Sep 5 2022
Virginia V and the Mosquito Fleet
Before there were roads around the Puget Sound region, there were rivers. Before the stagecoaches, there were Salish canoes. And before the planes, the trains, and the automobiles...there was the water, and the ships that traveled upon it. In the earliest days of human habitation in what is now Washington State, the fastest way to get from place to place around the Salish Sea was by paddling a canoe, whether to find a quiet spot to fish, hunt down a whale, race for bragging rights, visit and trade with neighboring tribes, or mount a seaborne offense to help secure your way of life.
When Spanish, British and later American explorers first entered what is now known as Puget Sound, they brought with them massive, tall ships capable of carrying armies across oceans. Aboard these tall ships were small ships, like gigs and other types of rowboats, which soon became more prevalent upon the water after settlement by the first non-natives in the region. As more and more settlers took root in the area, the need for better boats led to the development of steam vessels – some with propellers, some with paddlewheels, and all designed primarily to move people and goods back and forth across the inland sea. At first, enterprising entrepreneurs obtained a boat and began ferrying folks for a small fee. As their profits grew, they built bigger and faster steamships to carry more people, food and supplies, cattle and machinery. By the 1860s, there were hundreds of steamers crisscrossing the Puget Sound, every day, all day. There were, in fact, so many ships upon the water at any given time, that an article in the Tacoma Daily Ledger on February 21, 1889, implied that when viewed from a lofty point, the fleet looked like a swarm of mosquitos skimming over the green waters of the Sound.
And the nickname stuck. No one knows for certain how many ships were considered part of the Mosquito Fleet during its boom period between the 1880s and the 1920s, but estimates range from around 700 to as high as 2,500. In the time before roads and extensive rail lines, these vessels were the threads that helped knit together our communities. Each one of those ships has a unique and fascinating story to tell, but most are lost to history. In fact, there are only two that still remain in existence today.
Numbering in the hundreds (to possibly thousands), an A-to-Z list of just some of the Mosquito Fleet ships from the HistoryLink website includes names like the Alida, Black Prince, C.C. Calkins, Dix, Elwood, Flyer, George E. Starr, Hyak, Inland Flyer, Josephine, Katahdin, L.T. Haas, Maude, Nisqually, Otter, Potlatch, Quick Step, Rosalie, State of Washington, Telegraph, Urania, Verona, West Seattle, Xanthus, Yellow Jacket, and Zephyr.
But let's begin at the beginning.
In 1836, the reliance on wind and human energy to power boats lessened when steam-powered transportation reached Puget Sound in the form of a legendary 101-foot-long vessel, the Beaver.
It was built in London for the Hudson's Bay Company as a paddle wheeler, then converted to a sailing ship to travel to the United States, then converted back to a paddle wheeler once it reached the North American west coast. Over the next several decades, the Beaver plied the Sound, carrying goods, people, and machinery. The Beaver served trading posts maintained by the Hudson's Bay Company between the Columbia River and Alaska, then belonging to Russia, and played an important role in helping maintain British control over the region.
In 1874, the HBC sold the Beaver to the British Columbia Towing and Transportation Company which used it as a towboat until 1888 – when an inebriated crew ran her aground on rocks near Vancouver, Canada. The wreck remained on the rocks until 1892 when the wake of a passing steamer finally knocked it into the water where it sank...but not before enterprising locals had stripped much of the wreck for souvenirs. If you want to see some of them,
