……….. Old Wood & Rusty Iron – by Mike Creasy
Tugboats have been a fixture on the west coast for as long as there have been engines to run them. Steam, naptha, gas and diesel, with fuel cells and hydrogen yet to come.
You’ve heard of the Beaver, the first tug on the coast in 1836 – towing sailing ships out to sea between freight trips for the Hudson’s Bay Company. A 101 foot paddlewheel steamer, she was very early steam technology, putting out about 75 hp at a working pressure of about 2 ½ psi. That’s less than the pressure in your water pipes!
The Beaver also sported a small cannon on her foredeck, useful for keeping the locals at bay while the crew were ashore on their frequent firewood expeditions to feed the inefficient boiler. The general routine was, steam for 1 day and spend the next 2 days gathering wood.
Beaver wasn’t the only armed tug in those days. When Alaska was sold to the States in 1867, they threw in a former Russian Navy gunboat – the Politkofsky. She had a battery of small cannons, plus a nice copper boiler. The paddlewheel Polly, as she was known, was converted to towboat duty in the Puget Sound area. The cannons stayed aboard.
Think of the possibilities! You could tow a square-rigger out to Cape Flattery and open fire if they didn’t pay up. (Now you know why big-city car valets are armed!!) Anyhow, the Polly ended up as a barge on the Yukon River in the early 1900s.
In 1869 the former British gunboat HMS Forward was retired and sold at auction in Victoria. With the examples of the Beaver and the Polly, it seemed reasonable to leave Forward’s cannons on board when she was sold to smooth talking chap named Pedro Viscayno.
Pedro assured Her Majesty’s men that he represented the navy of San Salvador, and that such a ship would be perfecto! And it was. Pedro sailed south and declared war on the Republic of Mexico, capturing ships and looting villages along the Mexican coast until he was tracked down and captured by an American gunboat.
The poor old Forward was burned on a sandbar, while Pedro faced Mexican justice.
Cannons on civilian ships seem to have gone out of style after this; whether because Her Majesty frowned on it or because of a new cannon registry system, we just don’t know.
The unarmed towboat industry thrived on the BC Coast, as sailing ships continued to call at Victoria and Vancouver, and the new ocean steamers needed barge-loads of coal from Nanaimo.
A number of early entrepreneurs began servicing the growing trade, competing for business with each other and with the American towboats. The Mackenzie brothers operated the 95 foot Escort # 2 – built in Oregon in 1882 – on the lower Fraser and around the Vancouver area. The Mackenzies became marine consultants to Charles Melville Hays, who was bringing the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway into competition with the CPR.
Coal baron Robert Dunsmuir recognized the opportunity, and hired marine architect George Middlemas to design a ship specifically for this new West Coast towboat trade.
The Lorne was built in Victoria by Robert Laing, while her engines and boilers were built next door at Albion Iron Works. She was state of the art; one of the first ships built for towing and nothing else. The city followed the construction with interest, and turned out for the grand occasion of the launch on June 3, 1889.
Unfortunately, a request to have the federal government’s harbour dredger clear a channel for the big tug had been lost in the bureaucracy. Lorne slid majestically down the ways and came to grinding halt in the shallow water, losing much of her copper plating in the process.
Despite this little embarrassment, Lorne’s design proved to be ideal for the west coast, and her general arrangement became the benchmark for towboat design.
Bibliography
Pacific Tugboats, Gordon Newell, Bonanza Books, 1959
SS Beaver The Ship That Saved the West, Derek Pethick, Mitchell Press, 1970
Shipwrecks off Juan de Fuca, J.A Gibbs, Binfords & Morts, 1968
Prince Ships of Northern BC, Norman Hacking, Heritage House, 1995
Westcoasters Ships That Built BC, Tom Henry, Harbour Publishing, 1998