Not so long ago, V. Wickman, a steamship historian from Malta, sent me a striking photo of an old passenger ship. He asked me to identify the ship, but I couldn’t. I filed it under “Admiral Line,” for in the back of my mind I had the feeling that she might have been one of the post-World War I Admiral ships.
A few months later, Bob Loftus, of Moran Towing & Transportation Company, brought in a query from a mutual friend, Captain William T. Benson of Skokie, Illinois. With it was a small, black-and-white photo of a painting on silk by a Chinese artist depicting a passenger ship. The silk had been found in a storeroom of Benjamin Ackerly & Sons of Southampton, agents there for United States Lines. Could I identify the liner? I promised to try, and immediately wrote Bill Benson asking for more details.
His answer noted the following: The ship flew the American flag at her stern. Her stack had a black top, white stripe, and greenish-gray looking main body, although this may have been due to age. The hull was buff and it looked as if there might have been a white stripe on each strake of steel plate from bow to stern. He attached a reconstruction of her house flag, red with a wide white diagonal down through the middle. He added that there was some stitching in the white field, and surmised that it might be a Chinese attempt to imitate English letters.
I turned to the new edition of McCurdy’s Marine History of the Pacific Northwest and found a ship that looked something like the silk. She was the Admiral Line’s Watson, sister of the Buckman, an old United Fruiter sold to a Pacific firm in 1906 for Alaskan service. The picture showed a raised forecastle that looked very familiar and the outline seemed right. It was a bow view, however, and the superstructure had two levels of promenade decks, not the way the silk looked at all. I went through some other books on West Coast steamers and got no help.
Then I found my file on the Admiral Line and right on top was the Malta snapshot. The more I looked, the more excited I became. The two old pictures had the same outline, same single stack and two tall masts, the same raised forecastle and the same poop, with the much smaller well deck aft. They even had the same “interrupted” curve at the after end of the forward well deck and the forward end of the after well deck, beginning with a graceful curve down to bulwark level and becoming a straight cut-off, as if the bulwark rail had been made to be taken out and replaced as required for cargo loading. The same steam pipe ran up the after edge of the same thin, raked stack. The same major points, bow to stern, could be seen.
A closer look showed other matching characteristics. The two pictures showed the same counter stem with an odd knuckle and the same garbage chute or something protruding from the very stern. A cluster of air funnels surrounded the stack. Something, perhaps an elevated searchlight, was forward, just at the after edge of the raised forecastle. The same extended davits from the same three boat deck lifeboats extended down two decks to the main deck outside the shell plating, a most unusual feature. The same two after boats rested on the promenade deck. The same single lifeboat on the poof had the same outboard davits down the main deck. The similarities were so precise and complete that the ships had to be the same.
Yet, I realized that I was no farther ahead than when I started. True, I had found out that my two mystery ships were the same ship, but I was no closer to learning which ship she was.
I returned to study ships of the Admiral Line and found that the more I reviewed the company’s fleet, the more I realized that only the two Watson-type ships could possibly fill the bill. I found that the Watson had been radically altered after she had become an “Admiral,” and her superstructure enlarged and extended fore and aft. Possibly her captain had shown a photograph of the Watson as she looked before she became the Admiral Watson to his Chinese artist friend?
I had been under the impression that these Admiral ships were used in transpacific service, but now I found that they were used on coastal runs only. The silk painting undoubtedly had been made by a Chinese, but perhaps it had been a Chinese who had immigrated to California. The more I studied the two mystery pictures, however, the more I was convinced that the ship shown was neither the Admiral Watson nor her sister, the Admiral Evans, ex-Buckman.
When the Malta photo arrived, there had been a second bell ringing faintly in my mind. Could the ship be an old U. S. Army transport? The Malta photo showed a white-hulled ship with stack markings that suggested the pre-World War I transport service. My first impressions of the silk did not ring the transport bell at all. Bill Benson’s color references (greenish-gray funnel and buff hull with a white stripe on each strake) did not sound anything like the transport colors, and yet, I had now determined positively that structurally they must either be the same ship or sister ships.
At this point I decided to investigate the one other clue offered by the Benson letter—the houseflag. Bill said the silk ship had a red-orange houseflag with a wide white slash diagonally through it. He noted that there were some “chicken track” thread markings in the middle of the white slash. This meant nothing to me, but it helped to eliminate the Admiral Line and other Pacific Northwest companies, for none of them had a flag like this.
Looking back again at the Watson photograph, I found that she had two promenade decks. Both the Malta broadside and the silk painting showed a single promenade deck on a raised amidships house.
The Malta photo’s white hull and stack markings continued to remind me of the possibility that the little liner might have been a transport. I knew that a large number of small liners had been bought for the Spanish-American War and converted into troopers. Because there just weren’t many American deep-sea liners, we had been forced to buy foreign ships. These old ships are, to me, among the most interesting vessels in the entire liner field, although I have not managed to get very much material on them. Their stories have been almost entirely neglected. Among these ships were several former Atlantic Transport Line ships, a few Inman liners and a couple that had flown the old Guion Line houseflag. They were ships of 5,000 to 6,000 tons, generally with four masts each, and this discouraged me from the start.
There were three, however, with only two masts. They were the Bueford (also spelled Buford), the Sumner, and the Kilpatrick. Neither the Bueford nor the Kilpatrick were three-island ships, and so I turned to the Sumner. Fortunately, I had a whole set of pictures of this vessel, all showing her in her last hours. She had grounded off Barnegat, New Jersey, on 11 December 1916, en route from Panama to New York with troops.
I had photos of her from the beach and from a rescue ship, the Kilpatrick, by the way. There were also many news accounts of the wreck and a personal note from Paul R. Smith, former executive of the Roosevelt Steamship Company. The file also included several sad views of the Sumner in her final agony, broken in two and disappearing under the waves.
The major point of identification in both the Malta photo and the silk was the ship’s broken boat deck and the presence of two lifeboats on the promenade deck aft. On the Sumner, the boat deck went all the way aft to the end of the amidships house and all the boats were on the boat deck. There were four, not five boats. There were, however, striking points of similarity.
The silhouette was the same. The stack had its steam pipe aft, although there was a cowl on the stack’s top that did not appear in the other views. This well might be an added item. The air funnels were clustered about the stack. The ship was of the three-island type, with a longer forward well. The shell plating of the hull, both at the beginning and ending of the amidships house where it rose and descended from the wells forward and aft was interrupted in its sweep, a most important point of similarity with the two photos. On the forecastle there was a raised platform with what might have been a canvas-covered searchlight on it. Even the porthole positioning seemed to coincide. It looked as though the Sumner might be our ship.
Checking with my reference works on Atlantic liners, I found that the Sumner was 351 feet in length with a 43-foot beam and a draft of 26 feet. Her tonnage was 3,458 gross and she was built in Hamburg in 1883 for Hamburg American Line as the Rhaetia. She had three companion liners, the Bohemia, Rugia, and Moravia. What happened to these three is important to our story. The Bohemia became the Pompei and was lost. The Rugia became Fabre Line’s Patna and was scrapped in 1906. The Moravia was wrecked in 1899. This eliminated the three sisterships. The Rhaetia was sold to another Hamburg firm and became the Cassius. Then she was bought by the U. S. Army and was known as the USS Cassius before being renamed Sumner.
At this point I went back to my transport file and there I found the missing link. The main external difference between the Sumner and the two photos was the full-length boat deck. Filed under “Unknown Old Transports,” I came across an advertisement which showed a U. S. Army transport exactly like the Sumner except that her boat deck was cut short, just as it is shown in the two photos. There was no name, but this was clearly the Sumner. So it is apparent that in her later days, the Sumner’s boat deck was extended to carry all her boats. The advertisement shows three raised boats and two on the promenade deck proper. When the boat deck was extended, the new boats must have been larger and there was room for only four, as shown in all the grounding photographs.
The final confirmation came while making a second perusal of the Kilpatrick file. In one battered old magazine advertisement picture, I spotted her flag flying from the mainmast. It was just like that on the silk painting and described in some detail by Bill Benson. Instead of the hen’s feet in the middle of the white slash, there was what might well be an emblem, perhaps the Army Transport Corps coat of arms. This was reasonably positive proof that the old silk portrait was the transport Sumner, despite the gray-green shade of the stack and the buff hull. Here the Chinese artist may have lacked the proper color information, or perhaps it was a question of aging silk thread. Maybe the Sumner had a buff hull at one time.
A very close look at all the pictures produced still new bits of evidence that the Sumner must be our mystery ship. The silk clearly showed heavy rub strakes, three of them on the hull. This created highlights which Bill Benson thought were white lines. These same strakes are shown on the wreck photographs. The fifth lifeboat in the Malta photo, the silk portrait, and the old advertisement actually extends over the after edge of the boat deck out into thin air. The last of the davits rises free from the well deck. This was corrected when only four boats were carried on the rebuilt vessel.
The search was over, and it had been fun. In the last analysis, the most unusual thing about this utterly inconsequential little episode is the coincidence that started it all, the fact that the two queries should come within a few months from such widely separated points as Malta and Skokie, Illinois, about one and the same little liner built nearly 100 years ago.
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A graduate of Duke University in 1939, Mr. Braynard was Assistant Director, Bureau of Information, American Merchant Marine Institute from 1943 to 1949, and directed the Bureau from 1953 to 1961. He was assistant marine editor of the New York Herald Tribune from 1950 to 1953. Since 1961, he has been Manager, Public Relations, Moran Towing and Transportation Company. He is the editor of Moran Towing’s magazine Tow Line. The author of nine books and numerous articles, he was twice president of the Steamship Historical Society of America.