The Willard Ainsworth's Dangerous Nine-Month Cruise
A Seattle sealing schooner heads for the coast of Japan and Siberia, defying revenue cutters and maritime pressure to secure a massive catch.
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.
The sealing schooner Willard Ainsworth will leave the harbor this morning on her long and tedious cruise to the Japan coast to start on a nine months' slaughter of seals. The vessel is owned by Capt. E. Crockett, A. O. Decker, A. F. Abbott, and E. S. Abbott, all of Seattle. She is seventy-two feet long, eighteen feet beam, and carries a capacity of 90 tons. Capt. Crockett says he will either overtake the fleet that left for the Aleutian Islands or run his schooner under the water. The destination is Yokohama; from there, they will follow the migration northward to the rookeries off Copper Island, Siberia. While the voyage is long, the captain swears he won't return to Seattle unless there are at least 2,000 skins stowed in the hold. A year ago, the Ainsworth faced a tense standoff with the U.S. revenue cutter Mohican, which fired upon the schooner multiple times in Bering Sea in attempts to enforce federal restrictions on sealing.
“We haven't any liquor on board at all and won't have any, except a small supply to guard against snake bites from the sea serpents.”
This story highlights the intense, often illegal, pressure to harvest marine resources during Seattle's early maritime boom. The 'sealing difficulty' referenced eventually led to international conservation treaties, reflecting the city's long history of debating the cost of environmental exploitation versus economic gain.
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