The USC&GS Carlile P. Patterson was a survey ship of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in operation between 1883 and 1918. Subsequently she had a brief period of naval service and fifteen seasons as a merchant vessel before she was wrecked on the Alaska coast in 1938.

Construction

The Patterson was named for Carlile P. Patterson

Carlile P. Patterson

Carlile Pollock Patterson was the fourth superintendent of the United States Coast Survey. He was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, the son of Commodore D. T. Patterson. He was appointed a midshipman in the United States Navy in 1830...

, fourth Superintendent of the Coast Survey and first of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. The New York Times credited the design to Commander Colby Mitchell Chester

Colby Mitchell Chester

Colby Mitchell Chester was a United States Navy admiral. He is the only naval officer to have actively served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I.-Biography:...

, USN, at that time Hydrographic Inspector in USC&GS. Naval architect Samuel Hartt Pook

Samuel Hartt Pook

Samuel Hartt Pook was a Boston-based American naval architect noted for designing very fast clipper ships.-Clipper ships:...

, U.S. Naval Constructor, was credited with supervising the drawings. She was built of wood in James D. Leary's yard at Williamsburg (Brooklyn) New York. Frames were white oak with cedar tops; planking, beams and lower deck were yellow pine, the upper deck was white pine. Her hull was fitted with iron diagonal braces, and five watertight bulkheads

Bulkhead (partition)

A bulkhead is an upright wall within the hull of a ship or within the fuselage of an airplane. Other kinds of partition elements within a ship are decks and deckheads.-Etymology:...

 (3 wood, 2 iron). Power was a Cross vertical compound steam engine. (One source reports 356 hp, another source says 215 ihp; this difference may represent different calculation or measurement methods). Her machinery was constructed by Neafie & Leavy of Philadelphia. She was rigged as a barkentine with double topsail yards; standing rigging was galvanized

Galvanization

Galvanization is the process of applying a protective zinc coating to steel or iron, in order to prevent rusting. The term is derived from the name of Italian scientist Luigi Galvani....

 charcoal-iron

Charcoal iron

Charcoal iron is the substance created by the smelting of iron ore with charcoal.All ironmaking blast furnaces were fueled by charcoal until Abraham Darby introduced coke as a fuel in 1709. The more economical coke soon replaced charcoal in British furnaces, but in the United States, where timber...

 wire. Her boats were two steam launches, two cutters, two whaleboats, and a dinghy. Her deckhouse, 13 x 62 ft, included the engine and boiler rooms, galley, pantry, and a drafting room. She carried a Sigsbee

Charles Dwight Sigsbee

Charles Dwight Sigsbee was a Rear Admiral inthe United States Navy. In his earlier career he was a pioneering oceanographer and hydrographer. He is best remembered as the captain of the USS Maine, which exploded in Havana harbor, Cuba, in 1898...

 piano-wire sounding machine, state-of-the-art for deep-water hydrography, holding five miles of wire. Lieutenant Richardson Clover

Richardson Clover

Rear Admiral Richardson Clover was an officer of the United States Navy. An 1867 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he was a noted hydrographer, served as Director of Naval Intelligence, and commanded the gunboat during the Spanish-American War. He was socially prominent in Washington,...

, USN, supervised construction and became her first commander.

Federal career

The Patterson departed Hampton Roads

Hampton Roads

Hampton Roads is the name for both a body of water and the Norfolk–Virginia Beach metropolitan area which surrounds it in southeastern Virginia, United States...

 for the west coast on July 30, 1884. She traveled by way of the Straits of Magellan, with stops at Madeira

Madeira

Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies between and , just under 400 km north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union...

, Rio de Janiero, Montevideo

Montevideo

Montevideo is the largest city, the capital, and the chief port of Uruguay. The settlement was established in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, as a strategic move amidst a Spanish-Portuguese dispute over the platine region, and as a counter to the Portuguese colony at Colonia del Sacramento...

, Punta Arenas, Valparaiso

Valparaíso

Valparaíso is a city and commune of Chile, center of its third largest conurbation and one of the country's most important seaports and an increasing cultural center in the Southwest Pacific hemisphere. The city is the capital of the Valparaíso Province and the Valparaíso Region...

, Callao

Callao

Callao is the largest and most important port in Peru. The city is coterminous with the Constitutional Province of Callao, the only province of the Callao Region. Callao is located west of Lima, the country's capital, and is part of the Lima Metropolitan Area, a large metropolis that holds almost...

, Panama

Panama

Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

, San Diego, and Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara, California

Santa Barbara is the county seat of Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Situated on an east-west trending section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States, the city lies between the steeply-rising Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean...

. She arrived as San Francisco February 13, 1885, and immediately began preparations for her first season of surveying. She left for Sitka April 26 and began survey work May 27.

The Patterson was primarily used as a survey vessel off the coast of Alaska and numerous Alaskan features were named by the assorted crews of the steamer. She also served in other west-coast locations and in the Hawaiian Islands. In 1914, she found and rescued 26 members of the crew of the USRC Tahoma

USRC Tahoma (1909)

USRC Tahoma, was a steel-hull flush deck cutter that served in the United States Revenue Cutter Service from 1909 to 1914 with the Bering Sea Patrol and was the sister ship to the USRC Yamacraw.-Commissioning and trip to homeport:...

 after that ship struck an uncharted reef in the Aleutians and sank.

In 1918, the Patterson was transferred to the United States Navy

United States Navy

The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...

 for use as a patrol ship during the last months of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. She was renamed Forward August 15, 1918, and performed both patrol and hydrographic duties in Alaska and off the Mexican coast. Subsequently she was returned to the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1919. The Survey judged she was no longer strong enough for offshore use, and too slow for cost-effective hydrographic work, so she was sold. She was out of service several years.

Merchant career

In 1924, the Washington Tug and Barge Co. sold the Patterson to C.K. West Co. of Portland Oregon who converted her to a motorship for operation along the Oregon coast; the steam engine was replaced with a diesel, probably the four-cylinder Bolinders engine she had in 1930. It was probably at this time or a year later that she underwent a substantial rebuilding. Her deckhouse, bowsprit and mizzen were removed, her bow was reshaped, and the fore and main masts were replaced with, or reduced to, pole masts. A stern deckhouse and superstructure were constructed. These changes are evident in the photos of the 1938 shipwreck (this article and external links) and in a 1930 photo taken at Herschel Island.
In 1925, the Patterson was purchased by the Northern Whaling and Trading Company. From then through 1936 she operated as an Arctic trading ship under Captain Christian Theodore Pedersen

Christian Theodore Pedersen

Christian Theodore Pedersen was a Norwegian-American seaman, whaling captain and fur trader active in Alaska, Canada, and the northern Pacific from the 1890s to the 1930s...

, operating between San Francisco and Herschel Island

Herschel Island

Herschel Island is an island in the Beaufort Sea , which lies off the coast of the Yukon Territories in Canada, of which it is administratively a part...

 with stops along the Alaska coast. Subsequently she was sold to the Alaska Patterson Co. The Patterson was wrecked December 11, 1938, going ashore in surf and blinding rain 8 miles northwest of Cape Fairweather in the Gulf of Alaska, near the mouth of Sea Otter Creek. She was en route from Kodiak to Seattle when she went aground. The first mate and a crewman drowned in attempts to get the crew to shore; the 18 survivors remained in the vessel until the tide went out, then reached the beach where they subsisted on supplies dropped from airplanes. Two men were flown out by Alaska pilot Sheldon Simmons who made a daring float plane landing in the creek. The remaining men hiked out to Lituya Bay

Lituya Bay

Lituya Bay is a fjord located on the coast of the Southeast part of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is long and wide at its widest point. The bay was noted in 1786 by Jean-François de La Pérouse, who named it Port des Français...

with a guide left by Simmons's plane and were picked up there by Navy planes and the Coast Guard cutter Haida. Most of the cargo was salvaged by barge the next spring. The Patterson was reportedly beaten to pieces by the surf.

External links

• Video documentary about Simmons includes 1938 rescue, Patterson photos
• Photo of Patterson aground 1938 - close view from beach
• Photo of Patterson aground 1938 - close aerial view
• THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A MARINER. Theodore Pedersen's photo archives. Frame of Reference (Newsletter of the Alaska Humanities Forum) v9 (1), April 1998. pp 10–13. p 11 has a photograph of the Patterson undergoing modification in a shipyard.