labouchereLabouchere, 1858
This 1858 despatch reports that the HBC steamer labouchereLabouchere will start from the port of London on Thursday morning the 2nd [September]
for Vancouver Island. By 1859, it had arrived on the coast and began work as a trade
vessel, and it was a skookum craft, indeed, built of Baltic oak and teak, and, no
doubt, imposing at over 61 m in length.1 labouchereLabouchere was driven by a large paddle wheel, the engine for which could generate a respectable
180 horse power.2
According to Middleton, the ship and crew were captured at some point by the Tako
, likely Tʼaaḵu Ḵwáan, a Tlingit People subgroup; apparently, the crew were able to
talk their way out of further violence and the raiders left the ship.3 A similar instance aboard the nanaimo_packetNanaimo Packet is noted in this 1865 despatch.
Greater drama precluded the labouchereLabouchere's demise. It was refit in 1856, at considerable cost, for mail service between Vancouver
Island and San Francisco, but on its first run it ran onto a reef in a fog near San
Francisco.4 It reversed off the reef but soon flooded beyond hope, and in the scramble for the
lifeboats Captain Mouatt was forced to shoot a man who had attempted to board a lifeboat
before the women.5
The British Colonist reported that eliza_andersonEliza brought news of the total loss of the steamer labouchereLabouchere
to Victoria in April of 1866, which, the paper adds, is an announcement not so melancholy in its nature or so important to the interests of mankind
as this same ship's news that President Lincoln had been assassinated.6
- 1. Lynn Middleton, Placenames of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Victoria: Elldee Publishing Company, 1969), 120.
- 2. Ibid.
- 3. Ibid.
- 4. Ibid.
- 5. Ibid.
- 6. Singular Coincidence, British Colonist, April 20, 1866.