The Ghost of a Shipwrecked Log
A bottle washed ashore at Cape Flattery brings a message from a ship doomed by fire, while a local business turns the tragedy into a strange marketing stunt.
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.
In a bottle picked up at Cape Flattery by the Indians, and brought to Port Townsend by Captain Schofield, was found a slip of paper on which the following memorandum was written: 'Pacific Ocean. Lat. N. 47 deg. 19 min., south 133 deg., Sept. 14, 1885, 6 a.m. Ship Olympos, Captain Edwards, bound from San Francisco to Puget Sound, on fire, twenty-six souls on board. God help us. Signed: G. C. Phinney.' Referring to the above, we may state that the crew of the Olympos was picked up by the War Hawk, Captain Hine, and safely landed at Port Discovery, and that G. C. Phinney, who saved his valise with the celebrated recipe of the Swamp Angel's Rheumatic Cure, the only known sure cure for rheumatism, is alive and well, and is ready and willing to forfeit five hundred dollars to any one taking Swamp Angel's Rheumatic Cure who is not cured, although he has sold the 'recipe' to the S.A.R.C. Manufacturing Company of Seattle.
“Ship Olympos, bound from San Francisco to Puget Sound, on fire, twenty-six souls on board. God help us.”
This piece captures the transition between the age of maritime heroism and the dawn of modern commercial advertising. It is jarring to see a desperate, dying message used to hawk patent medicine, yet it serves as a reminder of how desperate 19th-century companies were to establish credibility through 'survivor' narratives.
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