"HARRY, THAT STUFF BLOWS UP!"

 

Steamer T. W. Lake
(ex-Annie M. Pence)

"The steamship Annie M. Pence, built at Lummi near Bellingham, had her share of bad luck while she served as part of Puget Sound's mosquito fleet for three decades. She was destroyed by fire in 1895, but the hull was salvaged and the ship was rebuilt at Ballard at the T.W. Lake Shipyard for Joshua Green and Associates and was named for the shipbuilder.
          As the T.W. Lake, she was sold to the Merchants' Transportation Company in 1905. She was modernized in 1916, fitted with a Barlow elevator, and two years later her hull was reconstructed from the boiler room forward and her wood-burning steam engines replaced by two 45-HP Fairbanks-Morse oil burners.
          Oil then was taking over as the principal fuel. The late Joshua Green told how he was convinced to switch from wood to oil as fuel for his steamers, the Athlon and Inland Flyer. In the H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Gordon Newell, the story is preserved.
          H.D. Collier, a former marine engineer and one-time secretary of the Puget Sound Chapter of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association had taken on a new job with Standard Oil Co. According to Green, Collier approached him with the idea of converting his wood-burning steamers to oil fuel, but the former master of the T.W. Lake was skeptical.
          "Harry," he said, "that stuff blows up!"
          Collier proceeded to don overalls and hook up an oil burner under the Athlon's boiler. Then he lit a match and dropped it in the tank much to Green's consternation. The match went out, thus proving that fuel oil was not explosive.
          All his long life, Capt. Green seemed a little surprised at Collier's success in convincing him, but he was not surprised that H.D. Collier went on to become president and chairman of the board of the Standard Oil Co of California.
          But back to our history of the T.W. Lake, now owned by F.H. Marvin, A.W. Sterrett, F.H. Wilhelmi, and Capt. Robert McCullough, known as Merchants' Transportation Co. Late in 1923, they scheduled the ship to carry 300 barrels of lime from Roche Harbor to Anacortes, but her bad luck returned. On the night of 5 December 1923, the veteran vessel was caught in a 72-mile-per-hour gale in Rosario Strait and foundered. She carried her entire crew of fifteen men to their deaths, including Capt. E.E. Mason and Chief Engineer Joseph Larsen. It was one of the worst disasters on record involving a ship of the Puget Sound Mosquito fleet."
          Words by James R. Warren for the Seattle Historical Society and published by the Seattle Pos-Intelligencer. 5 July 1981.