A Timber From the Lost Collier: Wreckage of the Montserrat Comes Ashore at Cape Flattery

A piece of wreckage supposed to have come from the lost collier Montserrat was found near Neah Bay last Saturday afternoon. Capt. Thomas Nielsen, of this port, nineteen miles off Tatoosh Island, picked up a portion of wreck which was believed by several steamboatmen to bear an exact resemblance to part of the missing collier. The timber is about six feet long and several inches in diameter, painted black at the ends and white in the center. It is believed to have been one of the main stanchions which supported the deck on which a lifeboat rested. The men took the timber to Port Angeles. A number of mariners who had recently been on board of the Montserrat declared it to have come from the vessel. Capt. Charles Kalstrom, of the steamer Garrison, plying on the ferry route, saw it, and is positive it belonged to the Montserrat. He said he had frequently noticed the same manner in which similar timbers of the vessel were painted and their appearance, all of which tallied with the Montserrat. The officers, who have often been on the vessel, said yesterday at Port Angeles that they firmly believed it belonged to the Montserrat.

The remarkable feature about the timber is that it should have floated at this late day and in the Straits of Juan de Fuca and off Flattery, when it is generally believed that the vessel foundered off Cape Flattery last December, since which time there has been almost a continuous storm from the southward. Some seamen say that the Montserrat might have foundered to the southwest of the Columbia river, and notwithstanding the current and set it would not be improbable for the wreckage in three or four weeks to come up to where it was found by this vessel. Yet it would have been utterly impossible for the timber to have become separated from the vessel if she lay at the bottom of the ocean and drifted to the surface—this water at fifty fathoms is too heavy for that. The timber at the ends showed that great force had been used to wrench it away from its fastenings.