucible for itinerant workers. This story highlights the harsh reality of life for early sailors and the lack of industrial safety or social support systems at the time.
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