The Ghost on the Wharf: A White Jacket Startles Seattle
In December 1876, a Coast Survey captain’s neatly covered engine sparked a panic among dockworkers who mistook it for a spectral figure.
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.
A Government Clerk—Captain Eliott, of the Coast Survey, is a man more remarkable for neatness than any other quality. He dresses in very plain style, keeps a tidy desk, and has his boats looking as if they were brand new from one year's end to the other. Being about to discontinue his triangulation operations for the winter, he hired a space on Crawford Harrington’s wharf for a boat shed, and placed two of his boats under it. His steam launch was too big and heavy to hoist, so he concluded to let her remain in the water, taking care to place a neat canvas jacket over the boiler and engine.
That let him out, but here begins the fun. An aged colored individual went down the wharf to go aboard the Goliah for Port Gamble last night, and caught sight of an upright figure in white standing in the stern of the skiff. He rushed up to the Bank Exchange and astonished the stove-comforters with: "Fore God, gemmen, come down on de wharf dar. Great big ghos’ down dar standin' up in the starn of a yawl boat down dar." The few bystanders who accompanied him discovered that he had got his fright from the neat white jacket that covered the engine on the launch.
This snippet captures the superstitious atmosphere of 19th-century waterfront labor, where the boundary between industrial machinery and the supernatural was thin for those working in the dark. It also highlights the presence of Black workers like the unnamed 'aged colored individual' in Seattle's early maritime economy, whose experiences are often erased from official histories but preserved here in local color pieces.
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