While the settlers were plowing the western land and loggers were bringing down the trees so it could be plowed, new towns were springing up and crying for lumber. Then came the little schooners and big barkentines with millions of board feet for the building of the New West. This is the dramatic picture story of those ships.
PACIFIC LUMBER SHIPS is the fourth book by the maritime writing team of Gordon Newell and Joe Williamson. Their fine picture-and-text output covers tugboats, steam freight boats, passenger liners and now the lumber ships that bucked or buckled under the southwesters, threaded the bars of the Columbia or foundered on them and made history in the Pacific ports.
And what ports they were – rough, tough sawmill outposts like Aberdeen, Tacoma, Seattle, Marshfield, Eureka, San Francisco and Honolulu. And the doughty skippers and crews who brought the tall masts in and out of harbor, who brawled with the loggers in the sawdust-floored saloons.
The names of the ships read like a roster of Western pioneers E. R. Sterling, Andy Mahoney, Henry T. Scott, Peter Helms . . . and like places on a map - Winslow, Gualala, Centralia, Fairhaven, San Pedro. The cargos they carried have a romance all their own – Jap squares, grape stakes, shingles and peeled poles – and the seas were littered with spilled deck loads.
You see it all in the hundreds of wonderful photographs that Newell and Williamson have garnered from the four corners. And you hear it all in the salty tales of this book for every lover of the sea.
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