The Mischief
“Officers, Crew and Passengers on board the Mischief, in Coal Harbor, Quatsino Sound” from an article written by Andrew Smith Hallidie for the Mining and Scientific Press, January 23, 1897. Captain Foote is seated in the middle. Andrew Smith Hallidie is seated on the left wearing a beret.
The Mischief - 4:30am. Thursday, October 10, 1895
On the morning of October 10, 1895 with the first smudges of light still an hour away, the Mischief ground to a halt with a long, slow shudder. In the close and dark cabin, an aging man sat up with the alarming sensation of falling. The din of the groaning timbers was deafening. He scrambled out of his bedclothes and jumped to a floor that leaned crazily. Righting himself like a man drunk, he grabbed the ladder next to his bunk and climbed towards the deck. The ladder, a lightweight model worn from years of feet snapped. He hurtled backwards against the bunk opposite then crashed onto a mate who had been sleeping on the grimy floor. Many hands, grubby with coal dust, reached down to hoist him through the hatch. He arrived on the fog swathed deck pale, shaking, humiliated.
The Mischief, was mired in a bank of sand within the Strait of Georgia on course to Victoria, British Columbia. The ninety foot, sixty-ton steam schooner was listing starboard. Neither speedy nor commodious, the ship was carrying a cargo of coal from the regions of Nanaimo and Comox for use in the large coastal cities of Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, and San Francisco, as well as her crew of seven, the captain, mate, one sailor, one engineer, two assistants and one cook,anda small party of explorers looking to investigate British Columbia’s coal producing potential.
One of the crew patted the injured man feeling roughly for broken bones. Aside from a swelling on his forehead and some tender ribs he was not seriously hurt, merely shocked. The man, legs spread, sat down heavily on the offered camp stool and breathed through the pain that gripped his chest. He assessed the situation; this development would surely affect his return to Vancouver.
“We made a wrong reckoning and ran her into a bank”, Captain Foote growled in a voice thick with the patois of the sea. Sucking on his pipe while stroking his seal brown beard he added, “The tide’s leaving us pretty dry but she lies comfortably.” He patted the older man on the shoulder and returned to consult with his crew.
The man was Andrew Smith Hallidie from San Francisco internationally known as the father of the cable car, the urban transport that effortlessly scaled hills by gripping a wire cable installed beneath the road. At sixty-one he had been the premier wire rope manufacturer of the American West for nearly thirty years. His cables of all sizes were used in bridges, telegraph lines, elevators, and mining machinery. He had sold his business six months earlier to Washburn and Moen, the leading manufacturer of wire products in the east, so he’d taken himself on a little northerly adventure upon the Mischief to circumnavigate Vancouver Island and explore the coal that was hiding in the depths of British Columbia’s forested hills and icy lagoons. More importantly the junket would give him time to consider his next career move.
Hallidie’s once dark hair had clouded to gray but still fluffed about his head in an admirable curly mane. His beard was lush, worn California style which meant lightly manicured at best. Though his waist had thickened over the years his blue eyes radiated a vitality that these days he didn’t always feel. Ever since a bad case of the flu a few seasons back, pains occasionally rippled across his chest in a disconcerting way. His elder brothers and father had died of heart issues, so he had reason to worry but not enough to stop him from hiking around the island, thrashing through brambles and traversing the rugged terrain on the hunt for coal deposits.
A photo from the voyage shows the seven crew members and the three guests on the Mischief’s white railed deck, arranged behind the ship’s belching stack[1]. The viewer’s eye immediately picks out Captain Foote, a lithe man in his middle 30’s, hastily positioned upon a wooden crate, his foot tangled in a coil of rope, clutching his pipe, his light eyes brooding. The crew lounge upon the ship’s wheel and railings, hands dirty and gazes fierce beneath their caps. The guests, obvious by dint of civilian headwear, are Mr. Fleming, one of a pair of brother photographers from Victoria hired by Hallidie to document the trip and Mr. Speck, a settler of Quatsino Sound, who regard the camera with seriousness. Hallidie, astride a stool looks away from the camera, perhaps to hide the bruises sustained in the tumble. Grasping binoculars in hands still powerful though knobby and swollen from a lifetime of use, he looks natty despite the privations of the voyage, in a velveteen beret, woolen trousers, and waistcoat. His crisp shirt is buttoned to the throat with a macintosh, purchased for the trip, thrown on top.
Exhausted by stress of the fall, Hallidie rises from his stool and returns to the cabin. As he eases himself down the hatch he is assailed by the atmosphere; a masculine fug of ancient pipe, rotting teeth and unwashed feet. He wrinkles his nose as he squeezes painfully into his narrow bunk. With a mournful glance at his surroundings, the worn paint marked by grimy hands, the slop pail, and the filthy remains of an oilcloth that served as a rug. He covers himself with the thin blankets he bought for this trip, bunches his overcoat under his head, and tries to get comfortable.
He frets about this delay in getting to Victoria and being separated even longer from his wife Martha, niece Florence, and their little ward Andrew. His body is oddly soothed by the sounds, now audible with the boilers silenced—the rumbling voices of the crew with the occasional low laughter, the scritch of a match striking—as they wait for the tide to come in. The murmur of the water lapping against the Mischief, and wind rustling through the trees that line the edge of the untamed land are a satisfactory lullaby. While drifting to sleep he remembers the first time he visited Victoria, thirty years ago, the waters then teemed with salmon and herring, and the woods so thick with bear, elk, and deer that you could see them on shore. He muses about his father, reminded of him by the calloused, coal stained hands of the ship’s crew. He muses that he has reached the age of his father when he died. Eventually he relaxes into a sleep punctuated with vivid dreams.
