Thirty Hours Adrift Off West Point, Waving a Coat at Half-Mast
A passing steamboat captain spots a dismasted sloop wallowing off the Magnolia bluff; the tug Mayflower goes out and brings back a man who had run out of food, water and luck.
Capt. Duffy, of the steamer Greyhound, reported to the captain of the tug Mayflower, on landing yesterday at noon, that he had seen a sloop in a dilapidated condition beating about near West Point, with a man standing in the pit, and suggested that the tug go to his assistance.
The Mayflower immediately steamed out after him and found the sloop just off West Point. The captain succeeded in reaching the sloop with a line and towed it to the slip north of the coal bunkers.
When the tug went alongside the sloop the man was taken off and was almost too fatigued and hungry to tell what had happened to him. After being thawed out he stated that he left this port last Monday for down on a little trip, and was caught in the squall of last Tuesday. The wind carried away his sails and rudder and tossed the little sloop about so roughly that his oars were lost overboard. He was left to the mercy of the waves, and with the aid of a paddle kept from being blown ashore. He had only a small stock of provisions, which soon gave out, and he was compelled to go over thirty hours without food or water. He stated that early yesterday morning he tied his coat on the mainmast, so that it hung at half mast, a signal of distress, and says he could not have lasted much longer.
The sloop is a short, unseaworthy craft, with a big spread of canvas, and is said to be unmanageable in a strong wind. The man's escape is miraculous.
“He was compelled to go over thirty hours without food or water… The man's escape is miraculous.”
West Point is still the tip of Magnolia, now the site of Seattle's treatment plant and the Point's lighthouse, and Puget Sound spring squalls still shred small sails just as fast. In 1895 the safety net for a man thirty hours without water was whichever steamboat captain happened to look out his pilothouse window — no radio, no Coast Guard, no helicopter. The Mayflower's line to a drifting sloop was the whole rescue system.
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