The Fishhook Baited With Human Flesh
In a Port Townsend hotel, a sailor displays the improvised wire hook that kept survivors of the wrecked whaler James Allen alive after the disaster in Bering Sea.
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. 10.—Special.—A common, ordinary piece of wire bent into the shape of a fish hook, and which was the direct means of saving twenty-two lives, is on exhibition at the Cosmopolitan hotel. It will be remembered that the whaling bark James Allen was wrecked last May in the southwestern part of Bering Sea, and the details of the disaster, loss of several men by drowning, the death of two men from starvation and the harrowing spectacle of the survivors eating the flesh of their dead comrades, is still fresh in the minds of the Port-Intelligencer readers. Some of the crew found a piece of wire, which was bent into the shape of a hook, and they summoned up energy enough to endeavor to catch a few fish. The hook was baited with human flesh. After the survivors were rescued by the cutter Bear, Master-at-Arms P. Hutton secured the hook and brought it to this city. It is a great curiosity among sailors.
“The hook was baited with human flesh.”
The James Allen disaster was a grim example of how quickly Arctic whaling could turn fatal; the hook is a relic of survival cannibalism and the stories sailors carried home to Puget Sound. It reads today as a macabre maritime artifact—part horror, part testament to human endurance.
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