Around the World on a Whaler: The Sea Life of Captain Richard Blackmer Holbrook Sr.

Capt. Richard Blackmer Holbrook (1821-1894) went to sea from Manomet at thirteen and died at Coupeville, on Whidbey Island, seventy-two years later, a pioneer of Penn Cove. His daughter Mollie gave his sea years one short paragraph of her typescript, and the family has carried its stories ever since: China, the two great capes, starvation off Kamchatka, a king and queen at Honolulu, cannibals in the South Seas. This thread follows those adventures into the records, to see what can be found of them, and then follows the man through the rest of his life, to understand who he was: what he lived through, what it taught him, and how he met the world.

Takeaway

One of the most remarkable passages in Mollie Frances Holbrook's typescript is a single short paragraph about her father. At thirteen, she wrote, he left home to follow the sea and made two long voyages: he visited China, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, fought three months of storms off Cape Horn, starved with his shipmates in a barnacle-laden ship off Kamchatka, was entertained by the King and Queen at Honolulu, and stood at the wheel while cannibals looked him over in the South Seas. This thread sets out to follow those adventures into the records, and to find the man who lived them.

They are there. In April 1841 Richard Blackmer Holbrook of Manomet, nineteen, signed on the New Bedford whaler Hydaspe, which went out by the Cape of Good Hope to Western Australia and the islands of the Pacific and came home round Cape Horn four years later: round the world. In 1845 he sailed again, in the Globe, for the cold right-whale grounds of the North Pacific, and in 1849 she called at Hong Kong. A shipmate's journal of the Globe's last passage survives at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and it names him. At Lahaina in January 1850, with only eight men before the mast to sail her home, the crew refused to loose the topsails until they had seen the American consul, and the captain had "the Cooper, Antonio, and R. Holbrooks" tied up in the rigging for it. Seven months later, after a passage of hunger, sickness and the captain's rages, the foul old ship came into New Bedford, and five days after that the census found Richard at home in his mother's house. "All hands," the journal says, had "got the California fever."

He went. He traded by sloop on the California coast, lost his savings to typhoid and thieves, and in 1852 made his home at the head of Penn Cove on Whidbey Island, where he lived in a tent, then a log cabin, beside a Lower Skagit village, a bachelor among half a dozen families and the Ebeys. He lost everything again in 1854, when his trading post on Lummi Island was robbed, and came back to the cove. He lived through the war years there, sat in the territorial legislature, kept the county's money in a blue sugar bowl, won Harriet Low after a week of persistent courting, planted flowers among his vegetables, rode his pinto pony to welcome every new family to the island, and was never the same after his little daughter died.

His children kept one line of his obituary above anything he might have left them: "Captain Richard B. Holbrook was a man of absolute integrity." His old partner on Lummi Island said much the same in 1881: "I have always regarded Mr. Holbrook as an honorable gentleman, and as such I believe he is esteemed by every person who knows him." The journal of 1850 shows where it began: a seaman of twenty-eight who gave his captain the same answer as his shipmate, knowing what it would cost.

The case

Mollie's paragraph

Her father's sea years take up one paragraph of her typescript, and a second for the South Seas (scan 7):

At thirteen he left home to follow the sea, and made two long voyages where he met many adventures; he visited China almost before white foreigners were allowed to enter that country; He rounded Cape of Good Hope, and for three months in great storms rounded Cape Horn; in a barnacle-laden ship off Kamchata he and the crew were reduced to starvation, some perishing. They made Honolulu and were hospitably received and cared for. My father and the Captain were entertained by the King and Queen. I recall that he spoke highly of Queen Emma.

In the South Sea Islands his ship was boarded by cannibles, and being first mate, he stood at the wheel while the crew went below to arm. The savages examined him carefully, and nodded and smacked their lips in approval -- he was young and tender and not befouled by tobacco. It must have been a harrowing experience and whatever his apprehensions may have been, I know that he did not show fear. Fortunately for him and for us they were driven off.

Further on she adds that he "followed the sea for fifteen years" and gave up "the captaincy of a large ship" for the gold rush (scan 13). She heard these stories as a child on Whidbey Island, decades after the voyages, from a father who liked to talk. Most of them can now be placed in the records: the two long voyages, round both capes; China; the starving, barnacled ship; the islands where the king kept his court. The royal welcome and the boarding in the South Seas are the family's own, and are told here as the family told them.

Manomet, 1821-1841: a shipmaster's son

He was born on 7 Aug 1821 at Manomet, the village on the shore south of Plymouth, in a house his daughter believed was built in 1690, "standing on land which has been in the family since the first land grants" (scan 7). The sea was the family's living and its grief. His father, Capt. Gideon Holbrook, was a Plymouth shipmaster of fifty-six, master in his youth of the schooner Eagle and the brigantine William; his mother, Nancy Ellis, was a mariner's widow. Her first husband, Richard Blackmer, mariner, had died young and insolvent, and she named this son for him.

There were nine children of the two marriages living when Gideon made his will in June 1841, five of them Nancy's: Gideon, Richard, Elisha, Mary and Eliphalet. "At thirteen he left home to follow the sea," Mollie wrote, and in a seafaring town in 1834 that was not unusual: a boy shipped as cook or cabin boy in a fishing schooner or coaster and learned the ropes on the way. Where Richard served his first years the records don't say, but by nineteen he was rated an ordinary seaman, the step between the green hand and the able seaman, and that April he went to New Bedford, the whaling capital of the world, and signed on for the Pacific.

1841-1845: round the world in the Hydaspe

New Bedford in 1841 was the whaling capital of the world, and its shipping agents, outfitters and boarding-house keepers lived on young men like him. J. Ross Browne, who went through the same mill the next year, heard a shipping agent call a whaler "a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy!" and an old hand warn him that "the fitters were all blood-suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains tyrants" (J. Ross Browne, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846)). A man signed the articles, often without reading them, took an advance that went to the agent, the boarding house and the outfitter for his sea chest and clothes, and owed the owners for it before the ship cleared the harbour. He was paid no wages, only a "lay," a share of whatever oil the voyage brought home (Charles Nordhoff, Whaling and Fishing (Cincinnati, 1856)).

Richard signed the Hydaspe's articles on 20 Apr 1841 as an ordinary seaman, for the 155th lay (Crew list of the ship Hydaspe of New Bedford, 1841, with the abstract of her voyage of 1841-1845). She was a ship of 313 tons, Francis Post master, and she sailed on the 23rd for the Pacific Ocean. In August she was at Fayal in the Azores, landing her first sperm oil; that October she rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and on 26 Nov 1841 she came to Geographe Bay in Western Australia, where right whales came into the bays to calve. Four hundred miles out, a boat's crew had taken a whaleboat and deserted, and the Hydaspe chased them into the Swan River, catching three. From there she sailed 144 days to Ascension, now Pohnpei, in the Caroline Islands, a high green island of beachcombers and runaway sailors, then to Maui, where she lay at Lahaina in November 1842; to Tahiti in June 1843, in the months before the French deposed its queen; back to Pohnpei; to Upolu in Samoa; north to the Northwest Coast for the summer of 1844; and from Lahaina home round Cape Horn. She came into New Bedford on 14 Apr 1845, "in 47 Months 21 days," with 850 barrels of sperm oil and 850 of whale (Wood's abstract, the log). He had gone out by one great cape and come home by the other: he had sailed round the world.

It was a hard way to see it. Browne found the forecastle "black and slimy with filth, very small, and as hot as an oven," and Melville, who sailed from Fairhaven that same year, called his "dungeon-like and dingy in the extreme," with "myriads of cockroaches, and regiments of rats" (Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (London: John Murray, 1847)). The food was salt beef and pork, hard bread and molasses-sweetened coffee, "month after month" (Francis Allyn Olmsted, Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (New York: D. Appleton, 1841)), and on Sundays duff, a boiled pudding of flour and fat. On the grounds two men stood at the mastheads all day, and when a whale was raised the boats went down and pulled for miles, six men to a boat, until the boatsteerer drove the iron in and the whale ran. "The sea was crimsoned with his blood," Browne wrote. Then came the cutting in and the trying out, the blubber boiled down in the try-pots on deck through the night, when "everything is drenched with oil. ... The biscuit you eat glistens with oil." A captain who had spent fifteen years at it told Nordhoff he could "never expect more than two or three letters from home in the course of a thirty-six or forty-eight months cruise."

He did not see his father again. Capt. Gideon made his will in June 1841, two months after the Hydaspe sailed, "to enable my wife Nancy Holbrook to bring up those of my children who may be under the age of twenty one years," naming "Richard B." among the nine, and he died at Manomet on 23 Jan 1842, when the ship was crossing from Australia to the Carolines (Will of Gideon Holbrook of Plymouth, gentleman). The news, if it reached the ship at all, came by a letter months old. Richard came home in April 1845 to a house without him.

For the four years his 155th share of the oil, at the prices of 1845 (sperm 88 cents a gallon, whale 33; Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Washington, 1878)), came to a little over two hundred dollars, about fifteen cents a day, and from it the owners took his outfit with interest at twenty-five per cent, his slops and the cash he had drawn in port. A whaleman, Hohman found, "was receiving about twenty cents per day, plus food and bunk space, at a time when the average unskilled shore worker was being paid about ninety cents per day" (Elmo Paul Hohman, The American Whaleman: A Study of Life and Labor in the Whaling Industry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1928)). Browne put it more bitterly: if a man came home from three years "with a few hundred dollars due him, he considers himself peculiarly fortunate. But how often does he return in debt or penniless!"

1845-1849: the Globe and the northern grounds

Five months at home was enough, or all the money would stretch to. On 12 Sept 1845 he signed again, in the Globe, a ship of 479 tons, twenty-one years old and newly bought from Philadelphia, John C. Daggett master. The crew list is the first record that describes him: "Richard B. Holbrooks," of Plymouth, 24, light-complexioned, with brown hair (Crew list of the ship Globe of New Bedford, 1845, with her voyage of 1845-1850). She sailed the next day for the right-whale grounds of the North Pacific, which the whalemen called the Northwest Coast and which by then ran from the Gulf of Alaska to Kamchatka, where the first bowheads had been taken in 1843 (Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Washington, 1878)).

These were cold, grey grounds. Charles Scammon, a whaling captain, wrote of "standing mast-heads in the biting cold, which is varied by storms of sleet and dismal fogs," fogs so dense "that no object can be seen much farther off than a ship's length," with horns and bells and guns fired to call the boats home (Charles M. Scammon, The Marine Mammals of the North-western Coast of North America (San Francisco: John H. Carmany, 1874)). Each summer the Globe cruised the north; each autumn and spring she came down to the Hawaiian Islands to refit and take on fruit and potatoes, and lay at Lahaina among dozens of other whalers. In October 1846 the Polynesian's column from the Port of Lahaina listed two dozen of them in ten days, and on the 25th: "Am ship Globe, Daggett, New Bedford, 13 months, 50 sperm, 1300 whale, 1300 whale this season" ("Port of Lahaina," Polynesian (Honolulu), 31 Oct 1846). In 1849 she went farther, to Guam and to Hong Kong, the China of the family's stories (Journal kept on board the ship Globe of New Bedford, on her passage from the Sandwich Islands to the United States, 1850). On the northern grounds, the crew remembered, Capt. Daggett told them they "should be on allowance on the passage home."

While they were in the north the world changed. Gold was found in California in January 1848, and by the summer the news had reached the islands. Whalemen deserted by the hundred. "Immediately after the discovery of the gold mines in California," Starbuck wrote, "desertions from the ships were numerous and often causeless, generally in such numbers as to seriously cripple the efficiency of the ship." By the end of 1849 the Globe, full at last, lay at Lahaina with "but 8 men before the mast" left to sail her home. Richard, nine years a whaleman, was one of them.

Lahaina, 18 January 1850: "I wish to see the Consul first, Sir"

On the afternoon of 18 Jan 1850 the Globe lay at anchor off Lahaina, four years and four months out of New Bedford, her hold full and her bottom foul, ready to sail for home. Capt. Daggett came off from the shore and gave the order to heave short. The men manned the windlass. Then, at the order "loose the topsails," the crew went aft in a body, the place on a ship where a seaman came only when he was called, and asked to see the American consul first. They had "but 8 men before the mast," one of them wrote that night (Journal kept on board the ship Globe of New Bedford, on her passage from the Sandwich Islands to the United States, 1850), to work a ship of 479 tons half way round the world and round Cape Horn as the southern winter came on, and they wanted the consul to make the captain ship more hands before they sailed. The law was on their side. The act of 1840 gave a crew "the fullest liberty to lay their complaints before the consul or commercial agent in any foreign port," and said they "shall in no respect be restrained or hindered therein by the master or any officer"; if the crew was "insufficient to man her," the consul was to have the ship examined (An Act supplementary to the "Act concerning consuls and vice-consuls, and for the further protection of American seamen," 20 July 1840).

Daggett ordered them forward and gave the order again. They held their ground: if the consul said so, they would get under way "as quick as possible." He stepped up to John Tripp and ordered him to loose the fore topsail. "I wish to see the Consul first Sir," Tripp answered, "and then I will." Tripp was seized up in the rigging "together with the Cooper, Antonio, and R. Holbrooks for giving the same answer." Seizing up was how a man was tied for the lash, and a punishment in itself: "The wrists were tied together and lashed to a ratline with the hands and arms extended full length above the head at such a height that the feet barely touched the deck" (Elmo Paul Hohman, The American Whaleman: A Study of Life and Labor in the Whaling Industry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1928)). Richard Holbrook, twenty-eight, nine years at sea, gave the captain the same answer as his shipmate, knowing what it would cost him.

The captain went ashore and brought off the consul. The consul had the men cast loose and the sails loosed, and told the crew that Capt. Daggett could not ship any more men at Lahaina "for the very obvious reason that there was no men there": the whalemen of the Pacific were deserting by hundreds for the gold fields of California. They got under way, a short-handed ship with a crew that had stood up to its captain, and seven months of the sea before them.

The captain never forgave it. "Damn 'em they wanted to see the Consul," he said the next day, "and they shall have no afternoon watch below." He kept a French boy who misheard him at the wheel for four hours; he told John Pierce he would "cut your back-bone out in that main rigging"; he took Tripp by the ear at the wheel and swore he would put him "ashore on some rock." Every quarrel, the journal says, ended the same way: "you wanted to see the consul God-damn you." On 6 February the captain came on the cooper, Mr Johnson, and Holbrooks talking quietly by the pumps; they separated, and Daggett shook his fist in Johnson's face: "don't let me catch at that again." Three days later he forbade his officers to speak with the part of the crew he called mutineers. In March, afraid of what the men might say against him at New Bedford, he threatened to "prosecute the whole ships company for Mutiny on the high seas." Nobody mutinied. They kept the ship, and they kept the journal.

The passage home, 1850: the Horn, hunger and the California fever

The Globe went south slowly. "The ship is so deep and her bottom so bad that we get along very slow," the journal says on 6 February: four years and more at sea had grown a beard of weed and barnacles on her hull. They crossed the line, beat up to Rarotonga, where islanders came off with fruit and stayed aboard all night and the boats brought off wood, and turned south-east for the Horn. They had left Maui with twenty-five barrels of meat, "not meat enough, for 3 meals a day," and by late March "scarcely enough for two meals." On a Sunday in April they killed the last two pigs and had a sea pie, "which went very well after having on salt junk so long" (Journal kept on board the ship Globe of New Bedford, on her passage from the Sandwich Islands to the United States, 1850).

That same Sunday, 7 April, the writer set down what the whole forecastle was thinking: "All hands got the California fever we hear of nothing but topsail schooners and jackass brigs with loads of lumber to match." They had sailed in 1845; since then, as he wrote in January, there had been "a war begun and finished a large extent of territory acquired and every body making their everlasting fortunes in California." Ships they spoke off the Horn were bound there, one 106 days out of Boston.

In the cold the captain opened the slop chest, "mittens, Comforters and trowsers," and the men, "without a shift of clothes," began to fall sick, three below by the end of April. On the 28th, in a north-west gale, they hove to, "there not being room for the old veteran to go between Cape Horn and the South Pole." Cape Horn was in sight on the 29th. Then, with the Horn behind them and the Falklands ahead, Daggett went whaling again with half a crew, heaving to at night as on the whaling grounds. "O: when will this voyage have an end," the writer wrote on 2 May, "it seems as if we were doomed to wear out an existance in this ship to atone for some horrible Sin." The meat was "very short and very bad so that it scents the whole forecastle," and "starvation again stares us in the face." Men had died on this voyage, and the captain still called a sick man a shirker: "If any man is unwell Capt Daggett says he is soldiering untill he dies and then poor fellow nobody thought he was so bad which has been the case more than once this voyage."

It went on all summer up the Atlantic: bread and water, "prisoners fare," on 16 June; the high barren island of Trindade, where two boats went in for wood through the surf; a man named Horatio seized by the throat over a lost sail needle and lashed in the mizen rigging all night; Sunday after Sunday of scraping and painting; the Fourth of July, "the 5th that we have spent in this ship." In August they spoke an English brig out of Jamaica and got half a barrel of beef, "we being out," and an American brig bound for Chagres with papers that told them President Taylor was dead. "If this breeze holds we will soon be clear of him," the writer wrote of the captain on 8 August, "and a release from Algerine slavery would be nothing compared to that day." On the 16th they heaved the old try-works overboard. On the 21st they spoke a New York pilot boat with the land thirty miles off, and on the 22nd the Globe came into New Bedford, "4800 bbls wh 100 do sp oil, 17,000 lbs bone on board" ("Whalers," Republican Herald (Providence), 28 Aug 1850).

Five days later, on 27 August, the census-taker came to the widow Nancy Holbrook's door at Manomet and wrote down her household, and among them, home, "Richard Holbrook, 27, Seaman" (1850 U.S. census, Plymouth, Massachusetts: household of Nancy Holbrook). By the autumn he was gone again, to California.

California, 1851: the sloop, the eggs and the fever

He had caught the fever with the rest of the forecastle, and he did not wait. "With other Plymouth and Plympton boys," his daughter wrote, he bought an interest in a sailing vessel, "in which they came around 'The' Horn in a rough and perilous voyage of months" (scan 13). It was his second rounding of the Horn in a year, and the hard way, westward against the gales; it may be the passage the family remembered as three months "in great storms." He landed at San Francisco on 4 Mar 1851 ("Pioneers Gone," The Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

He did not go to the mines. A seaman knew what the city needed, and "instead of mining he wisely bought a sloop and traded for produce up and down the California Coast to help feed the hordes that were crowding into San Francisco and the mines." For the first time he was master of his own vessel. Thirty miles out from the Golden Gate, on the Farallon Islands, the murres nested on the rocks by the hundred thousand, and in a city short of hens their eggs were a prize: "he gathered quantities of gulls eggs for which there was a ready market" (scan 7). He saved a thousand dollars.

Then typhoid took him. He lay unconscious for weeks, and when he came to himself, his "hard-earned savings of $1000" were gone, "what was not stolen was paid out in doctor-bills," and his trunk and clothes had been stolen too. The doctor told him to go north for his health, "so he shipped on a schooner and sailed to Puget Sound" (scan 14). He was thirty, and he had to begin again with nothing.

Penn Cove, 1852-1854: a tent, a cabin and the Ebeys

He came north in the spring of 1852, recovered but nearly penniless, and at Port Townsend he and Capt. Eli Hathaway took a sloop round into Penn Cove, the long bay that nearly cuts Whidbey Island in two. At its head, where a Lower Skagit village called Ʒáʒop, "head of a bay," stood on the shore and a trail ran over the island to a lookout on the western beach, he took up 160 acres on 5 May 1852 (Douglas Deur, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve: An Ethnohistory of Traditionally Associated Contemporary Populations (National Park Service, 2009)). He lived in a tent that summer and built a small log cabin in the fall. Across the water a doctor had laid out a town on paper, Coveland, and a few sea captains were loading spars and piles in the shallows for San Francisco; Holbrook and Hathaway, it seems, were among the first (National Park Service, Historic Resources Study, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (2005)).

"We only number six families and about 15 children at present," Rebecca Ebey wrote in February 1853. "There are 18 bachelors and youths residing on the island, but we want more families, so we can have schools and churches." He was one of the bachelors. "Coveland is beginning to improve. Vessels are beginning to load in the Cove with Spiles and square timber." The first settler, Isaac Ebey, had taken his claim on the prairie by the west shore in October 1850, and he and his wife Rebecca kept a diary in which Richard comes and goes as a neighbour. On 3 June 1852, with the onions being weeded and a schooner dropping anchor at Port Townsend, "Mr Howe and Holbrooks called in." In August, with Ebey away at the legislature, "Samuel Crockett, Mr. Smith Mr. Howe and Mr. Holbrook were all here in the forenoon. All very anxious to hear the news from Mr. Ebey." In February 1853 Howe and Holbrook walked over to see "if the indians had brought over the Island mail from Port Townsend but they had not" ("Diary of Colonel and Mrs. I. N. Ebey," ed. Victor J. Farrar, Washington Historical Quarterly 7-8). Letters came by canoe, when they came at all. That winter the territory made Island County, with Coveland its seat.

By the next winter a younger brother had come out to him, and on 26 Jan 1854 he wrote home to their mother at Manomet (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)):

I am stopping yet with Richard on this cove, That we are all well and have a plenty to eat and drink and have a good comfortable log house to live in. ... The best soil I have seen is on this (Whidby) Island; it is considered the best in the Territory. 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. The climate here is much milder than in Massachusetts, nearly all December the weather was very like that of May at home, and I could pick as many blackberries as I wanted from the bushes.

Governor Stevens had come by the week before, talking of the railroad that would one day end on the Sound.

Lummi Island, 1854: the trading post

That spring Richard tried his hand at trade. He and Capt. Hathaway went north to Lummi Island, by Bellingham Bay under the snows of Mount Baker, where the Lummi and the northern canoes came and went, to trade with the Indians and to cure and barrel salmon. Each built a house and store, near neighbours, across the water from the little settlement at Whatcom. His store held what a trader needed: forty blankets, 252 yards of sheeting and 222 of calico, beads, vermilion, four gross of fish-hooks, shirts and pants by the dozen, and 120 pounds of tobacco. It held his tools, a rifle, a musket, a pair of pistols, a sword and a bowie knife. And it held the man himself: a pilot-cloth coat and two frock coats, a feather bed, a silver watch, a ship's lantern, a barrel of oil soap, "a peculiar kind of soap, used principally by whalemen," and three books, "1 geography," "Webster's Dictionary," and a "Bible" (Indian depredation claim of Richard B. Holbrook, Lummi Island, Washington Territory, 1854).

On the morning of 27 May he and Hathaway made their houses fast and went "up the Gulf of Georgia a short distance upon a fishing cruise, expecting to be at home again that same evening, but it came on to blow so hard" that they could not get back for two days. They came home to find "that both of our homes had been broken into and that we were robbed of pretty near the entire contents of both houses," the thieves' tracks "clearly discernible all about the premises." Richard wrote to the acting governor from Bellingham Bay on 1 June: "On the morning of May 28, while from home, my house was broken open and robbed, by a party of Indians, of my goods, tools, provisions, and clothing." The local justice added that "through the present disaster he will be deprived of this season's work." He put the loss at $1,378.20. He did not go after the Indians to get it back, and swore so: he filed his account with the governor and trusted that "in the course of time he would be ultimately indemnified." Thirty years later the claim reached Congress, with the sworn word of the men who had known him longest, and it was never paid. This is the family's trading post that "was burned in an Indian war." After it he farmed at Penn Cove for the rest of his life.

The war years, 1855-1857: blockhouses and the night Ebey died

It was a small world and, by the settlers' own memory, a warm one. Food was dear in 1852-53, flour forty dollars a barrel when it could be had at all, and the island lived on venison, salmon and potatoes. Families jogged six or seven miles in a farm wagon to spend a Sunday with a neighbour. "Hospitality was unbounded and every man was the close friend and comrade of his neighbor," Flora Engle remembered. "The afflictions of one household became a common cause of sorrow and the good fortune of a neighbor brought rejoicing to all." When a candidate came to the island to speak, "everybody attended to hear him exalt his own party and abuse the opposing party" (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)).

It was also a frontier at the edge of a war. The treaties of 1854-55 took most of the Sound country from its peoples, and the northern canoes of the Haida and the Tlingit came down each summer to work and trade, and sometimes to raid. In May 1855 Winfield Ebey wrote in his diary that "two men were robbed on the Island. Mr. Libby and a fellow called Paddy Dogli. The Indians robbed the former [man's] house and then shot at him but did not hit him"; Libbey was Richard's neighbour at the head of the cove (Douglas Deur, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve: An Ethnohistory of Traditionally Associated Contemporary Populations (National Park Service, 2009)). That autumn fighting broke out east of the Sound, and in early November the farmers round Penn Cove built blockhouses and log stockades, where for months the families slept by night and went home by day to work (National Park Service, Historic Resources Study, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (2005)). Many of the island's men served in the volunteer companies under Ebey and Samuel Howe; Richard's name is not on their rolls.

In November 1856 the warship Massachusetts fired on a camp of northern people at Port Gamble and killed their chief, and the island knew what would follow. "Much fears are entertained by us," the settlers petitioned in December, "that they will seek revenge for their loss and defeat on the defenseless exposed and frontier settlement of this Island." The commander at Fort Steilacoom agreed: "Whidbey's Island is in the most defenseless condition of any settlements on the sound." In the spring of 1857 the rumours came down the Sound of canoes in numbers, and the Lower Skagit of Penn Cove left their villages for the mainland: "In the spring of 1857 the Penn Cove encampment was abandoned altogether." Winfield Ebey wrote on 10 May: "Numerous reports are constantly in circulation relative [to] them coming down in numbers. God only knows what is to become of us. I cannot believe we are to be murdered by them but we may" (Douglas Deur, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve: An Ethnohistory of Traditionally Associated Contemporary Populations (National Park Service, 2009)).

They came in August. After the canoes had camped on the island for days, a settler, asked whether Isaac Ebey, at work in his field, was a chief, answered carelessly that he was "a hyas tyee," a big chief. About one o'clock in the night of 11 August the Ebeys' dog woke the house. "We were entirely defenseless, there being no fire-arms of any description in the house," wrote the U.S. marshal, George Corliss, who was a guest there that night. Ebey went out onto the porch; there were two shots; "Here he was seen by his wife with one hand to his head. She cried out to him to jump into the house through the window, but he did not seem to hear or notice her" ("Letter from Marshal Corliss," Pioneer and Democrat (Olympia), 21 Aug 1857). "What do you want?" he asked, and the answer came in the trade jargon: "We want your head!" He fell dead at his own door. His wife and children escaped through a window into the woods; the neighbours, roused "by means of friendly Indians," ran for the beach with their guns, too late: "the Indians were aboard their canoes and so far out in the fog we could not see them," Robert Hill remembered. "None of us at that time knew what had been Colonel Ebey's fate" (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)). They had taken his head. The killers were Tlingit, by the word that reached the governor at Victoria from Fort Simpson, avenging the chief killed at Port Gamble.

"Three long weary torturing days," Winfield Ebey wrote when he could write at all. "My Brother Isaac is dead. My noble high minded brother is no more. Shot and beheaded at his own door by the murderous Northern Indians." The territory sent a case of muskets and two thousand caps by steamer, soldiers were put into the blockhouse at Point Partridge, and families went back behind the stockades. Some left the island altogether. The settlers' anger had its own grim sequel: for years afterwards, Hill wrote, "no northern Indian ever set foot on Whidby Island and lived to return to his native northern home."

Richard Holbrook had known Ebey since his first weeks on the island; the diary has him at the Ebey house waiting on news of him in 1852. He was a bachelor of thirty-six, with a cabin at the head of the cove a short walk from the western shore the northern canoes passed, and three years before he had come home to a ransacked house himself. What he felt the records don't say. That his neighbours slept behind log walls with their guns, and that he stayed, they do.

Christmas Eve, 1860: the persistent Captain Holbrook

He had first heard of her years before. Young Thomas Hastie, going home past the cabin one day, stopped to tell him about a woman he had met at Ebey's Landing, storm-bound on her way to Olympia, "a very handsome woman whom he would have made every effort to marry, only that she had a husband in Olympia and was on her way to join him" (Told by the Pioneers: Tales of Frontier Life, vol. 1 (Washington Pioneer Project, 1937)). She was Harriet Phillips Low of Deer Isle, Maine. Her marriage went badly, and in January 1860 the legislature dissolved it; she stayed on at Olympia, earning her living with her sewing machine.

By that December Richard had been eight years on the island and had told his neighbours he meant to bring home a wife. At Olympia his neighbour Capt. Thomas Coupe, then the island's member of the legislature, told him "he knew just the girl for him to marry," and took him to call. He called again alone the next day, formal and pleasant, and the day after that he proposed and was refused. He proposed again on the Friday and was refused again, and on the Saturday Harriet saddled her mare and rode off to her friend Mrs. Ford's near Fort Steilacoom. In the morning she looked out of the window and saw Mr. Ford coming up the road, "and with him was the persistent Captain Holbrook!" She gave up. "I like to remember his persistance," Mollie wrote, "although he was past his first youth and had left a girl behind in Massachusetts that he had intended to return for" (scan 109). The Steilacoom paper printed it three days later: "In Steilacoom, same time [Monday evening, Dec. 24th], by same, at the residence of Mr. G. Ford, Mr. R. B. Holbrook, of Whidby's Island, to Miss Harriet P. Low, formerly of Maine" ("Married," Puget Sound Herald (Steilacoom), 27 Dec 1860). It was Christmas Eve.

Olympia, 1861-1862: a seat in the House

The next winter, the first of the Civil War, Island and Snohomish counties sent him to the House at Olympia for the ninth session (Territorial Assembly 1854-1887: members of the Washington territorial legislature (Washington State Library, 1989)). The journal shows a working member. He sat on the Judiciary committee and chaired Roads and Highways, signing its reports on some twenty road and ferry charters; he wrote the act that set the terms of Island County's commissioners' court and amended his neighbour Coupe's ferry charter between Port Townsend and the island. His own memorial to Congress asked for the mail to be brought to Coveland by steamer: it came "in small sailing crafts from Port Townsend," and in winter "the weather is frequently so inclement that the mail cannot be landed on the Island by that conveyance, and the people are deprived of its benefits" (Journal of the House of Representatives of Washington Territory, ninth session, 1861-62, with the session laws). He had been one of the men who walked to the Ebeys' in 1853 to see whether the canoes had brought it.

He went home for Christmas, a newly married man, "excused from further attendance upon the House until after the holidays," and while he was away, on 2 Jan 1862, the House passed a first set of resolutions "relative to the state of the Union," which the Council then put off to April. On the last day for new business a Republican member brought in a second set. Its last article pledged that Washington Territory "will not be found wanting in devotion to the Union, in fidelity to the Laws and Constitution, or in due respect for, and support of Mr. Lincoln's administration," and the House voted it down, 16 to 8, with "Holbrook" among the sixteen ("The Union Resolutions Rejected by the Legislative Assembly of Washington Territory," Washington Standard (Olympia), 22 Mar 1862). The territory was Democratic country: its first governor, later its delegate in Congress, Isaac Stevens, had run the Breckinridge campaign in 1860. The papers fought over the vote all spring. The Republican Standard held that "support of the present Administration is the true test of loyalty to the Government," while granting, "We have no idea that all who voted against them sympathized with the peace movement"; the Democratic papers answered that the resolutions were partisan, and that with the clause on Mr. Lincoln's administration qualified they would have "passed without a dissenting voice." A year later, after Stevens had been killed leading Union troops at Chantilly, the next legislature passed "very strong resolutions of support to the government in suppressing the rebellion."

His daughter called him "partizan and conservative," and he voted, it seems, as a Democrat among Democrats: not against the Union, which the House had already resolved to support, but against putting a Democratic House's name to a Republican president's administration. His own feeling for the Union shows that autumn, when the citizens of Whidby Island took up a subscription "for the benefit of our wounded soldiers" for the Sanitary Commission, and "R B Holbrook" gave five dollars with his neighbours (Whidby Island's subscription for the wounded soldiers, Puget Sound Herald (Steilacoom), 6 Nov 1862). The next year he named his first son Horace Greeley, for the most famous Republican editor in America.

The farm at San de Fuca, 1861-1889: flowers among the vegetables

They came home from the wedding by sailing vessel and then by canoe, six Indians paddling through a storm, with his big bandana tied over Harriet's head, and at the head of the cove their neighbour Mrs. Libbey came down to the water calling, "Why, I thought you were an Indian woman, Mr. Holbrooks, I thought you had brought home an Indian woman after all!" That first spring Harriet drove the horses while he broke a fifty-acre field, land "that had never before in all the ages it had lain there, been cultivated nor planted" (Mollie, scan 110). "I imagine they grew very well acquainted and became good chums in those pioneer days," their daughter wrote. He had to be away at times, and "he thought it wise as a safeguard for mother, to frighten the Indians," so he told them that his wife "was very strong and vicious, and had killed an Indian up the Sound." Harriet, who came to love her Indian neighbours, said all her life that her coziest and happiest years were in "the old three-roomed cabin with the big willows in front and the fine view from the little windows" (Told by the Pioneers: Tales of Frontier Life, vol. 1 (Washington Pioneer Project, 1937)).

The children came: Nathan Gideon, named for both grandfathers, who died a baby; Horace Greeley, born in 1863 and named for the great New York editor; Josephine; Mollie, in December 1870; and Richard Blackmer, in 1872. Josephine, Mollie wrote, was "dainty, good and loving, the idol of her father's heart." In 1870, when she was four, "a terrible scourge swept over the Island, every family lost one or more children, and this girl was taken. Her father was never the same again" (scan 111). The censuses keep the household as it was: "R. B. Holbrook, 49," with Harriet, Horace and a baby Mollie in April 1871, counted by his old partner Eli Hathaway; a farmer of 58 in 1880, with Horace, "Molly F., 9, at school," and little Richard (1871 Washington Territory census, Island County: R. B. Holbrook household, 1880 U.S. census, Whidby and Camano Islands, Island County, Washington: R. B. Holebrook household).

He was not, his daughter thought, "a very practical farmer, but a contented one, and a great gardener. He loved flowers and planted them through his vegetable gardens." In 1874 he built the family a frame house of a storey and a half, and it still stands, moved a little east about 1930, at 683 North Power Road (National Park Service, Historic Resources Study, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (2005)). He kept the county's money, in his years as its treasurer, in "an old blue sugar-bowl up in the china-closet," and when the territorial treasurership was offered him, Mollie remembered as a child, he refused it, "not wishing such responsibility again."

He read everything that came to the island, "the leading 'Coast' papers, and those sent by his sister Mary from Massachusetts," and he talked: politics, history, the affairs of the day. "He was a genial host, a man of easy manners in any company, and a keen reader of character, quick in his likes and dislikes, and not slow in expressing them. He was a good neighbor. He was rather a severe father, being so few generations from Pilgrim ancestry." He liked company and paying calls, but not parties; "We were not allowed to give parties." Years later a man who had lived on the island in the early days, meeting Horace somewhere down the Sound without knowing who he was, told him that "Old Holbrook was a great old fellow": when a new family came to the island, "Holbrook would saddle his pinto pony and ride away to offer his assistance to them" (scan 8, scan 14).

Across the bay, 1889-1894

He had tried to sell the farm once before, in 1878: "160 acres of prairie land, besides a forty acre timber or wood lot ... on the east side of Penn's Cove," with "a water frontage of half a mile, and a good house, two barns, a well and spring, and the title is United States patent" ("Chance for Somebody," Daily Intelligencer (Seattle), 28 Sept 1878). It did not sell, and he stayed, and in August 1882 an island correspondent of the Seattle paper noted that "Captain Holbrook in Penn's Cove has a fine piece almost ready for the machine." At last the farm went for a townsite, San de Fuca, named in 1889 and meant to be the eastern end of a canal across the island that was never dug ("San De Fuca," Revisiting Washington (Washington Trust for Historic Preservation)). He and Harriet moved across the cove to Coupeville; they were living there in January 1890, when they witnessed their neighbour Ella Tenney's will (Will of Ella A. Tenney of Coupeville, Island County, Washington). Mollie believed that leaving the place he had cleared and planted was part of what broke his health: he "became ill, lingered for four years across the beautiful bay from his old home," and died at Coupeville in May 1894, at seventy-two ("Pioneers Gone," The Seattle Post-Intelligencer). His children kept one line of his obituary above anything he might have left them: "Captain Richard B. Holbrook was a man of absolute integrity."

Who he was

He was a son of the sea before he ever shipped. His father was a shipmaster, his mother had been a mariner's widow before she was a shipmaster's wife, and he carried the name of her first husband, a mariner who died young. At thirteen he went where Manomet boys went, and for the next sixteen years the sea was the whole of his life.

Nine of those years he spent before the mast in two whalers, and the records let us see what that meant: a bunk in a dark, wet forecastle, salt meat and hard bread, four years between letters, and at the end a share of the oil worth about fifteen cents a day. He came home from the first voyage to find his father dead, and he went out again. Whatever romance there was in it was in the places, Fayal and the Swan River, the Carolines and Tahiti, the fogs off Kamchatka, Lahaina's anchorage under the mountains, Hong Kong, and those were what he told his children about, with the adventures and the kings and queens. The hunger and the beatings he seems to have kept to himself; Mollie mentions only the starving ship off Kamchatka.

The one moment we can watch him is at Lahaina, on 18 Jan 1850. He was twenty-eight, an old hand with nine years of whaling behind him. The ship was undermanned and the men had the law on their side. When John Tripp told the captain he would see the consul first, Richard gave the same answer and was tied up in the rigging beside him. The journal records no blow and no oath from him; the next record of him is talking quietly at the pumps with the cooper who had hung beside him, until the captain shook his fist and parted them. Forty-four years later his obituary called him "a man of absolute integrity," and his daughter wrote that he was "a keen reader of character, quick in his likes and dislikes, and not slow in expressing them." That is the same man.

What a man owns tells something of him, and the list he made of what the Indians took from his store on Lummi Island in 1854 is the nearest thing to his own room we have: trade goods and tools, a rifle and pistols and a sword, a pilot-cloth coat and two frock coats, a silver watch, a ship's lantern and a barrel of whalemen's soap, and three books, a geography, Webster's dictionary and a Bible. He did not go after the thieves; he swore that he "never attempted to coerce or intimidate in any way any tribe or band of Indians," and waited thirty years on the government instead. When the claim went to Congress the men who had known him longest swore to his character. Henry Roeder of Whatcom had "always known him to be an honorable and much respected citizen." Samuel Howe, his friend since 1852, had "always known him as an honorable gentleman, therefore incapable of rendering or attempting to collect an unjust account." Eli Hathaway, his partner, called him "a prudent and careful person, for he was particular in keeping a close watch upon his property generally," and an honorable gentleman, "and as such I believe he is esteemed by every person who knows him" (Indian depredation claim of Richard B. Holbrook, Lummi Island, Washington Territory, 1854).

The sea taught him to endure, and it taught him to start again. He lost his savings and his health in California at thirty, came north with nothing, and lived in a tent. He was patient, and he was persistent: past his first youth, with a girl left behind in Massachusetts he had meant to go back for, he asked Harriet Low to marry him twice in one week and followed her to Steilacoom to ask a third time. What he made at Penn Cove looks like everything the forecastle was not: his own land, cleared and ploughed; a house; a garden where he "planted flowers through his vegetable gardens"; a door open to company; and a pinto pony saddled whenever a new family landed on the island and might need a hand. A man who had come to the island with nothing knew what a newcomer lacked.

He was a reader and a talker, "very interested in world affairs and politics, partizan and conservative," and he named his first son for Horace Greeley, the most famous newspaper editor in America. He was careful with what was not his: he kept the county's money in a sugar bowl in the china closet and would not take the territory's. With his own children he was "rather a severe father," the Puritan in him, Mollie thought, and when his little Josephine died he "was never the same again." He loved the farm so much that, when he sold it in old age, his daughter believed the leaving made him ill. Mollie's own words about the Holbrooks could be his epitaph: "They have made themselves felt quietly, behind the scenes, so to speak. There is never a blare of trumpets, nor a striving to make themselves heard" (scan 13).

Old stories, set right

• He reached California in March 1851, not in 1850: he came home from the Globe in August 1850.
• On the whalers the records find him in the crew, not as first mate or captain; he was Captain Holbrook from the West, master of his own sloop on the California coast and one of the captains of Penn Cove's timber trade.
• His ships put in at Lahaina, where the king kept his court until 1845, rather than Honolulu.
• Emma was a schoolgirl in Honolulu in his whaling years and queen from 1856; he admired her, as Mollie says, but she was not the queen who welcomed him.
• The trading post "burned in an Indian war" was his store on Lummi Island, robbed by Indians in May 1854, in a time of peace.
• He and Harriet were married on a Monday evening, Christmas Eve 1860, not a Sunday.
• He sat one term in the territorial House, in 1861-62; in December 1860, when he met Harriet at Olympia, the island's member was Thomas Coupe.
• The later marker at Sunnyside gives him 1830-1898; he was born in 1821 and died in 1894.

Trail

13 Oct 2026: His page, and Mollie's paragraph

His person page had told his life thinly, and the typescript's checked notes had marked Mollie's Honolulu story "unlikely" by reading her "Queen Emma" as the queen who entertained him. She doesn't say so: the King and Queen of his sea years were Kamehameha III and Kalama, and the note now reads "possible" (the ruling of 13 Oct 2026, Research decisions).

13 Oct 2026: Penn Cove in the records

The Ebeys' diary, printed in the Washington Historical Quarterly in 1916-17, names him three times in 1852-53, calling at the Ebey house with Samuel Howe ("Diary of Colonel and Mrs. I. N. Ebey," ed. Victor J. Farrar, Washington Historical Quarterly 7-8). His brother's letter from Penn Cove of 26 Jan 1854 was read in full in Told by the Pioneers (1938), correcting the Park Service study's loose quotation of it (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)). The territorial roster gives him one term in the House, in 1861-62 (Territorial Assembly 1854-1887: members of the Washington territorial legislature (Washington State Library, 1989)), and the Park Service's ethnohistory puts the Lower Skagit village Ʒáʒop where he landed (Douglas Deur, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve: An Ethnohistory of Traditionally Associated Contemporary Populations (National Park Service, 2009)).

13 Oct 2026: The whaling crew lists

The American Offshore Whaling Crew Lists have "Richard B. Holbrook," ordinary seaman, in the Hydaspe of New Bedford, 1841 (Crew list of the ship Hydaspe of New Bedford, 1841, with the abstract of her voyage of 1841-1845), and "Richard B. Holbrooks," of Plymouth, 24, in the Globe, 1845 (Crew list of the ship Globe of New Bedford, 1845, with her voyage of 1845-1850). The Globe came into New Bedford on 22 Aug 1850, five days before the census found him at Manomet: Mollie's two long voyages. Dennis Wood's abstract gives the Hydaspe's voyage (Wood's abstract).

13 Oct 2026: The Globe's journal

A crewman's journal of the Globe's passage home, held by the New Bedford Whaling Museum and scanned by the Internet Archive, names "R. Holbrooks" twice: tied up in the rigging at Lahaina on 18 Jan 1850, and talking at the pumps with the cooper on 6 February (Journal kept on board the ship Globe of New Bedford, on her passage from the Sandwich Islands to the United States, 1850). All seventy pages are now in the Gallery (the journal), with his name marked where it appears.

14 Oct 2026: The journal transcribed, and life aboard

The whole journal was transcribed into its source file, and its story read for this thread: the captain's weeks of revenge for the visit to the consul, the hunger, the Horn, the California fever, the homecoming. The index of the Hydaspe's abstract log at the National Archives gives her route leg by leg, 1,088 days in all (the log). Firsthand accounts of whaling in the 1840s (Browne, Olmsted, Nordhoff, Melville, Davis, Scammon), the laws of 1835, 1840 and 1850 on seamen and consuls, Starbuck's oil prices and Hohman's study of the whaleman's pay filled in what the voyages were like; the period engravings are in the Gallery.

14 Oct 2026: Lummi Island, the war years and the House

The printed claim of 1854 (House Executive Document 197, 1885) puts the robbery at his store on Lummi Island, with the list of what was taken and the sworn word of Howe, Hathaway and Roeder on his character (Indian depredation claim of Richard B. Holbrook, Lummi Island, Washington Territory, 1854). The Puget Sound Herald settles the wedding at Steilacoom on Monday evening, 24 Dec 1860 ("Married," Puget Sound Herald (Steilacoom), 27 Dec 1860), and Mollie's letter of 1925 in Told by the Pioneers adds Thomas Hastie's tale and the three-roomed cabin (Told by the Pioneers: Tales of Frontier Life, vol. 1 (Washington Pioneer Project, 1937)). For the war years: Winfield Ebey's diary and the settlers' petition as the Park Service's ethnohistory quotes them, Marshal Corliss's letter ("Letter from Marshal Corliss," Pioneer and Democrat (Olympia), 21 Aug 1857), and Robert Hill's and Flora Engle's reminiscences. The House Journal of 1861-62 gives his committees, his bills, his memorial for the Coveland mail, his absence at the first Union resolutions and his vote on the second (Journal of the House of Representatives of Washington Territory, ninth session, 1861-62, with the session laws); the Washington Standard printed the resolutions he voted against ("The Union Resolutions Rejected by the Legislative Assembly of Washington Territory," Washington Standard (Olympia), 22 Mar 1862), and the Herald of November 1862 lists his gift for the wounded soldiers (Whidby Island's subscription for the wounded soldiers, Puget Sound Herald (Steilacoom), 6 Nov 1862). He offered the farm for sale in 1878 ("Chance for Somebody," Daily Intelligencer (Seattle), 28 Sept 1878). The Historic American Buildings Survey's photographs of Coveland's courthouse, a blockhouse and Hathaway's house, and Stanley's views of the island in 1853, are in the Gallery.

14 Oct 2026: The records themselves

The scans of the records that name him are now in the Gallery, each set with its chapter: the first page of the Globe's journal, with "R. Holbrooks" tied up in the rigging (the page); the Polynesian's arrivals at Lahaina in October 1846 and the Providence paper's report of the Globe's homecoming in August 1850, both read on the page images ("Port of Lahaina," Polynesian (Honolulu), 31 Oct 1846, "Whalers," Republican Herald (Providence), 28 Aug 1850); the two days of the Ebeys' diary; his brother's letter as printed in 1938; the printed claim of 1854, with his letter, his list and his neighbours' affidavits (the claim); the House Journal's page with his signature as chairman, and the Washington Standard's column with the Union resolutions and the vote; and the notice of his farm for sale in 1878. The first page of Mollie's memoir of her father is with them, sealed with the rest of her typescript.

Where it stands

His life is now known in outline from boyhood to death, and in detail for 1841-1854. The two whaling voyages are documented: the Globe certainly his, the Hydaspe very probably (its list gives no home town). The family's stories of the sea fit them closely, with Lahaina for Honolulu and Hong Kong for China; the royal welcome and the boarding in the South Seas rest on the family's word. His California years rest on Mollie; his years on the Sound on the Ebeys' diary, his brother's letter, the claim of 1854 and its affidavits, the House Journal, the newspapers and the censuses. The years 1834-1841, his term as county treasurer and his obituary are still to find.

Next

• The Hydaspe's daily abstract log (National Archives, M1160, vol. 37): the Cape of Good Hope, Pohnpei and Cape Horn dates, and any incident with islanders.
• The Globe's own logbook of 1845-1849, if one survives (New Bedford Whaling Museum, Providence Public Library, Mystic Seaport): the northern seasons, Kamchatka, the deaths, and his rank.
• The consul's report from Lahaina, January 1850 (U.S. consular despatches, Lahaina; Hawaii State Archives, MFL 22): the crew's complaint, perhaps with their names.
• Plymouth's crew lists, 1834-1841 (Plymouth customs district, National Archives at Boston): his first years at sea.
• The vessel he went to California in (the Daily Alta California, 4-5 Mar 1851; the ship Western Star, from Boston, arrived that day).
• The Island County commissioners' records: his years as treasurer.
• The E. Holbrook letters and journal at the Huntington Library (mssHM 24543-24544, 2280).
• His obituary of May 1894, with the words his children kept: the Island County Sun or Island County Times (Coupeville), on Washington Digital Newspapers or at the Island County Historical Society.
• Winfield S. Ebey's diary, 1855-57, and the Crockett papers (University of Washington Special Collections): what the neighbours wrote of the war years, perhaps of him.
• The Island County census of 1857 (Washington State Archives) and the settlers' petition of December 1856 (National Archives at Seattle, RG 75): whether he signed.