❖ HISTORY BACKS SEATTLE'S TRADE WITH THE ORIENT ❖

Click image to enlarge.

"Foreign trade programs for the Pacific Northwest today bear down heavily upon development of Oriental markets. Expansion of the Port of Seattle, encouragement of shorter trade routes across the Pacific, a shipment of West Coast products to Asia––these are variations of the same theme. 
      It is not a new idea. On the contrary, it is a very old one, for the Pacific Northwest's first exports went exclusively to the Orient.
      Had it not been for the Chinese mandarin's insatiable desire for fur linings for his silken garments, the Pacific Northwest might have remained unknown terrain much longer than was actually the case.
      Chinese homes were cold in winter and padded garments were the only answer to a real need. In wealthier circles, cotton wadding was scorned and fur, particularly sea otter, was the lining of fashion. Northwest America had plenty of furs and the sea-going nations of the 18th Century rushed in to profit from the trade.
      Puget Sound and its ports were unknown in that era; the two fur emporiums of the vast Oregon country, which extended far into Canada, were situated on the Columbia River and at Nootka, a now almost-forgotten cannery station on the west coast of Vancouver Island. All of the furs taken by the natives in the area tributary to Puget Sound passed into the hands of white men at one of these parts or the other.
      Furs were the only item of exchange and they were slated for export to a single destination––Canton, China. Sometimes, it is true, they were carried only as far as Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, and here they were transported on vessels bound for the mouth of the Pearl River.
      Chinese trade was surrounded by mystery and bound by strict formalities. The fur-laden ship came into the Portuguese port of Macao, picked up a pilot, and went upstream to the anchorage of Whampoa, the closet large vessels could approach the shallow harbor of the delta port. From this point, the pelts were lightened the remaining ten miles or so and deposited in warehouses in an enclosed area. The ship's crew saw nothing of this place; only officers were allowed there and their stay was limited to the trading season. A Chinese merchant acted as a go-between, disposing of the sea-otter skins, so crudely cured by Native Americans of Puget Sound and other Northwest inlets. The same merchant reloaded the vessel with teas, silks, and oriental wares destined for British ports or for those on the east coast of the US.
      Even these meager direct contacts between Puget Sound and the Orient were amazingly lacking for many years, simply because the exact location of the Strait of Juan de Fuca was unknown. It was one of those semi-mysterious bodies of water in a class with the Northwest Passage and the Strait of Anian. A Greek sailor, Juan de Fuca, was said to have seen the inlet in 1592 but upon the latter part of the 18th Century, no one had tested the merits of his story.
      The first expedition to this region for business––in other words, furs––was conducted by Capt. James Hanna, who sailed direct for Nootka from Macao in April 1785. Several other ship captains followed him to Vancouver Island in the same year, but the Strait of Juan de Fuca remained unexplored until Capt. Charles William Barkley in the Imperial Eagle, flying the Austrian flag, nosed his ship into the waters of the Sound sometime in 1878. According to the diary of his wife, who sailed with him, he was the first man to trade with Natives south of the strait. However, this did not prove a fortunate enterprise and the Natives at the mouth of either the Hoh or the Quillayute Rivers killed several of his men. 
      Capt. John Meares obtained a copy of Barkley's log and, in the summer of the following year, he too stopped at the mouth of Juan de Fuca and cast a speculative eye eastward. Meares had come from Oriental ports and his venture to the Northwest was under a cloud, so much so that he carried a Portuguese flag in case some other British sea captain challenged his right to be in these waters. Meares dispatched Robert Duffin in a longboat to investigate trading possibilities inside the sound.
      Duffin stayed out a week and may have penetrated as far as Port San Juan. In any case, Mears claimed possession of the strait for Great Britain and, while he was primarily engaged in taking on sea otter pelts, he did not overlook another possible cargo.
      All of the early explorers had noted the desirability of Douglas fir for spars and had been cutting them for their own needs during their voyages along the coast. Mears went a little farther. He is reputed to have taken aboard a load of spars to sell in China.
      Naturally wood did not compare in value with furs, so, for 25 years or more, the latter continued to be the drawing card of trading vessels plying between the Northwest and Canton.
      Knowledge of the extent of the Sound was acquired gradually. Capt. Robert Gray was the next visitor, in 1791. Then, in the following year, Capt. George Vancouver arrived and explored the region more thoroughly.
      

Click image to enlarge.
Original vintage card
from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

Meares was not the only wily fur trader who thought of carrying Washington wood to China. At the Hudson's Bay Post at Fort Vancouver, a tiny sawmill had been operating several years when, in 1833, the company conceived the idea of sending some of its output across the Pacific. This lumber was crudely sawed, for it was originally intended only for the trading post-settlement. Logs made into small booms were towed by canoes down the Columbia to the fort. Cutting was accomplished by the simple expedient of whipsawing by hand, one man standing in a pit under the log and another standing over it, working a cross-cut saw. This outfit could turn out only 3,000 board feet a day, which soon was insufficient to meet the demand.
      The Hudson's Bay Co., obtained better mill equipment from England, installed it at Vancouver and sold the first crude rig to loggers at Tumwater, where the second sawmill in the state was put into operation.
      This was the beginning of logging on Puget Sound. Another mill went in at the mouth of the Nisqually River in 1851, a third was installed at the present site of Tacoma in 1852 and in the following year Henry Yesler built his steam sawmill at Seattle. By the end of the decade, 32 sawmills were operating in Washington, 25 of them on Puget Sound.
      The circumstances which turned the pioneer farmer into a woodsman were created by the need to clear land before using it for agriculture. Almost every old settler at some time or another engaged in shaving shingles. It would have been difficult to find one who had not cut poles. Seattle's original group of families, while still at Alki Point, cut 13,000 feet of piling to provide cargo for the brig Leonesa.
      This wealth of timber and the need to remove it to provide space for homes and farms was a great factor in reviving Puget Sound's dwindled communication with the Orient.
      Early-day shipping and early-day logging on Puget Sound are inseparable since the mill companies mainly owned the vessels which transported their output. Port Gamble was a typical example. The firm of Pope & Talbot came from East Machias, ME, to San Francisco, scouting for new activities for his firm. Three years later he arrived on Puget Sound and commenced negotiations for erection of the first unit of the mill from which his company was later to ship huge cargoes.

PORT BLAKELY,
WASHINGTON TERRITORY, dated 1882.
Lumber shipping was one of the first industries
in the Puget Sound area.
Original photo from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

      Puget Sound acquired most of its famous sawmills in the early '50s, Port Gamble and Port Madison being the largest. Other lumber ports were Port Blakely, Port Discovery, Seabeck and Utsalady, their mills being mainly owned by California capital. Fleets of company lumber schooners carried away from here cargoes of singles, piling, planed lumber and boards.
      While the first shipments mainly comprised timber for the California mines, vessels soon were sailing to more distant markets.
      Isaac Parker, who came to Seattle in 1853, is credited with initiating Puget Sound's lumber trade with the Orient. He was employed to build a sawmill at Utsalady and received his pay in sawed boards. He chartered a sailing ship, the Leandras, for a voyage to China, loaded his lumber on board and sailed off with the cargo to dispose of it. After visiting Japanese ports he returned to the Sound and organized Seattle's first shipping company, for the purpose of exporting lumber and machinery to Shanghai. He arranged for the lumber to be sent to San Francisco and transferred there to ships bound for the Orient.

PORT GAMBLE MILL
Puget Sound, WA.

      
      The first direct shipment of lumber from Puget Sound to Australia went out of Port Gamble in 1854 on the bark Ella Frances. Other shipments followed to South America and to East Africa.
      The really great days of sail on Puget Sound and Grays Harbor began when a number of famous windjammers were taken off the tea route from New York by way of Cape Horn to China and were put to work carrying lumber from Northwest ports. Low freight rates, the large crews necessary to operate such vessels and the beating they took going around Cape Horn were factors that brought about this change.
      Picturesque China clippers began to show up in sawmill ports, their figureheads distinguishing them from ordinary coastal shipping. Sailors came ashore with coconuts, bananas, and sections of sugar cane, edible souvenirs of foreign shores they had so lately visited.

Four-Master leaving Port Townsend, WA.
Original photo postcard from the archives of
the Saltwater People Historical Society©

      A great fleet of schooners and barkentines built in the Pacific Northwest augmented the service performed by the deep-water veterans. A few barks and full-rigged ships also were constructed in this region, the peak of large schooner construction being reached at the turn of the century when such five-masters as the Inca, the H.K. Hall, and the George E. Billings were built at Hall Brothers yard in Port Blakely. 
      An average passage from Puget Sound to Japan required 55 to 65 days outbound and 60-70 on the home journey.
      For more than a century Puget Sound's trade with the Orient was strictly 'one-way;' the ships came back in ballast from Kobe, Hong-Kong, and Manila, unless they happened to bring a load of coolies to work as cheap construction labor. Returning from Australian ports, the lumber schooners frequently carried coal; though this was one of the Northwest's own export commodities.
      The business of transporting Chinese to our shores was inaugurated by a French ship. The Dutch and other nations soon followed, then tramp steamers and locally built vessels entered this profitable field.
      It was not until 1885, when Frazer & Co., of Yokohama chartered two vessels, the Isabel and the Artizan, for the tea trade between Tacoma and the Orient that eastbound export cargoes other than human beings were inaugurated. In the following year another British firm, Adamson Bell & Co., began transpacific steamship service to connect with the Canadian Pacific at Vancouver, continuing until 1891, when the Canadian Pacific put its own vessels on the run. From that time on, Adamson Bell cooperated out of Tacoma in conjunction with the Northern Pacific Railroad. This was the first regular service established between this area and the Orient. Then in 1898 Nippon Yusen Kaisha put its Miike Maru on the run to Seattle. 

S. S. Taiyo Maru 
Under the flag of the N.Y. K. Line

      The Spanish-American War brought other changes, the Northern Pacific's Oriental service finally being taken over by the Blue Funnel Line. Then the Boston Towboat Co, with Frank Waterhouse & Co., as agents, added several other ships to the Seattle-Orient run.

S. S. Minnesota
1904-1923
The Minnesota sailed on her first voyage
from Smith Cove to the Orient in 1905.
1919, the U.S. Navy called her into service as a 
troop vessel and renamed the Troy. She was 
sold to Germany for scrapping in 1923.
Postcard from the archives of the S.P. H. S.©

       In 1905 the Great Northern placed the two largest freighters afloat, the Minnesota and the Dakota, in service between Seattle and Yokohama. The Dakota was lost the following year, but its sister ship continued in operation until 1915. 

S.S. American Mail 
C-3 cargo liner with accommodations for 8-12 passengers. 
492' x 69.6' 
loading disp. 18,160  tons.
Cruising speed 16.5 knots. 
Serving Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Vancouver, B.C., Japan,
ina, Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, India.
J.Boyd Ellis postcard Co. from the Clinton Betz Coll.
Saltwater People Historical Society©

      Meanwhile, a number of other lines entered the field, both Japanese and American, principal among them now being the American Mail Line. Before the war at least 16 steamships companies were plying between Puget Sound and Oriental ports, carrying timber products, flour, canned salmon, paper, machinery, and apples to Asia and returning with quantities of silk and an endless assortment of smaller items––tea, bulbs, bristles, cotton waste, drugs, feathers, fireworks, canned crab, hair, and so on.
      No one can predict what the trade of the future will bring to Seattle. Those who venture their opinions say there will be more––not fewer––vessels and the variety of products exchanged will be infinite."
Lucile McDonald, Seattle journalist, author, historian. 
The Seattle Times, 4 November 1945.