The Final Voyage of the James Cheston
The ship had a storied past, including a journey across the Atlantic while rudderless and half-submerged.
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 hull of the bark James Cheston was put on the beach at Port Ludlow yesterday and set fire to. She was unseaworthy and had been laid up at Port Ludlow over a year, and her owners took this method of getting the iron work out of her. She was well known on this coast, having sailed in these waters many years as a lumber carrier. She was built of oak at Baltimore, Md., in 1855. On her first voyage from Baltimore to England her captain, becoming temporarily insane, bored an auger hole in her bottom and with the crew deserted her and took to the small boats. On being picked up he reported her lost, but seaweed choked up the hole when there was only two feet of water in the hold and she drifted across the Atlantic. She was picked up in the English channel, put on the dry dock and repaired and had been sailing ever since.
“She was well known on this coast, having sailed in these waters many years as a lumber carrier.”
Shipbreaking was once a brutal, manual affair involving fire to recover metal. Today, the maritime history of Port Ludlow and the surrounding Puget Sound is preserved through archaeology rather than burning wooden hulks.
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