Richard Blackmer Holbrook

Richard Holbrook went to sea at thirteen, out of Plymouth, as his father had, and by twenty-three he had sailed round the world. In April 1841, nineteen and already an ordinary seaman, he shipped in the whaler Hydaspe of New Bedford, Capt. Francis Post, bound for the Pacific Ocean. She went out by the Azores and the Cape of Good Hope to the Swan River in Western Australia, chasing a boat's crew that had deserted her four hundred miles out, and then cruised for sperm whales among the islands: Pohnpei in the Carolines, Maui and Lahaina, Tahiti, Samoa and New Zealand, and north to the Northwest Coast. She came home round Cape Horn and reached New Bedford in April 1845, nearly four years out (crew list). His father had died at Manomet in January 1842, while the ship was crossing from Australia to the Carolines.

Five months later he sailed again, in the Globe of New Bedford, Capt. John C. Daggett, for the right-whale grounds of the North Pacific; the crew list has him as Richard B. Holbrooks of Plymouth, 24, light-complexioned, with brown hair (crew list). The Globe was out five years. Between the northern seasons she put in at Lahaina, and in 1849 she called at Guam and Hong Kong. She was a hard ship. At Lahaina in January 1850, homeward bound with only eight men before the mast, the crew asked to see the consul before they would loose the topsails, and Capt. Daggett had "the Cooper, Antonio, and R. Holbrooks" tied up in the rigging for it, until the consul came off and had them cast loose. On the long passage home "the ship is so deep and her bottom so bad that we get along very slow"; the meat ran short, and "starvation again stares us in the face," a shipmate wrote. More than once that voyage a sick man had died. On 7 April, "All hands got the California fever." She rounded the Horn in gales at the end of April and came into New Bedford on 22 Aug 1850 (journal). Five days later the census found him at home at Manomet: "Richard Holbrook, 27, Seaman."

These are the voyages his children grew up hearing about. He told them of China; of rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and of three months of great storms off Cape Horn; of a barnacle-laden ship off Kamchatka, where the food gave out and men died, and how the rest made the Hawaiian Islands and were taken in and cared for, and he and his captain were entertained by the King and Queen, Kamehameha III and Queen Kalama, who kept their court at Lahaina. All his life he spoke highly of Queen Emma. In the South Sea Islands his ship was boarded by cannibals, and he stood at the wheel while the crew went below for their arms; the islanders looked him over, "and nodded and smacked their lips in approval -- he was young and tender and not befouled by tobacco." He did not show fear, his daughter Mollie wrote, and they were driven off (typescript).

He caught the California fever with the rest. That autumn, by the family's account with other young men of Plymouth and Plympton who had bought shares in a vessel, he sailed for the Horn once more, and on 4 Mar 1851 he landed at San Francisco. He didn't go to the mines. He bought a sloop and, her captain, traded up and down the coast for produce to feed the crowds pouring into San Francisco, and gathered gulls' eggs on the Farallon Islands for the city's market. Then typhoid laid him low. He lay unconscious for weeks, and by the time he came round his savings of $1,000 had gone, stolen or paid out to the doctors, with his trunk and clothes; the doctor ordered him north (typescript).

He reached Puget Sound in April 1852. At Port Townsend he and Capt. Eli Hathaway took a sloop round into Penn Cove, on Whidbey Island, and landed at its head, where a Lower Skagit village, Ʒáʒop, "head of a bay," stood on the shore, with a trail running from it across the island to a lookout on the west coast (ethnohistory). There, at what is now San de Fuca, he took up 160 acres on 5 May 1852. He lived in a tent that summer and built a small log cabin in the fall. He and Hathaway, it seems, were among the first captains to load spars and piles in the cove's shallow water for San Francisco (study).

The island then had a handful of families. Isaac Ebey, who had taken its first claim, on the prairie by the west shore, in October 1850, kept a diary with his wife Rebecca, and Richard comes and goes in it as a neighbour. On 3 June 1852 "Mr Howe and Holbrooks called in"; on 12 August, with Ebey away at the legislature, Holbrook was among the neighbours at the Ebey house "all very anxious to hear the news from Mr. Ebey"; and on 5 Feb 1853 Howe and Holbrook came to see "if the indians had brought over the Island mail from Port Townsend but they had not" (diary). That winter the new Island County was made, with Coveland, beside his claim, its seat.

By the winter of 1853-54 a younger brother had come out to him. "I am stopping yet with Richard on this cove," he wrote home to their mother on 26 Jan 1854: they had "a plenty to eat and drink and have a good comfortable log house to live in"; Governor Stevens had visited the week before; nearly all December had been "very like that of May at home," with blackberries still on the bushes; and "Richard has a good farm, all good soil, nearly all cleared land, and one side of it is on the cove, which is a large and beautiful harbor" (letter). That spring Richard and Hathaway went north to Lummi Island, by Bellingham Bay, to trade with the Indians and cure and barrel salmon. He built a house and store there and stocked it with blankets, calico, beads, vermilion, fish-hooks and tobacco for the trade, his tools and guns, a silver watch, a ship's lantern, a barrel of whalemen's soap, "1 geography," "Webster's Dictionary" and a "Bible." On 27 May he and Hathaway went up the Gulf of Georgia fishing, a gale kept them out, and while they were away both their houses were broken into and emptied. "On the morning of May 28, while from home," he wrote to the acting governor, "my house was broken open and robbed, by a party of Indians, of my goods, tools, provisions, and clothing." He put the loss at $1,378.20. The claim was never paid, but when it went to Congress in 1885 the men who had known him longest swore to his character: Samuel Howe, "intimately acquainted with Mr. Holbrook for the past twenty-nine years," had "always known him as an honorable gentleman," and Hathaway thought him "a prudent and careful person" and an honorable gentleman, "and as such I believe he is esteemed by every person who knows him" (claim). They were anxious years. In November 1855, with war on the Sound, the farmers round Penn Cove built blockhouses and stockades, where their families slept for months, and in the early morning of 11 Aug 1857 raiders from the north killed Isaac Ebey at his own door (study).

In the pioneer years he was the county's treasurer, and kept its money in an old blue sugar bowl up in the china closet; when he was later offered the territorial treasurership he turned it down, "not wishing such responsibility again" (typescript). He had first heard of Harriet Low years before, from young Thomas Hastie, who stopped at his cabin to tell him of a "very handsome woman" he had met at Ebey's Landing, on her way to a husband in Olympia (letter). In December 1860 he was at Olympia, where his neighbour Capt. Thomas Coupe, then the island's member of the legislature, told him "he knew just the girl for him to marry": Harriet Phillips Low of Deer Isle, Maine, who was earning her living there with her sewing machine. He was thirty-nine, and had left a girl behind in Massachusetts whom he had meant to go back for. Harriet refused him twice in a week and rode off to her friend Mrs. Ford's near Fort Steilacoom; on the Sunday morning he came up the road with Mr. Ford, and that evening, Christmas Eve 1860, they were married in the Fords' house by a justice of the peace (notice). They went home by sailing vessel and then by canoe, six Indians paddling, through a storm; at the head of Penn Cove their neighbour Mrs. Libbey, seeing his big bandana tied over Harriet's head, called out, "Why, I thought you were an Indian woman, Mr. Holbrooks, I thought you had brought home an Indian woman after all!" That spring Harriet drove the horses while he broke a fifty-acre field (typescript). "I imagine they grew very well acquainted and became good chums in those pioneer days," their daughter wrote, and Harriet always said her happiest years were in "the old three-roomed cabin with the big willows in front."

The next winter, the first of the Civil War, Island and Snohomish counties sent him to the House of the territorial legislature at Olympia (roster). He chaired the committee on Roads and Highways, sat on the Judiciary committee, wrote the act setting the terms of the Island County commissioners' court, and brought in the memorial asking Congress to carry the mail to Coveland by steamer, since in winter it often "cannot be landed on the Island" (journal). He was home for Christmas when the House passed a first set of Union resolutions; in January it voted down, 16 to 8, a second set that pledged "support of Mr. Lincoln's administration," and he voted with the Democratic majority against it (resolutions). That autumn he gave five dollars, with his neighbours, "for the benefit of our wounded soldiers" (list).

They had five children: Nathan Gideon, who died a baby; Horace Greeley (1863); Josephine, "the idol of her father's heart," who died at four in 1870, when a terrible sickness swept the island and every family lost a child, and "her father was never the same again"; Mollie (1870); and Richard Blackmer Jr. (1872). In 1874 he built a frame house of a storey and a half on the farm. It still stands, moved a little east about 1930, at 683 N. Power Road (picture). He was not a very practical farmer, Mollie wrote, but a contented one, and a great gardener, who planted flowers all through his vegetables. He liked company and paying calls, but not parties; he read every paper that reached the island, the Coast papers and those his sister Mary sent from Massachusetts, and talked politics, history and the affairs of the day. He was a genial host and a good neighbour, and a rather severe father. An old settler remembered that when a new family came to the island, Holbrook would saddle his pinto pony and ride over to offer his help (typescript).

Late in life he sold the farm, which became the townsite of San de Fuca (waypoint), and moved across the bay to Coupeville, where he and Harriet were living in January 1890, when they witnessed their neighbour Ella Tenney's will (will). He had loved the old place, and Mollie thought it was partly for missing it that he fell ill; he lingered four years within sight of it across the water, and died at Coupeville in May 1894. His obituary said that he "was a man of absolute integrity," words his children valued more than any fortune. His portrait, and Harriet's from the family's photograph album, are at the Island County Historical Society (picture).

He was named for Richard Blackmer, his mother's first husband. The family remembered him reaching California in 1850; he landed there in March 1851.

Open questions

• Where he sailed from thirteen to nineteen, before the Hydaspe (Plymouth's fishing and coasting vessels, or its whalers).
• The vessel he went to California in, 1850-51.
• His years as county treasurer (the Island County commissioners' records).
• The Plymouth probate file of 1869 that names him "of Coveland": whose estate was it?