brother_jonathanBrother Jonathan, 1851-1865
brother_jonathanBrother Jonathan achieved fame in its era for both celebratory and tragic reasons. As to the former,
this ship carried the official announcement to Portland that Oregon Territory had
become Oregon State.1 As to the latter, on July 30th, 1865, it hit an uncharted rock off the coast near
Crescent City and sunk with 244 passengers on board, only 19 survived.2 brother_jonathanBrother Jonathan then had the regrettable label as the deadliest shipwreck in West Coast history to
date.3
It avoided an earlier and greater disaster further up the coast, named as the brother_jonathanCommodore at the time, in which it nearly sunk with 350 passengers on board.4 For its final calamity, however, it had been repaired and renamed brother_jonathanBrother Jonathan, which, prior to the invention of the better-known Uncle Sam, refers to a fictional
character created to personify the state of the United States.5
In this despatch, Douglas refers to the brother_jonathanCommodore as an American Steamer,
whose purpose at the time, in 1858, was to disembark some 450 passengers on board, the chief part of whom [were] gold miners for the Couteau
country.
In the same year, this ship carried a contingent of Black travelers from San Francisco
to Vancouver Island, whose purpose was to determine the island's suitability for settlement
and, apparently, the reports were favourable.6
The brother_jonathanBrother Jonathan was an impressive vessel at 67 m long and 10 m wide; its paddle wheels, one each
side, were nearly 11 m in diameter and driven by an engine that had cylinders of 2
m in diameter.7 Its main saloon was 21 m long, had a dozen staterooms, and after its repairs in preparation
for use under the ownership of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the ship had a passenger capacity
of 750.8
- 1. Denis Powers, Brother Jonathan (ship), The Oregon Encyclopedia.
- 2. Ibid.
- 3. Ibid.
- 4. Lynn Middleton, Placenames of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Victoria: Elldee Publishing Company, 1969), 45.
- 5. Powers, Brother Jonathan (ship).
- 6. The SS Commodore, Parks Canada.
- 7. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 217.
- 8. Ibid.