A Stanchion, a Log Raft, and Two Ships That Never Came Home
Wreckage found off Cape Flattery leads Port Townsend mariners to suspect a double collier disaster hidden in a tangle of drifting timber.
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.
Port Townsend, Jan. 9.—The stanchion found by the tug Pioneer last week, ninety miles southwest of Cape Flattery, was examined today by a former first officer of the Montserrat, who says he is positive that it did not come from that vessel, but he thinks it is from the collier Keweenaw. Shipping men unite in the opinion that the stanchion belonged to some steamer, and are positive it did not come from a sailing vessel. In the vicinity where it was found the Pioneer saw hundreds of big logs adrift that undoubtedly came from the raft lost off the Oregon coast recently. Some shipmasters advance the theory that one of the colliers became disabled and was in tow of the other, when both vessels got into the drifting logs and were wrecked and sent to the bottom. If this theory is correct, it probably accounts for the stanchion not drifting to the north of Vancouver Island.
“If this theory is correct, it probably accounts for the stanchion not drifting to the north of Vancouver Island.”
Before satellite tracking and emergency beacons, a ship’s fate could be read only in fragments: a stanchion, a drifting log raft, a name in a shipping column. The speculation around the Keweenaw and Montserrat shows how maritime communities lived with uncertainty—and how the sea kept its own records.
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