CAPTAIN SAM
THE STEAMBOAT MAN

By ________
THE ISLANDS’ WEEKLY, OCT 3-OCT 10, 1995

Of all the men who guided steamers through the treacherous waters of the San Juans and Puget Sound, none was more skillful, nor more fondly remembered, than Captain Sam Barlow. A man who commanded everything from schooners to steamers, he was a master mariner, as well as a good friend and neighbor.

Taking to the sea was only natural for Sam Barlow and his brothers. Their father, Arthur “Billie” Barlow, was a seafaring man, who like many early white settlers, jumped ship to make Lopez his home.

The elder Barlow was born in Ireland, but left at an early age to serve with British forces in the Crimean War. Whether his departure was due to legal difficulties, as some tales indicate, or simply to escape the grinding poverty and hunger of his native land is unknown, but he survived the war and came to the Northwest on the British steam corvette Satellite in 1858.

Billie Barlow was assigned to a survey crew, and his first encounter with Lopez was in that capacity. He was apparently so taken by the beauty of the place that he blazed a mark on a prominent tree on the south end and vowed to return and make the area his home.

His opportunity came when Satellite was ordered home after the Pig War. During a stop in Victoria, Barlow and three others departed the Queen’s service by slipping over the side during the night. He and shipmates Aleck Graham and Tom Smith made their way to Lopez, where Barlow settled on what we now know as Barlow Bay, and Graham took up residence across the neck of the peninsula leading to Iceberg Point, on Aleck Bay.

Billie Barlow carved out a homestead – sometimes apparently leaving to work in lumber camps around the Sound to raise a little cash – but homesteading by himself must have worn a little thin, and he soon set off in search of a wife.

There were no white women on the islands in those days, and the other settlers – many of who were also “retired” sailors – were either bachelors, or had klootchman, as Indian wives were known. According to old accounts, Billie’s matrimonial opportunity came one day in the form of a Haida trading party.

The Haida landed their war canoe near Jack Shears’ Point, and offered their goods – a young Indian woman they had apparently captured. Shears was also in need of a wife, and he agreed to buy her. But when he left to get his money, Barlow stepped forward and made his own deal, swapping his brightly colored British military jacket for the young woman.

Shears’ comments aren’t recorded – he disappeared from the island not too long after – but Barlow must have felt he made a good deal. He and his new bride, who took the name Lucinda, or Lucy, promptly set to work rearing 11 children, of who Sam was the third. A somewhat romantic version of this story holds that Lucinda was an “Indian Princess,” and the daughter of a local chief, but Karen Jones Lamb, in her book, Native American Wives of San Juan Settlers, notes that she was most likely Stikine Tlingit, which would account for her being a Haida captive. The “princess” story may have had some basis fact, however, as Jones Lamb speculates that she was related to Chief Shakes of Wrangell.

At any rate, Billie Barlow settled down to building and operating trade schooners along the coast and up to Alaska. Sam took up voyaging at the tender age of three, when he and older brother Dan set off to sail around the world in a leaky canoe with no provisions and only one paddle. Fortunately Billie’s schooner Henrietta showed up in time to take the intrepid voyagers aboard before they vanished in Davy Jones’ Locker.

Undaunted by his circumnavigation setback, Sam grew up working on his father’s boats. But he also did a bit of independent contracting. While still a young boy, he was approached by a stranger who offered him $20 to transport him from Oak Bay on Vancouver Island, to Whidbey Island. Since $20 was a fortune to a young boy – and a month’s work for a grown man – Sam agreed.

The voyage went smoothly, and Sam was $20 to the good. So when the stranger approached him again and offered the same deal – albeit with a mysterious package thrown in – young Barlow assented. Unfortunately, a storm blew in, and they found themselves in a battle for survival, as the boat was swamped by heavy seas. While Sam struggled to save the boat, the stranger seemed concerned only with his package, which he refused to throw overboard even though their lives were at stake.

When they finally did make it to shore – with the boat completely awash, and afloat only because Sam had the presence of mind to jettison all the other materials aboard, and lower the mast and lash it and the booms across the hull for buoyancy – the young skipper deduced that the cargo was opium, and his mysterious passenger a smuggler.

Sam went on the command his father’s 60 ton schooner Port Admiral while still in his teens, then moved on to the Puget Sound Navigation Company as Captain of the steamer Dode. Over his career, he skippered such locally famous steamers as Lydia Thompson, Bellingham, Rosalie, City of Angeles and Flyer. Later, with the emergence of the Black Ball Line, he skippered the motor ferry Rosario.

Sam Barlow was a legend on Puget Sound, and a local hero in the San Juans. “I think everybody in San Juan County knew Captain Barlow,” says San Juan historian Etta Egeland. “He was a man everybody liked.”

Not only did folks like Captain Sam, they quite literally trusted him with their lives. Accidents were not uncommon in those days, as skippers had to work through treacherous reefs, rocks and currents, and loss of life – such as the 50-plus passengers who drowned when the Clallam went down in 1904 – was always a possibility. “They always felt very safe, and they didn’t worry when the fog was deep,” Egeland recalls. “He knew every rock in Puget Sound.”

Captain Sam possessed uncommon navigation skills, remembers Lopezian Oscar Anderson, whose first job was as a crewman on Barlow’s last command, the ferry Rosario. In those days, Anderson points out, the only navigation aids were, “a compass, a lead line, a whistle and a clock.”

When the weather got thick, Barlow checked his instruments, but relied on his senses. In fog, he shed his Captain’s cap, and pulled on an old, black felt hat with a wide brim, which he turned down over his ears. “It picked up the echoes better,” Anderson explains. Then, with the engines stilled, he listened for his landmarks – the bark of a particular dog, the clucking of chickens at a given farm, the wash of waves against a rock or shore, and the reflection of the whistle blast.

Sometimes, he even used his own voice, speaking into the fog, and counting the time it took for the echo to return. “He could always tell from the sound of a voice how far the shore was,” Egeland says. Along with gauging distance by noting the time it took for an echo, Barlow could also tell from the strength of the echo what typed of shoreline he was facing; rocky cliffs, trees or open space.

Barlow also relied on his incredibly keen sense of smell to locate his position in fog. Once on a voyage from Port Townsend to Richardson on Lopez, he was called to the pilothouse when a pea soup fog developed. He ordered the engines stopped, stepped outside, and sniffed the air. “He smelled the kelp and knew right where he was,” Anderson remembers. “He set a course, and a few minutes later they were in Richardson.”

Beyond his senses, Captain Sam also relied on a father unusual navigation aid. “In those days, the skipper had a bottle of whiskey in his cabin when he was off watch,” Anderson notes. “He’d get so drunk he could hardly walk, and the crew had to help him to the pilothouse. They knew once they got him there, he’d do his job.” His passengers also knew of Barlow’s affinity for whiskey, and apparently approved, since the more he drank, the more acute his navigational skills became.

While he liked his liquor, Barlow was in every sense a gentleman. While other colorful skippers – such as “Hell-Roaring Jack,” who rarely shaved, often stood his watch in shoes and shirt, and cussed a blue streak – maintained the rough and tumble manners of frontier days, Barlow was the picture of decorum. “I can’t ever remember Captain Barlow using foul language,” Egeland says.

He was an active Mason and a supporter of his lodge’s good works, and a mentor to younger men working their way up the ladder of the maritime industry. A patient and gentle teacher, Barlow was later credited by many skippers as having helped them become captains of their own vessels.

Decades after his death in 1936, Sam Barlow was still remembered fondly by people all around Puget Sound. In an annual event maintained at least through the early 1970’s, Masons from the Anacortes and Saanitch (BC) lodges used to meet to ride the ferry to Lopez. There, the vessel hove to in a moment of silence, and a floral wreath was load upon the water to honor the man who not only helped found those lodges, but also made more than 20,000 trips through Puget Sound without a single stranding or mishap.