A Cook's Last Night in Tacoma
Injured, stranded ashore and facing the loss of his berth, a steamboat cook spends his final hours quarreling with his wife before swallowing morphine in a boarding-house room.
Tacoma, May 18 — Special — George Holland, a cook, aged 32, took a dose of morphine in his room at the Brooklyn House between 8 and 9 o'clock this morning, with suicidal intent. He died late this afternoon. He leaves a wife, who is employed in a restaurant here.
Holland was a cook on the Alaska steamer Willapa. The steamer got in yesterday morning. Holland came ashore and began drinking. Last evening, while under the influence of liquor, he went into the restaurant where his wife is employed and reproached her for not coming home. He said: "It's a wonder you would not come home once in a while." Mrs. Holland replied that she would be glad to go home with him, but that she could not do so until her work was done. The Willapa sailed on the return trip to Alaska at 10 o'clock tonight. About 9 o'clock Mr. and Mrs. Holland left the Brooklyn to go down to the steamer together. Below the fruit stand at the corner of Thirteenth and [——] streets Holland, who was still under the influence of liquor, stepped off the sidewalk and fell heavily. His ankle had been broken several years ago, and the fall strained it so he could not walk. His friends from the Brooklyn carried him back to his room in the house. The accident prevented him taking the steamer, and he went to bed with the intention of taking the Flyer early this morning and catching the Willapa at Seattle, so as not to lose his job as cook.
Roomers say that Holland upbraided his wife during a considerable portion of the night about a trivial matter. Mrs. Holland went to work at 6 o'clock this morning. At 9 o'clock Proprietor Michael met Holland in the hall. As Holland looked as though he had been drinking, Mr. Michael asked him what was the matter. Holland replied: "Look in my coat pocket and see." Mr. Michael followed him into his room, and then Holland produced from his coat pocket a little pasteboard box, such as come from drug stores, labeled "Morphine." It was nearly full of morphine powder. Holland laid himself on the bed. Physicians and Mrs. Holland were summoned, but before they arrived he was unconscious.
“"Look in my coat pocket and see." — George Holland, moments before producing a box of morphine.”
Holland's death is an early case study in the precarity of maritime work: an injured cook who feared losing his berth, drank away his shame, and then took morphine. Today the link between job loss, physical injury and suicide among isolated workers is better understood, though still too often ignored. The boarding house that sheltered him, the Brooklyn, is long gone — but the human mechanism of his despair is not.
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