Editor’s Note: We are pleased to continue this series of articles concerning Oysterville’s early history. The articles were begun in 2004 in conjunction with Oysterville’s sesquicentennial celebration and were written by the great granddaughter of R. H. Espy, co-founder of Oysterville. The series will be available in 2006 in book form: “Oysterville: The First Generations.” For ordering information, please contact the Chinook Observer.

OYSTERVILLE – On a blustery morning in November 1864, 26 year old Caesar Crellin of Oysterville, Washington Territory, shook hands with his older brothers John and Tom and boarded the oyster schooner, J.M. Chapman. It was a loving, if silent, goodbye for, according to the 1860 Oysterville census, Caesar was “deaf and dumb,” “dumb” relating to his inability to speak, not his intellectual capacity.

In that same 1860 census, Caesar was listed as an “oysterman” with a personal worth of $1,550 in addition to real estate valued at $1,000. It is easy to assume that he was affiliated with his brothers in the Morgan Oyster Company which had properties in both Shoalwater Bay and San Francisco Bay. On that winter voyage of 1864, Caesar was the only Oysterville resident aboard the J.M. Chapman and, presumably, his trip to California had to do with the Crellin business interests. But the ship never arrived at its destination, and Caesar was never heard of again.

“My understanding has always been that he was a member of the crew of a ship taking a load of oysters from Oysterville to San Francisco which ran into a storm and went down,” recalled Caesar’s grandniece, Ruth Crellin Boutwell in a 1971 letter to Ruth Dixon of the Pacific County Historical Society.

The watery fate of Caesar Crellin and the others aboard the J.M Chapman did not come into question for almost 50 years after its ill-fated departure from Shoalwater Bay. Then, in 1912, Bay Center pioneer L.H. Rhoades wrote down his recollections concerning the matter, and the lost-at-sea story suddenly became a more intriguing mystery – one involving elaborate scheming, Confederate sympathies, and piracy on the high seas.

According to Rhoades, the tale began in San Francisco in early 1864 when five Confederate sympathizers pooled their resources to outfit a gun boat in order to “prey upon the commerce of the Pacific Coast.” No sooner had they completed their preparations when the San Francisco authorities got wind of the scheme and seized the men and vessel. For whatever reason, the men were not convicted, but their schooner was sold at public auction to the Crellins’ Morgan Oyster Company.

The J.M. Chapman was considerably larger than schooners that the Crellins had previously chartered to transport their oysters. It could carry 4,000 baskets per voyage which was nearly twice the capacity of most schooners that had been transporting cargo between Washington Territory and California. Consequently, extra time was required at the Shoalwater Bay end to make up a full cargo, and the Chapman bided its time in San Francisco.

Finally, all was in readiness and a crew of six, five seamen and a captain, was employed to make the trip. As was the custom, the crew was hired from among the many seafaring men on the San Francisco waterfront and the men were unknown to the owners of the schooner. According to Rhoades, five of those men were the very Confederate sympathizers who had previously owned the vessel; the sixth man was hired as cook.

Also according to Rhoades, the cook turned up years later in Valparaiso, Chili with clear memories of his time on the J.M. Chapman despite the fact that many years had gone by. He told how, after loading up and setting sail out of Oysterville, the schooner completely bypassed San Francisco on its southerly voyage and headed, instead, for the Gulf of Mexico. There it discharged its oyster cargo, by then spoiled, and the ship’s hold was cleansed with chloride of lime, which had conveniently been stocked, along with extra provisions before ever leaving San Francisco. There, also, young Caesar left the vessel.

The old cook told how the five crew members continued sailing along the South American coast to Callao, Peru where they again outfitted and armed the J.M. Chapman as a privateer. They claimed they wished to prey only on the commerce of the United States in order to assist in the secession of the Southern States. According to the cook (who claimed never to have joined forces with the pirates other than to serve in their employ as cook) they overtook a number of American ships, relieved them of money and other valuables, but allowed the crews to head shoreward in their own small boats.

While engaged in such enterprise in 1866, they came across a newspaper which gave an account of Lee’s surrender to General Grant and described the assassination of President Lincoln. With that information, they gave up their cause, provisioned their ship once more, and headed for the South Sea islands. The cook, not in agreement with that plan, refused to go and settled in Chili instead. The J. M. Chapman and her crew were not heard of again.

And what of Caesar Crellin? According to the account by Rhoades, the cook insisted that he last saw Crellin, alive and well, as he left the ship in Mexico. The young oysterman did not return to the ship and nothing was ever heard from him again. The cook speculated that Crellin may have died of a fever or been set upon by robbers. An alternative possibility, of course, is that the Crellin family story is the true one and that the ship went down in a storm on its way to San Francisco.

Ruth Dixon wrote up the Rhoades story in the early 1970s and published it both in her Raymond Herald and Advertiser newspaper column, “Echoes from the Past” and in the Pacific County Historical Society’s quarterly magazine, The Sou’wester. In each article, she asked readers who might have additional information to get in touch with her. As far as I know, there has not yet been a “rest of the story.”