The Mystery of the 'Swamp Angel' and the Ship Olympia
A century-old newspaper advertisement disguised as a news report used the haunting tale of a lost vessel to peddle a patent medicine for rheumatism.
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.
At Cape Flattery, a bottle was picked up by the Indiana and brought to Port Townsend by Captain Schofield. Inside, a slip of paper was found on which the following memoranda was written: 'Pacific Ocean, Lat. 47 deg. 19 min. north, 126 deg. west, Sept. 14, 1881, 6:30 a. m. Ship Olympia, Captain Edwards, bound from San Francisco to Puget Sound, on fire; twenty-six souls on board. God help us. (Signed) O. C. Phinney.' Referring to the above, we may state that the crew of the Olympia was picked up by the War Hawk, Captain Haines, and safely landed at Port Discovery, and that O. C. Phinney, who saved his life with the celebrated recipe of the 'Swamp Angel's Rheumatic Cure,' the only known sure cure for rheumatism in all its forms, is alive and well, and is still willing to forfeit five hundred dollars to any one taking the Swamp Angel's Rheumatic Cure, according to directions, who is not cured, although he has sold the recipe to the A. R. C. Manufacturing Company of Seattle, Washington Territory.
“Ship Olympia... on fire; twenty-six souls on board. God help us.”
This is a quintessential example of early 19th-century 'clickbait'—using a tragic ship disaster narrative to market a snake-oil remedy. It highlights how quickly regional tragedies were commodified in the unregulated advertising landscape of territorial Washington, a sharp contrast to modern truth-in-advertising laws.
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