A Historical Narrative

by Glen Harris

Dedication

To all who have gone to sea in small ships — and to those who wait ashore.

Fog Over Elliott Bay

Seattle, November 18, 1906.

The fog lay thick and wet over the harbor, a woolen shroud that blurred mastheads and muffled bells. From the wharf at Colman Dock, the small steamer Dix rocked gently against her mooring, her white hull beaded with condensation, her deckhands moving like shadows through the gray.

Henry Carstens, the chief engineer, wiped his hands on a rag and looked toward the pilothouse, where Captain Philip Mason bent over the wheel. The Dix was late. The tide was turning, and the Monticello—a larger steel-hulled steamer—was inbound from Alki Point. Carstens felt the familiar tightening in his chest before departure, that quiet pulse of risk that came with every crossing.

“Steam’s steady,” he called.

Captain Mason nodded without looking up. “Aye. Let’s clear before the fog thickens any more.”

A handful of passengers waited under the canopy—clerks, a grocer with parcels, two women wrapped in shawls. The Dix was one of the Mosquito Fleet, those quick little wooden steamers that carried mail, freight, and gossip from one Puget Sound settlement to the next. She was only eighty-nine feet long, narrow and fast, proud despite her reputation for cranky handling and thin planking.

The whistle moaned—a hollow note swallowed by fog—and the Dix eased away from the dock, paddlewheels churning a creamy wake. Seattle receded into mist, its lights diffused to pale halos above the water. The ship’s bell tolled twice, answered faintly somewhere out in the bay.

Carstens ducked below to check the boiler. Steam hissed steady through the pipes; the smell of coal oil hung thick in the air. He touched the gauge with the back of his hand—a superstition more than a test—then climbed back to the deck. Above him the fog dripped from the rigging like rain.

Part II — Crossing the Bay

The Dix nosed into open water, the gray swallowing her whole. From the pilothouse Mason could see barely the length of his own vessel. “Keep her two points east,” he murmured to the wheelsman. The compass card trembled. Somewhere out there, the Monticello would be inbound, heavy with passengers from Port Blakeley.

Down on deck, purser George H. Bridgman moved among the travelers, collecting fares with gloved fingers still numb from the cold. He tried to smile—he always did—but the fog pressed close like a wall. The bell from Duwamish Head groaned through the distance, followed by another far-off note, uncertain, like a voice lost in sleep.

“Busy day for the Sound,” said a man in a bowler hat.

“Aye,” Bridgman answered, “and too thick for comfort.”

At 7:30 p.m. the Dix was halfway across the bay, boiler humming smooth. The engineer kept a wary eye on the water gauge. The ship’s log later would note: Speed moderate. Visibility poor. Whistle sounded at regular intervals.

Up forward, Mason strained to hear. The Sound was full of whispers: the slap of waves, the beat of engines, the ghostly cry of another whistle—then, faint but growing, the iron-throated thrum of a larger vessel bearing down through the murk.

“Monticello off the starboard bow!” came the shout.

Mason pulled the whistle cord three times—danger signal—but the sound was muffled by fog and wind. He ordered the helm over. The Dix heeled hard, but she was small and light, her paddlewheel biting at the water. Out of the mist, sudden and enormous, loomed the dark flank of steel.

There was a grinding crash, the shriek of timbers giving way. The Monticello’s bow cut deep into the Dix’s port side, just aft of the pilothouse. The little steamer shuddered, lifted once, and began to list. A scream rose from the deck as crates and passengers slid toward the rail.

Carstens was thrown against the bulkhead. Steam hissed. He stumbled toward the ladder, shouting, “She’s going down!” Water gushed in a black torrent through the gash. Mason clung to the wheel a heartbeat longer, then shouted for everyone to abandon ship.

But there was no time. Within two minutes the Dix rolled onto her side, the cabin roof splitting away. Passengers flung themselves into the freezing bay; the women’s shawls spread like dark wings before they vanished. The Monticello’s crew launched lifeboats, pulling survivors from the water, but most went down with the vessel—carried under by the suction or trapped below decks.

When the last bubbles broke the surface, only wreckage remained: a drifting spar, a floating crate of apples, a single hat turning in the eddy.

Part III — The Aftermath

By midnight, the tugs Daring and Fearless had arrived from Seattle. Their searchlights swept the fog, catching fragments of wreckage glinting like wet bones. Twenty-three souls were lost, among them Captain Mason. Carstens and Bridgman survived, pulled half-frozen from the bay.

Newspapers called it “The Tragedy of Elliott Bay.” In the days that followed, carpenters and divers combed the shallows near Duwamish Head, raising pieces of the Dix’s hull. The Marine Board convened at Pier 2, questioning crew and passengers in the cold light of dawn.

Carstens told the truth as he knew it—that the fog was thick, the whistle sounded, that the Monticello appeared out of nowhere. But engineers spoke of weak timbers, of a boiler too heavy for her frame. The verdict called it an accident, “the result of misjudged courses in fog,” yet among the Mosquito Fleet men there was talk of the Dix being unlucky from the day she was launched.

Weeks later, the fog lifted clear over the city. A diver found her bell half-buried in silt, the clapper rusted still. They raised it and hung it for a time in the office of the Harbor Department, where old sailors would nod toward it and say quietly, “That one rang for the Dix.”

Part IV — Afterword

The wreck of the Dix remains one of Puget Sound’s earliest major passenger disasters. Built in 1904 by Crawford & Reid at Tacoma, she was intended for the Seattle–Alki–Port Blakeley run. On November 18, 1906, she collided with the Jeanie (not the Monticello, as early papers reported) in heavy fog off Duwamish Head. Estimates of the dead range from twenty-three to forty-five.

The tragedy marked the beginning of stricter navigation rules for the Sound’s Mosquito Fleet. Within a generation, the little wooden steamers would vanish—replaced by ferries of steel and schedule—but their echoes still drift across Elliott Bay when the foghorns call.

— Glen Harris